Back in the 90s, Sex and the City was a breakthrough. Whatever you think of it now, at the time no one was writing young women as they really were. Flawed, complicated, ambitious, messy, funny, obsessed with friendship as much as relationships, a bit self-absorbed, a lot hopeful. Under the gloss, it felt real. And crucially, it didn’t just reflect culture. It shaped it.

Before Carrie Bradshaw, hardly anyone had heard of Manolo Blahnik. After SATC? Sales jumped 300%. No one went to Magnolia Bakery for overpriced cupcakes. One episode later? Queues down the road and the global boutique cupcake trend was born. Cosmopolitans weren’t the signature drink of the era until SATC made them so (they’re still bloody good by the way). Bar sales soared, and suddenly everyone was sipping pink cocktails.

SATC didn’t just tell stories. It made culture. It sold shoes, cocktails, cupcakes and more, but more importantly, it sold possibility. It put women’s lives, conversations, friendships and experiences centre stage and brands followed the cultural mood it was setting – we all wanted a piece and we felt seen like never before.

Which makes it more depressing that And Just Like That, the SATC follow-up, a programme basically about middle-aged women, has landed with such a dull, stereotyped thud. Rabid mums gaming college admissions. Sad single women with cats. Women who’ve ‘given it all up’ to work in charities and don’t start us on the ham-fisted portrayal of anyone and everyone who might be labelled LGBTQIA+.

Where’s our moment? Who is writing our lives now? I'm getting to the point, honest.

If anything defines the experience of middle-aged women in culture right now, it’s invisibility. We’re here. We’re living. We’re feeling. And yet we’re either patronised or erased. And this matters. For culture. For business. For all of us. You can see the same pattern playing out in advertising.

The $4 billion-plus menopause market is a case in point. Yes, awareness is up. Yes, products can help. But let’s be honest, the market has grown this fast because until recently, there was nothing. And women, desperate for recognition, for tools, for stories, are grabbing at crumbs. Something, anything, is better than nothing.

But much of the marketing is paper-thin. The Boots “Menopause Monologues” campaign was meant to be bold but ended up reinforcing the idea that menopause can be ‘solved’ with products – and little else. Everywhere you look, the stories are simplified to the visual cliché. The subtext: buy the cream, smile through it, move along.

And this is the real cost of lazy storytelling.

Because the middle-aged women I know are not simple. They are starting businesses, leaving old careers, grieving, loving, raging, creating, dreaming. They are burning it down and starting again. They are living.

And when we only see them flattened into tropes - the Cat Lady, the Frazzled Mum, the Woman Who’s Let Herself Go, the bitch - the culture loses. The stories lose. The audience loses.

And the brands? They lose too. Because lazy storytelling doesn’t connect. It doesn’t create cultural impact. It doesn’t sell to the potential it actually could.

And let’s face it - part of the problem is this: older people and particularly women are wildly underrepresented in the advertising industry. In UK, only 15% of the team are over 45 (errrr what?) and representation of women over 45 at board level is negligible. No wonder the lived experience of this audience isn’t making it into the work.

So, what if we flipped it?
What if we created the next cultural moment - for our generation? What if we stopped waiting to be written into the story and started writing ourselves in? Because invisibility is not some natural phase of life. It is something the world imposes on us and something we can refuse to accept. And to the organisations, brands, networks, writers: start seeing us. Start writing with us, not about us - and for god sake retire Davina from the ads, she's done enough.

AndAmd
And for those of us living this life now: Let’s say it clearly. We do not owe the world our silence, our smoothing down, our polite disappearance. We are here. We are feeling more, doing more, burning brighter. If you're a brand wanting to know middle aged women, give some of us a shout, we’re here to set things alight, be represented and do it differently (and probably say fuck off quite a lot along the way).