Fez — With “Toujours Hot!” (“Always Hot!,”) released in early January, Ghizlaine Chraibi delivers a bold and liberating work that tackles a major taboo surrounding women: menopause and desire after 50.
Published by Éditions Onze, the book arrives at a moment when conversations around aging, sexuality, and women’s bodies are still largely muted or reduced to medical language.
Chraibi, who is also a psychotherapist and visual artist, has long explored relationships and women’s place in society. With “Toujours Hot!,” she turns her focus to a subject many still whisper about.
Menopause as a social taboo
Chraibi is direct in her framing. Biologically, menopause is simple: the end of menstruation. It is a natural stage of life experienced by all women who live long enough. Yet socially, it remains heavy with fear, judgment, and silence.
The author points to a deeper issue. Women’s value is still too often tied to youth, fertility, and appearance. As long as those markers remain, women are seen, desired, and acknowledged. Once they fade, many women feel they become invisible. “Toujours Hot!” confronts this erasure head-on.
A free conversation between Rabat and Essaouira
The book takes the form of a graphic fable built around the candid conversations of two friends in their fifties, Nadia and Salma. Their exchanges unfold between Rabat and Essaouira, grounding the story in familiar Moroccan settings.
Their dialogue is raw, funny, sometimes blunt, and deeply human. They talk about bodies that change, desire that shifts, and a society that often stops looking at women once they move beyond standards of youth and reproduction. Nothing is softened, and nothing is dramatized for effect.
Redefining what it means to be “hot”
The title plays on a double meaning. It refers, of course, to hot flashes, a common symptom of menopause. But more importantly, it speaks to an inner heat: vitality, clarity, and freedom.
In Chraibi’s narrative, being “always hot” is not about pleasing others or remaining desirable by external standards. It is about staying fully alive for oneself. Menopause is not presented as an ending, but as a shift. Fewer social expectations. Greater honesty. The right to say no.
A political and necessary book
Supported by minimalist and expressive illustrations, “Toujours Hot!” is both tender and political. It celebrates women who are rarely centered in public narratives and opens a space for joyful, powerful conversation.
By normalizing menopause and refusing shame, the book challenges how society defines femininity, age, and desire. Even after its final page, its message lingers: women’s visibility does not end at 50, and their desire does not expire with youth.
