Why Women in Their Forties are Ungovernable

I am well into my forties – and definitely not ashamed of it. 

Because, this is – hands down – the best and most illuminating time of my life. 

I am pretty sure that most people are not as clueless as I was for the better part of my life. But, that was probably part of my curriculum in this lifetime. I had SO MUCH to learn. Honestly. Whether it was my mind, my body, my relationships – I had to work on all of it. For a long time. And, now, I am pretty sure that I know probably more than others about many things, especially when it comes to confidence, self-worth, belief systems, religion, holistic physical and mental health or patriarchy. I do not have the final answer to anything, but I have researched so much that I have a pretty good picture about life in general, women in particular and my path on earth especially. 

Many women though might fear their forties. The birthday is dreaded, we jokingly say we are 29 for years, don’t want to grow older, hatefully inspect each and every new wrinkle and compare ourselves to 20-year-olds we have never met in real life. Why is that? Because our patriarchal society has successfully tried to convince us that a woman’s life trajectory is only downhill after peaking in her twenties. That there is nothing to come, nothing to look forward to except for saggy boobs, expanding midriffs and lines on our face. As if we are a product that is single use and will be discarded after it’s done its service. Our everyday experience underlines this each and every day – we don’t get the job or promotion because we are too young or might get pregnant soon, we don’t get the higher paying job, the responsibility or the position that we would love to because we have kids, we don’t get further training as we are already too old, too inflexible and too set in our ways. We still have a wage gap, face old-age-poverty more often than men because of the accumulative loss because of said wage gap, raising kids and the ensuing motherhood penalty. And then, we are facing the fact and the news that older men don’t want to have women their own age anymore, but younger ones that could easily be their daughters. Is it any wonder that we feel like there is nothing to look forward to, that age is nothing to be celebrated? 

Let’s unravel this. 

The short version: It’s all a patriarchal story to keep women in check. 

Now, the longer version. 

If you listened to my earlier episodes, you are now well versed in the Beauty Myth, the ever-changing standard to which women need to compare themselves. Well, there are two sides to this particular story. 

On the one hand, the beauty myth is a great tool to distract women, to keep them from engaging in meaningful things and thus topple the whole system, to stay divided. It’s the necessity to create an environment that will justify unjust circumstances. In the Western world, where women’s rights have been encoded in legal documents and laws, the patriarchal male-dominating social order has to be kept by those internalised self-optimising principles. In other countries, like Afghanistan or Iran, we know that this is not even necessary, patriarchy is ruling in open view with an iron hand. The oppressor is still outside of women. 

On the other hand, the Beauty Myth is not only keeping patriarchy alive and kicking, but also means big business and money in the pockets of those very men clinging to patriarchal structures. Making women insecure about their age and appearance, their bodies and their skin, their hair and their overall visual appeal, generates billions of dollars each year – and has done so for decades. 

Let’s look, for example, at L’Oreal, the largest cosmetics company in the world, owning 36 brands and 497 patents. Basically, most beauty products available are owned by them – there is no diversification, no different brand values, no real interest in helping women, but marketing techniques, tricks of the trade, only a different brand image, packaging and marketing campaign to appeal to different women to sell the same thing – a solution to a made-up problem. The problem always being a woman who needs help to turn into something more appealing to the patriarchy. L’Oreal owns Essie, Maybelline, Nyx, Garnier, Aesop, Biotherm, Kiehl’s, Lancome, Kerastase, Redken, Shu Uemura, and Vichy cosmetics amongst others. Whether the brand image is high fashion, clean aesthetic, Korean appeal, naturalness, colourful extraversion, cheap or expensive, low range or extensive range – they all report back to the conglomerate, an entity entirely fixated on growth, profit and turnover. It doesn’t matter whether you need it or not – they need you to buy more and more often. The easiest way to do this? To make you believe that your face aging naturally is a fault, something that is wrong with you – and you alone are the culprit of letting this happen. The profits of your purchases are then put into the production of advertisements with 20 year olds applying anti-wrinkle cream onto their peachy perfect skin. It’s a never-ending cycle of gaslighting women, selling ever more invasive and expensive treatments to rectify the unavoidable decline in elasticity. 

And when beauty products don’t cut it anymore, that’s when Big Pharma steps in. Whether it’s nips and tucks, implants, fillers, Botox or Ozempic – they are all massive invasions into our body’s integrity. We want to prevent it from doing its natural thing. Which is absolutely ridiculous. Are people really buying the lie that they can outsmart nature? Spoiler Nope, they can’t They will look simply extremely ridiculous trying to – and do harm to their bodies, minds and nature in the process. 

