Sunday marked the 40th anniversary of The Golden Girls. 1985. I was 25, designing nuclear submarines for the Navy, and the internet wasn’t even on the radar. I wonder—were we better off? At 25, I thought I knew so much. Forty years later, I know how little I knew and how much I’m still learning. Reflecting back, our lives were simpler and connections felt stronger. Friends, family, and coffee around the kitchen table held us together.
Blanche, Dorothy, Sophia, and Rose always had room at their table. At PROVOKED, we hope to do the same.
What if the most radical thing you did for your marriage was claim your own space? Not leaving, not giving up—just refusing to vanish into someone else’s comfort. This story isn’t about snoring or bedrooms. It’s about autonomy, intimacy, and what happens when you stop performing “good wife” and start showing up whole. The fallout? Brutal. The freedom? Delicious.
Grief used to live behind closed doors, hushed voices, and unspoken rules about keeping it private. But in the digital age, mourning spills into social media feeds. Suddenly, the most intimate losses are everyone’s to see, judge, and scroll past. Is this oversharing? Or have we been conditioned to fear raw emotion when it stares back at us? Read what happens when we stop hiding our pain, and why women’s public mourning still makes the world so uneasy.
Women have been the world’s free labor force—planning the parties, remembering the birthdays, hosting the holidays, wiping the tears. Call it goodwill, call it caregiving, call it what it is: unpaid. We’ve bankrolled everyone else’s comfort for decades and been told to smile and suck it up. But what happens when women finally stop paying it forward on demand? When we start keeping receipts instead of swallowing guilt?
What you said stopped us cold. ✒️ Here’s what one fabulous reader had to say this week:
"As a 63-year-old, I am doing so much more for personal growth at this age than I ever accomplished the first 40-plus years of my life. This is the time with wisdom and grace to let go of our collective baggage from the male-dominated world and fly to the moon and back only if we want to.” — Cheryl on The Woman Who Thought She Had Everything
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LAUGH LINES
Humor with bite—because if we're not laughing, what are we even doing?
The endless hold music, the robotic prompts, and the creeping suspicion that customer service was designed to break you. Buckle up for a wicked laugh as you relive the emotional roller-coaster every woman faces when trying to get a straight answer from a billion-dollar corporation. Trust us, you’ll feel seen.
🔥 Women over 50 stole the spotlight at the Emmys—Jean Smart, 74, dazzling once again as Deborah Vance in Hacks, and Katherine LaNasa, 58, commanding the screen in The Pitt. Proof, as if we needed it, that women 50+ don’t just “still have it”—we always did. And yet, while Hollywood pats itself on the back, the numbers tell a different story: Lead male actors over 60 still outnumber women two to one. Onscreen, women our age are treated as exceptions. Offscreen? We’re the rule.
Betty. Joan. Peggy. A decade after Mad Men ended, these women still won’t leave us alone. They were messy, ambitious, trapped, defiant—sometimes all in the same episode. They reminded us of our mothers, and uncomfortably, of ourselves. While Don Draper got the spotlight, the real story was happening on the margins: women trying to claim respect in a world built to dismiss them. And the unsettling part? For all our progress, their struggles still feel familiar.
🔥Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff and the moors—sexy then, even sexier now. Emerald Fennell’s provocative new adaptation has already set off fireworks. Critics are screaming mis-casting, over-sexualization, and sacrilege to Brontë’s 1847 original. The result? Sales of the novel spiked 504 percent on Amazon after the teaser dropped. Controversy is the best marketing. With Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as leads, the Valentine’s Day release promises to be hot. Haven’t read the book in years—or ever? Time to read this classic.
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✍️ Are you a writer? Do people call you opinionated? Got an unapologetic POV? We’re looking for freelancers with a distinct voice—especially in Money and Tech.
