Old men but not women in Super Bowl halftime due to menopause?

In the comments on a Super Bowl post at Steve Sailer's, there was some discussion of age and sex of the halftime performers. With a few exceptions, most of the old performers have been male ever since the halftime became a big event in 1987; female performers have been young or not so old.

While surfing YouTube to find some good female performers over 45 or 50, I discovered why they are unlikely to land a spot on the Super Bowl or other spectacle -- menopause. Forget the effect it has on their looks, as the audience could overlook the fact that the woman they used to fantasize about or imitate was no longer a spring chicken. The plummeting levels of female sex hormones means that they'll no longer have that girly energy and dulcet voice that they used to. That's what the audience really craves in female performers. Males don't stop producing testosterone, so they can continue on for awhile. Sure, The Who and Bruce Springsteen were bland, and most of Paul McCartney's set was dopey later-Beatles stuff, but Tom Petty and The Rolling Stones did well, and Prince was phenomenal.

Now don't get me wrong, at age 50, Susanna Hoffs of The Bangles is still very bangable, but you can notice how masculinized her face and voice have become by comparing these two live versions of "Manic Monday": first one (watch the short interview to see how feminine her face was) and second one. Here's yet another when she was about 40, which shows that she still had it. So it really does seem like a menopause thing. The only live performance I found of a post-menopausal woman who still sounded young was of a 57 year-old Rosie Hamlin singing "Angel Baby" with a teenager's voice.

The only way you could have a revival group with a female lead on the Super Bowl is to get one of the late '70s female rockers before they die. As I pointed out before, that period was so guy-driven that even the women were pretty hard-edged. No one expects Joan Jett to have a girly demeanor and light voice, so she could do it just as well as Mick Jagger did a few years ago. Here's a 58 year-old Chrissie Hynde singing "Brass in Pocket" in 2009, and it's not worlds apart from what it must have sounded like live in 1979.

Do young female musicians take menopause into account when they're deciding whether or not to make a career out of music? If they're girly, they'll have great success early but be unable to reproduce that later. If they're more masculine, they probably won't steal as much of the spotlight early on, but they'll be able to keep going for a lot longer.