So, a short recap: Keeping women distracted and minimised and enslaved by beauty is on the one hand absolutely comfortable for men and necessary for the patriarchy to justify its unjust conditions. On the other hand, there is a roughly 2 to 4 trillion dollar a year industry behind it – everything from beauty to Pharma, to diet products right to fast fashion – it all depends on women’s insecurities. No insecurities, no business, no profit, no patriarchy. Fast fashion also only works if you make women believe that they NEED to have this one piece, that this will determine their rank and desirability in the social order. Nobody truly needs any of those things – the needs are manufactured, the problems they seem to solve are manufactured. 

Now, the one question that remains is: Why is society so afraid of women after the age of 40? Why would they organise everything around keeping them from progressing naturally? Why is 40 the number that women are told to fear? The simple answer: This is exactly the cut-off date, the time portal when they become ungovernable, when they turn into threats to the established order.

Ageing has always been connected to wisdom, to experience, to discernment, to knowledge. But, with women, there comes an extra layer to all of these, because as women we are connected to cycles, body wisdom, intergenerational bonds and lineages and insights that I believe are not available to men. I am not a man, I have never had the opportunity to switch gender and see what it’s like. But, I am pretty certain that our biological and hormonal set-up makes us not only different, but superior in the realm of embodied cyclical wisdom. 

So, let’s dive into three different arenas of womanhood and how they make women feral and dangerous to the existent patriarchal order: 

• Biology and hormones / Motherhood & Menopause
• Social expectations and reality 
• Astrology 

Biology

So, first there is a woman’s biology and the hormones governing her body. This is probably the most important one to talk about. But, when I remember my biology class in school and when I talk to kids these days – it’s never taught in school. Girls grow up without any knowledge of this via the conventional education system. It would make them aware and proud, not ashamed of their blood – which, incidentally has been proven to include highly valuable stem cells that can actually heal better and more effective than any other. The one thing we have been told to be icky, smelly and bad, is actually truly a matter of life. That on a side note. But, back to the main point girls are not told anything about their hormonal makeup or what will happen during their cycle or during their lifetime. If you are interested in this topic in more detail, I will link three amazing books in the show notes – In the Flo by Alicia Vitti, The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine, M.D., and The Menopause Brain: The New Science Empowering Women to Navigate Midlife with Knowledge and Confidence by Lisa Mosconi. Truly excellent sources to understand the complicated and fascinating female body. 

So, girls and their brains undergo more and more intense hormonal flashes than boys. Their brains literally get flooded with hormones at certain points and thus develop differently. And the effect of these hormones are not merely the development of breast, hips and hair, but also their social behaviour changes accordingly. Flooded by oestrogen, progesterone and flashes of oxytocin during their teenage years, their whole system is geared toward social acceptance, to be a part of the in-group and thus to find a suitable mate to procreate. This sounds bad, but underneath it all, we are just animals. No matter how sophisticated we think we are, we are designed to procreate and continue the lineage for the survival of the species. So, once a girl finds a mate and becomes pregnant, her hormonal make-up shifts completely during the nine months of pregnancy and once again during childbirth. Childbirth actually signifies the biggest hormonal drop in the whole human species. Men would have to live to 200 to ever experience this drop. A woman does this within 24 hours, with little sleep and caring for a completely dependent newborn. It will take up to two years for her to recover completely from this crash. Her hormonal make-up is now no longer wired to find a mate and be part of the desirable elite within the social circle. Instead, she is wired to connect, to provide, to guide and to secure the wellbeing of her offspring. 

The next important cut will be in her forties – the cutoff years. Why? This is when her oestrogen and progesterone drop significantly, erratically and unpredictably. If you track the hormones of a perimenopausal woman, you will see no pattern, no regularity, no gradual shift, but dips and peaks. Most importantly, her overall hormonal balance will lose in estrogen and progesterone, and thus relatively gain in testosterone. When their period, their life-giving cycle stops, they become a bit like men – because they do not care about the others any more. They do not need to find a mate anymore, do not put value in comparing themselves with others and don’t care whether men find them attractive or not. They also do not produce offspring anymore and thus do not need to care for them anymore. For the first time since before puberty hit, they can finally be themselves again – with a lot more wisdom, experience and knowledge. Actually, the human race is built on this and depends on the wisdom, experience and knowledge, the attunement to nature and life that women after menopause bring with them. Humans are the only species besides Orcas and elephants that have females go through menopause. And you know what? All others, namely Orcas and elephants are matriarchies with the grandmothers leading the tribe. Because they know shit. 

