I will begin here by stating that I am not vanishing. Nor do I feel as if I am losing relevance, or no longer in the game, or that I am being erased. Please do not mistake what I am writing here for some fist-shaking, I-will-not-go-softly last-gasp act of resistance.
I’m just a 53-year-old woman, probably in menopause, with two teenage daughters, going about my business: working, parenting, hanging with friends and family, sometimes being overwhelmed, sometimes enjoying the fruits of experience, sometimes feeling like crap, often feeling fine, and not at all dissolving into a puddle of nothingness. I even feel, quite regularly, that I am in some kind of prime.
So why, in so many of the TV shows, movies and podcasts that are marketed to me, do I feel, more than ever, that I keep encountering the idea that, once a woman hits middle age, she becomes invisible?
Maybe you’ve come across it yourself. It’s two women on “Platonic,” played by Rose Byrne and Carla Gallo, talking about how “no one is looking at us. We’re invisible. We’re middle-aged women.” It’s Rachel Weisz’s character on Netflix’s “Vladimir,” a show about a professor fixated on her younger colleague, stating that, “as an older woman — truly, what is more embarrassing? — I will have lost the ability to captivate.”
In the Canadian sitcom “Small Achievable Goals,” the stars Jennifer Whalen and Meredith MacNeill — perhaps two of the most visible comic actresses in Canada and both original members of the popular comedy troupe Baroness von Sketch — commiserate about their invisibility. “There is no ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Menopause,’” says the Whalen character. “And you know why?” It would be a short book, she says: “Her bones turn to dust, she becomes invisible, and then she dies.”
But honestly? It’s gotten to the point that every time I encounter this sentiment, it makes me do a little internal happy dance. Because constantly being told you’re invisible is just proof that you’re increasingly visible.
I truly believe that there has never been a livelier time to be a woman in her 50s. You’re typically in much better health than previous generations at this age and can expect to live into your 80s. Sex is often better, in part because of the reassessment of the efficacy of hormone replacement therapy for women. A middle-aged woman today is more likely than her predecessors to have a university education, her own income and assets, and the legal and social freedom to leave an unhappy marriage should she want that. It’s safe to say that the meaning of middle age has changed since the years when the 50-somethings on “The Golden Girls” represented, at least culturally, the notion that middle age is the beginning of life’s great wind-down.
Even the famed midlife crisis seems to be on the wane: For years, economists described happiness as following a U-shaped curve that bottomed out in the later 40s — so we were most unhappy in middle age before finding happiness again in the later years. More recently, however, that curve appears to be flattening, with well-being in midlife rising so that the arc of happiness — at least on paper — looks noticeably different.
It’s not that middle age has become easy for women. It might actually be more burdensome. Middle-aged women most likely had their kids later in life than previous generations: Today’s first-time moms are about six years older than first-time moms in 1970. They also are working at rates sharply higher than women were 50 years ago. (In 1975, only 47 percent of American mothers were in the work force; it’s more than 70 percent today.) Their parents are increasingly surviving to an age when their care needs intensify. When people talk about a “sandwich” generation, stuck between caring for parents and caring for kids, middle-aged women are at the center of the sandwich.
To me, none of this feels in any way like invisibility. If anything, it’s the exact opposite: presence. But Hollywood would not produce movies and TV shows about women feeling anxious about becoming invisible unless there was an audience for that sentiment. But where did that come from? A recent L’Oréal Paris campaign asserted that 70 percent of women believe they become invisible with age.
So it’s worth asking: Invisible how? And to whom?
I recently read Caroline Criado Perez’s wonderful book “Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men,” which details how in everything from clinical trials to industrial design a male-oriented default remains the status quo. But I’m also sure that the design of cellphones and the underdiagnosis of female heart attacks are not what a cosmetics company like L’Oréal, or a show like “Platonic,” is referring to.
No, all this talk of invisibility is referring to one thing: the passing of youth. A middle-aged woman in 2026 may be many things — accomplished, desirable, indispensable — but she is definitely not young, or still seen as young. So a tired, male-gaze-informed trope is applied: If youth is no longer visible, then the woman must be invisible.
This youth centrism is tone deaf and outdated. Kamala Harris ran for president in 2024 when she was turning 60, and the whole vibe of her campaign was that she was bursting with optimistic energy. (It helped that she was running to succeed an 81-year-old man and campaigning against a 78-year-old man.) Women occupy nearly 30 percent of C-suite jobs, up from 17 percent just a decade ago, and the average age of these executives is roughly 55.
These numbers still can improve, and should, but they point to both an increase in influence and visibility for older women. So what are we talking about here? Fewer catcalls?
In order for us to hear middle-aged women saying they’re invisible, they need to be wholly visible. “Small Achievable Goals” can have jokes about women of a certain age feeling that they don’t exist because this show has broken ground and exists — a type of show that rarely existed before. Ms. Weisz’s character in “Vladimir” can say it in part because she’s in a show that trains its spotlight directly on a middle-aged woman.
If a 50-year-old woman raises her voice and claims to be “invisible” and there is nobody to see her, hear her or care, the claim is apt. But if she has outlets on which to express it, or other visible women around who can say it for her, “invisibility” becomes a dissonant claim.
There are precedents for women identifying the phenomenon of middle-aged invisibility even as they defy it. In “The Coming of Age,” published in 1970, Simone de Beauvoir wrote that older women were pushed outside the erotic order — even as Ms. de Beauvoir, in her 50s and 60s, was deep into a series of affairs with all kinds of lovers.
Susan Sontag was 39 when she gave the concept a very clean articulation in her 1972 essay “The Double Standard of Aging,” writing that men were seen to mature while women fade. Yet, in her 50s, Ms. Sontag was one of the more photographed women in New York, moving through literary life with a level of erotic and intellectual magnetism that was legendary.
Nobody can say that Ms. Sontag is anything but an outlier, but history has caught up with the way she lived midlife. So now a category must be created for this kind of middle-aged woman — one who is not fading because she is no longer young but, instead, is actually excelling because she is garlanded with years. This woman is solvent, capable, desiring and desirable, happy with her years and looking at decades and decades more ahead of her.
Recently I canvassed a number of my middle-aged female friends and asked: If you could drink a potion and become 22 again today, would you do it?
A few waffled, but after some thought, not one of them said yes.
They are all overwhelmed with work, family and responsibility. But they are also owning the hot mess of their 50s, keeping everything afloat and earning the underrated satisfaction one gets from the feeling of mastery. These women could be truly invisible only to certain people — those who miss the story because they’re too busy still looking around for the youth of a girl.
Ms. Silcoff is a cultural critic and is working on a book about the sex lives of Generation X.
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