It’s a new year, and for many people that means diet plans and moral resolutions. For me, every new year also heralds my birthday in early January. Along with the usual reflections, I’m reminded—unavoidably, with every round of fireworks and a few more wrinkles—that another year has passed, and that, yes, I am aging right along with it. While Leonardo DiCaprio has reportedly distanced himself from 2026 now that it has passed quarter-century status, I am now officially in my early 40s and have hit, according to a certain corner of the online manosphere, what is called “the wall.”
“The wall,” in that particular discursive community, is the supposed moment when a woman’s desirability—and, by extension, her social value—abruptly and drastically declines. According to one manosphere writer, the wall is “the threshold at which most women realize their lessened capacity to sexually compete with the next generation of women in their ‘actualized’ sexual peak (22–24).” The wall, then, is framed as a biological inevitability: Bam, 40, and you’ve slammed straight into it. The idea is most often applied to women very much like myself—women who pursued education and careers in their early 20s and who are therefore presumed to have “chosen” work over family.
I’ll even help make their point for a moment. My now-husband proposed twice before I accepted the third time. With each no, and with each degree earned, I was—according to this very-online logic—increasingly squandering a limited window of fertility and the few years of beauty allotted to a woman’s prime.
I eventually said yes to my now-husband, and I’m glad I did. But marriage does not offer women an escape from judgment: No matter our marital status, we are culturally sidelined, even made invisible, as we age, because our desirability is presumed to have expired. What matters in wall discourse is never the fullness of a woman’s loves, work, or responsibilities, but her proximity to youth, fertility, and a narrowly defined version of beauty.
What brings me to write this essay is not simply the cruelty of this idea, but how far it diverges from the actual lives women in midlife are living—and how insistently our media refuses to acknowledge that gap, even as it influences how women are seen, hired, and valued. Even as it influences how women see and value themselves, too.
A recent viral post on X featuring Keely Shaye Brosnan and her husband, actor Pierce Brosnan, illustrates the presumed logic of “the wall.” The post presents side-by-side images of the couple taken decades apart, inviting viewers to compare the two across time. Now, the focus is not on continuity, affection, or shared life, but on the female Brosnan’s obviously visible aging—her changed body, her weight gain since their marriage in 2001. “The wall is undefeated,” the post’s caption declares. Women age. The sky is blue. But strangers on the internet treat that as a tragedy. For Pierce Brosnan, who is also looking older, there is no commentary. The judgment is reserved for his wife.
Keely Shaye Brosnan is a journalist, author, and environmental activist, in addition to being a wife and mother. None of that counts toward her assessed “value” by those who do not know her. A long marriage and a full life with work and children are rendered totally irrelevant by a narrative that treats aging as a failure to preserve peak marketability. In this story, simply living a life is enough to be declared a loss.
At this point, I suspect I know what some of you are already thinking: Why does any of this matter? If some guy on the internet thinks that I, Keely Shaye Brosnan, you, my dear reader, or any other woman has “hit a wall,” why should it affect any of us? After all, Pierce Brosnan is still with his wife, and my husband seems perfectly content with the early-40s version of me that exists now.
And yet—as much as I might like to ignore time and its effects on my body, I can’t, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Aging can be hard. My knees hurt when I get off the couch, and my hair no longer has the sheen it once did. Still, something else has emerged with time: a wider, more far-ranging perspective, a deeper attentiveness to meaning in the crevices of ordinary life. This 40-year-old crone has accrued what many cultures would simply call wisdom. I know the difference between a child’s cry of sadness and a child’s cry of delight, and how each shifts with pitch and urgency. I also know which battles are worth fighting, which moments require silence rather than speech, and how much of life is sustained not by intensity but by patience and care. (And, for the record, I still think I’m pretty hot and stylish, too.) All of this has pushed me to look more closely at the cultural frames we use to talk about women in midlife—and how rarely those frames resemble the women I know, love, work with, laugh with, and worship alongside every week.
Let’s look at the numbers. Roughly 78 percent of women ages 40 to 54 participate in the U.S. workforce, a figure that has remained remarkably stable in recent years. While media (social and traditional) often emphasizes the decline in American households with children, most women in the United States have at least one child, and most women in midlife have two children. More than 80 percent of women in this age group are mothers, and roughly 8 in 10 women aged 30 to 49 report being married or living with a romantic partner.
This is not every woman’s story—but it is a snapshot of the average woman in midlife.
The takeaway is straightforward. The majority of women over 40 are raising children, working outside the home, and embedded in long-term relationships. And the women who are single are not living suspended, provisional lives, twiddling their thumbs while waiting for something exciting to begin either! Across marital status, women over 40 have full lives with hobbies and personal interests: ice skating, gaming, travel, painting, dancing—yes, sex too. Their lives are not unmoored. They are relational and active in ways our dominant cultural narratives consistently ignore.
That gap between reality and representation is not accidental by any means. The online manosphere may be a niche subculture, but its assumptions are hardly confined to it. In subtler, more respectable forms, mainstream media often reproduces the same story: that women’s value narrows with age, that aging represents decline rather than development. Research from a recent report by CreativeX, a data analytics company that studies how imagery functions in advertising, shows that women over 40—despite significant purchasing power (a fact amply confirmed by the Amazon drivers in my neighborhood each December)—make up less than 5 percent of characters in advertising. When they do appear, they are overwhelmingly associated with anti-aging creams and antidepressants. This, apparently, is what marketers imagine women over 40 need.
