Media Acts as If Women Die Once Our Eggs Shrivel Up

I am approaching 40, and I keep noticing how often stories about women jump from young adulthood to retirement with very little curiosity about everything in between.

As though ambition disappears.

As though reinvention becomes less interesting.

As though motherhood, divorce, caregiving, career changes, grief, creativity, money, friendship, sexuality, and starting again are side plots instead of entire lives.

I love a coming-of-age story.

But where are the starting-over stories?

Where are the stories about being 38, 42, 47 and realizing the life you spent years building no longer fits?

Where are the stories about changing your mind?

About leaving the marriage. Leaving the career. Starting the business. Moving somewhere new. Deciding you do not want the life you were told you were supposed to want.

What happens after coming of age?

We are not done becoming

For years, I thought maybe this was just me getting older and becoming harder to please.

It is not just me.

AARP research found that 64% of women 50 and older say they rarely or never see themselves represented in today’s media. The same body of research found that 68% of women 50-plus say they have grown completely or very much into their authentic selves with age.

That contradiction is hard to ignore.

Media seems to care less about women once we stop being fertile—as if when our eggs die, so do we.

And curiously, that is also the precise moment many women say they understand themselves more clearly than ever before.

The problem is not simply that women disappear from the screen.

It is that the range of stories we are allowed to have seems to shrink.

We become the mother. The wife. The grandmother. The boss. The person helping someone younger become who they are.

Apparently, everyone else still gets to have a coming-of-age story.

We are expected to have arrived.

But we are still becoming, too.

The script is not the life

For a long time, adulthood was presented as a fairly predictable sequence: career, romance, marriage, motherhood, and then some vague period where a woman was apparently supposed to gracefully fade into the background.

That is the script.

It is not necessarily the life.

Some women marry. Some do not. Some have children. Some do not. Some have them later. Some divorce. Some fall in love again. Some leave careers at 45. Some start companies at 50. Some become caregivers. Some stop being caregivers. Some move across the country because they can.

At some point, many of us arrive at a question we may not have known how to ask at 25:

What do I actually want?

Even the old assumption that motherhood will organize every woman’s adulthood no longer holds the way it once did. Pew Research has documented a growing share of adults under 50 who expect not to have children; among women in that group, simply not wanting children is one of the most common reasons.

That does not mean motherhood matters less.

It means there are more visible versions of adulthood now.

The lives changed.

The stories should have changed with them.

I miss the messy middle

When I think about the shows I still return to, I think about Living Single. Sex and the City. The Golden Girls. Insecure.

I am not saying they were perfect representations of every woman. They were not.

I am saying they gave women room to have lives.

Friendship was a story.

Ambition was a story.

Money was a story.

Sex was a story.

Being unsure was a story.

Starting over was a story.

Becoming someone different from the person you thought you would be was a story.

And yes, Grace and Frankie exists. I know.

But one show cannot carry an entire missing chapter of womanhood.

Why does it sometimes feel like media jumps from young womanhood straight to older womanhood and simply skips the entire universe in between?

There is this whole stretch of life where women are changing enormously, and culture acts like it is somehow less interesting because it is not the first time something has happened.

Maybe more.

Because this time you know what things cost.

Women are not aging out of culture

Women in this season are not waiting to fade into the background.

We are building companies. Changing careers. Raising children. Choosing not to have them. Leaving relationships. Entering relationships. Caring for parents. Traveling alone. Returning to ourselves. Learning things we were once too afraid to try.

Even entrepreneurship, one of culture’s favorite youth myths, tells a different story. U.S. Census research found that the average founder was 41.9 years old at the time of founding; among the fastest-growing new ventures, the average was 45.

So this is not simply a plea for representation because representation is nice.

I am not asking media to invent these women.

We are already here.

The lives are already happening.

The stories are already there.

What seems to be missing is curiosity.

The media gap is not simply a lack of women on screen.

It is a lack of stories that recognize how much becoming still happens after the age culture considers most marketable.