Each year, millions of women worldwide experience menopause — more than 1 million in the U.S. alone. Growing up, though, the word was barely uttered around many women, like me, who is currently combating this often years-long stage during which hormones change, periods stop and we can no longer get pregnant.

So the newest crusade from Baltimore-adjacent media mogul Oprah Winfrey, 71, is to “stop the stereotypes and change this conversation.”

Her secret weapon? Hot people.

Prominently featured among the medical professionals and everyday women who told their very personal stories in her recent special, “The Menopause Revolution,” were two decidedly not everyday people: movie star goddesses Halle Berry, 58, and Naomi Watts, 56.

There’s something profound about hearing these famous people whose careers, in part, are based on their cinematic sexual attractiveness, discuss the symptoms encountered by so many of us experiencing The Change: fatigue, sleeplessness, racing hearts, memory issues and painful sex.

If they can risk their public images discussing such a taboo subject, an act they admit affects the roles they are cast in as they age, maybe it makes it OK for the ordinary middle-aged menopause sufferers among us to do the same. This is not to say that means that their hotness trickles down to said ordinary middle-aged ladies like myself, because I’m not delusional. But it’s a start.

I have written in the past about the relative silence about menopause in media and public conversation, and the resulting confusion and ignorance that women have about our own changing bodies because of it. Winfrey’s special was basically like a medical version of that Us Weekly feature “Stars: They’re Just Like Us,” as even the rich and beautiful admitted to not understanding what was happening to them.

Berry, who has testified on Capitol Hill about research and education around menopause, said she knew so little about the life stage that she naively thought she could ”skip it” through healthy living. When sex was so painful it made Berry feel like she had “razorblades in my vagina,” a doctor told her she had “the worst case of herpes I’ve ever seen.” Berry demanded her partner get tested for the sexually transmitted disease — but both their tests came back negative. Turns out it wasn’t herpes, but menopause. Whoopsie!

Watts, who released the book “Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I’d Known About Menopause” in January and sells menopause-related products through her company Stripes Beauty, got even more candid on the special, now available to watch on Hulu and ABC. She talked about her first sexual encounter with now-husband and fellow sexy person Billy Crudup, in which she desperately tried to peel off the residue from the estrogen patch she’d just ripped off so he wouldn’t see it. Rather than ruin the mood, being vulnerable enough to tell Crudup what was happening was “the beginning of true intimacy,” she said. (She also let Oprah spill the part from her book where her handsome beau revealed his own … personal signs of aging.)

Let’s be honest: part of the taboo of talking about menopause is talking about sex. A lot of people are turned off by the idea of older women being sexual, and the parts of us that are affected by this stage seem like icky lady bits.

More and more, these discussions are happening in the culture — increasingly about the specific conflict in women known, pre-menopause, for their attractiveness. An episode of the recently released second season of Netflix’s bawdy and brilliant series “Survival of The Thickest” features a menopause-related meltdown by former top model Natasha Karina (played by recently departed “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” star Garcelle Beauvais). Karina so often quotes an infamous, unrepeatable-in-a-family publication line from ”Sex and The City’s" Samantha Jones about how aging lady parts are undesirable that Karina’s male assistant is haunted by it, because everything about it is horrifying to him.

And that’s the point. If being desired as we age is an issue for women who look like Garcelle, or Samantha, or Halle Berry or Naomi Watts, for that matter, what chance do ordinary middle-aged women with changing physical needs have?

Since we’re giving Halle and them props for being so candid about their menopausal sex lives and issues from their huge platforms, I’m going to use my relatively modest one by skirting TMI territory. Now three years solidly into menopause, my libido is routinely meh and I don’t have sex much, but I will say that I’ve sought medical prescriptive help that makes it less painful.

I will also say that at this age, I feel like Elaine on “Seinfeld” figuring out if a guy is worth using her special stash of birth control sponges, except now it’s like, “Are you worth all these creams and kegels and then makeup and leaving my house?” (The answer: Not usually!)

These conversations do not make hot flashes or insomnia any less irritating. But they do help lessen what Watt candidly calls “the shame” associated with a natural part of women’s lives. May we all get old enough to experience menopause. And may that shame be replaced with another “s” word: sexy.

But only if we feel like it. It’s a whole thing.