The pattern extends to television. According to the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, working mothers in their 40s who are securely partnered and professionally active are rare as main characters. When women over 40 do appear in central roles, they are more likely to be portrayed as divorced, strained, unemployed, or romantically unstable rather than stably married. This imbalance is especially visible in drama, where men’s professional lives drive the narrative while women—particularly women in midlife—are positioned largely at home, absorbing the emotional and moral fallout of men’s public work. In shows like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, or The Sopranos, men’s careers and crises propel the plot, while wives and partners are framed primarily through domestic strain, caregiving, or containment. Older standbys like Roseanne or The Cosby Show could be offered as counterexamples, but Roseanne’s work is sometimes intermittent, and The Cosby Show—for all the virtues of Clair Huxtable—is no longer a cultural touchstone many viewers wish to revisit. In any case, both belong to a television era now decades past.
Women over 40 are also frequently shown exercising competence or authority only when something has gone wrong, and the Davis Institute notes that widowhood and grief are among the most common plotlines for women in this age group. Dead to Me, one of my favorite recent shows, is sharp and genuinely funny, but it, too, frames female competence through loss. The series opens with the newly widowed Jen Harding navigating grief, anger, and the practical demands of single parenthood; her capacity for action—professional and emotional—emerges in response to that rupture rather than alongside stability. By the final season, the narrative again centers on loss, this time through her closest friend—who helped her survive that initial grief—being diagnosed with cancer. Older women in film and television are more than twice as likely as men to be defined by grief, while men’s aging remains narratively open, marked by reinvention and ambition rather than sustained loss.
These narratives do not stay on screen; they create expectations around gender norms that travel with women into real workplaces. A study reported in Harvard Business Review found that middle-aged women were routinely described as “difficult to manage” or as having “too much family responsibility”—assumptions not applied to men of the same age. Some academic search committees have declined to hire women in their late 40s, citing “impending menopause,” while hiring similarly aged men instead. As one researcher summarized it, “You’re not seen as middle-aged—you’re seen as old, whereas your comparable male counterpart is seen as in his prime.”
This is not a new story. In her 1991 edition of The Beauty Myth, third-wave feminist Naomi Wolf—whose later political turns I in no way share—argues that modern culture sustains its power over women by splitting them into two groups: Women may be intelligent or beautiful, but not both. Beauty is initially offered as rewarding—conferring attention, approval, ease—but once accepted as a primary source of value, it becomes a condition that must be constantly maintained. Wolf names this system the Iron Maiden, borrowing the image of a (likely mythical) medieval torture device: An unchanging woman on the outside, inflicting pain on the inside. In Wolf’s metaphor, beauty functions the same way: it is disarming at the outset, but then becomes a structure of pain and constraint, especially as one ages and the labor required to remain conventionally beautiful intensifies. Put on light makeup in your 20s and receive the compliments. Wear the same makeup in your 60s and get asked if everything is all right.
When I think of the Iron Maiden, I think automatically of Kris Jenner. Now 70, Jenner recently debuted a facelift so seamless that she could plausibly be mistaken for a sister to her famous daughters. The work is impressive—and yet it does not signal escape from the Iron Maiden. She remains powerful—the Momager, the architect of an empire—but she is never quite allowed to age. And even now, here we are, still talking about her age. Which raises a harder question: Is this what we want from women, to remain visible only if they perform agelessness without end?
I don’t have answers to that question, and I don’t pretend to stand outside the pressures Jenner embodies. I make small interventions to look better; over the holiday break, I got a laser facial, and for my birthday, I bought myself some Kylie Jenner lipstick in my favorite shade of red. Participation, yes. Excess, no. Not only do I lack Jenner’s money, I also believe that a wrinkle or two—time made visible—is not a failure. It is, on the contrary, evidence of having lived.
Part of truly perceiving the wall is recognizing that it was built long before you arrived, and that pretending it isn’t there does not make it passable. Refusing to acknowledge it is not an act of freedom so much as a guarantee that you will keep running into it. Now, naming the wall will not cause it to vanish. But naming it does mean that you can begin to decide how to live with it: where to push, where to climb, where to go around. And stories like the one you’re reading now—and the ones you might share with others if you’ve ever known anyone to contemplate that age marker that wall represents—show where others have found footholds, where cracks have formed, where passage is possible. In that sense, stories are one way to approach the wall without being defined by it, especially by the manosphere.
Because I am an English professor and an unabashed lover of stories, I want to close with one. In The Picture of Dorian Gray—British playwright Oscar Wilde’s famous novel—a young man preserves his outward beauty by allowing a hidden portrait to bear the marks of age and moral corruption in his place. As Dorian remains youthful, the painting records the consequences of his vanity and cruelty, revealing the cost of separating beauty from truth and responsibility.
The novel’s preface includes a line that feels especially apt for our moment: “Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.” A woman’s beauty is not determined by a stranger’s constraints, but by the story she chooses to live. If there is a wall, it is not brought down by either denial or perfection, but by refusing the lie that women’s value diminishes even as their lives grow fuller.
And that feels like an optimistic way to begin a new year—and one’s 40s.