What if this is true for the human species, which is actually is, wouldn’t it make sense for women after forty to take the lead? To guide the human race? To save us from the extinction that colonialism back then and today have brought us? 

This makes older women dangerous because they cannot so easily be coaxed into serving the patriarchy – except, if you feed them the lies of beauty, servitude and youth that all big conglomerates desperately try to. 

Social Reality

But, women going through perimenopause and menopause become ungovernable especially because of the social sphere they have lived in for so many years. The patriarchal structures, the neglect of women and their needs in politics and the workforce, the pay gap, even the climate change. Because women are the ones bearing the costs of patriarchy – the unpaid labor, the glass ceilings, the motherhood penalty, the body and beauty standards, the harsh reality of knowing how life on earth could be and what patriarchy has done to it – whether you feel it overtly or just underneath your skin. Chronic illnesses are more prevalent in women because of exactly this societal makeup – they internalise not only the patriarchal standards, they also internalise their own struggle with it instead of aiming it at the culprits. Once women hit perimenopause and menopause, they slowly but surely opt out, see through it, do not have the hormones anymore to try to smooth over an make everybody happy. Instead, they voice their concerns, their unhappiness, they demand more. Hence, it is no wonder that big beauty, big Pharma and politics are all trying to make sure that young women see older women as “no longer useful”, “neglected”, “past their prime”, in essence, something to fear, to stay away from, to not take seriously. It’s easier to fight a real danger with ridicule and pity from others instead of openly attacking them. And that is what is happening. 

Honestly, I was also one of those young women who thought that I know absolutely everything. But, I sure as hell did not know anything really. I have gone through puberty, the mate-search, matrescense and motherhood and now perimenopause. And, in hindsight, I know that I could have learned so much more from other women, could have found my way faster, could have been more in tune with my body, my mind, my nature all along. Women don’t need coaches – they need other women who have come before them. This one I am sure of. But, this does not generate any money, no taxes – just like care work. It’s not billable not taxable, so it’s deemed unnecessary in a patriarchal world. 

And this is why the combination of the hormonal and social sphere are such an explosive mix. If we provided women with what they needed, we actually would save in mental health treatments, sick days, depression and anxiety – but again, it’s so well-paid and also goes to big pharma. Treating anxiety and depression with pills instead of with prevention and the environment that women need, is a much more profitable business. Women and their non-natural habitat are what makes this world go round. We are funding the world. Yes, there are computers, cars and houses to be built and designed. But, if all women opted out – none of it would work anymore. 

And, it’s in their forties that women realise this. That they were living a lie and they can see it clearer than any man ever could – because they lived it. 

Astrology

And then comes a third sphere that probably many will deem too woo woo. But, as women, we are connected to life on earth, to the cycles of bodies, lives and eons. And astrology is exactly this. If you believe that the moon is governing ebb and flow of the seas, why are you doubting that astrology, the science of the impact of stars on life on earth, will also impact you? That is actually insane to me. 

So, what happens in your forties – both to men and women? The time between roughly 40 and 50 is one of the most intense times of anyone’s life – instead of teaching us what happens, anyone who feels the shifts is labelled to have a midlife crisis. Yes it is a midlife crisis. But, why does it happen? And what are we supposed to do with it? 

So, in astrology, there is a concept called aspects, which describes the angles which two or more planets are connected with. A conjunction, for example, is when they are right next to each other and an opposition, when they are stationed exactly opposite of each other. Another major concept in astrology is transits. A transit is when a planet today moves in any kind of aspect to any kind of planet in your own birth chart. Any aspect might have some kind of effect, but the most important ones are those, in which the transiting planets are aspecting their own natal placement in your chart. And during your forties many of those returns, meaning the transiting planet returns to its exact place in your birth chart, and oppositions. These are extremely important, do not happen very often and truly culminate in this window. Their mission is simple: To ask you to have a good look at your life and see whether you are on track, which is why many buy the sportswear, get a younger wife or leave for another country. They know something is amiss, but cannot pinpoint it, because they do not know their astrology and their basic astrological makeup, their purpose, their legacy, their growth path. And when this astrological examination time comes and you feel that you are wrong, but have nowhere to go, you truly try to fix the feeling with what you know – consuming more, getting the trophy wife, trying to become younger and thinner to see whether you might feel better if you still fit the familiar picture of a successful, wanted, happy woman, seducing men, caring for kids. Whatever you felt your happiest at. But the stars are relentless – which is both a pain the ass as well as so wonderful. We have a built in life compass that will show us whether or not we are living up to our potential and push us beyond our comfort zone. So, let’s have a look at what is happening in the sky during your forties. 

1. Uranus Opposition (~ages 38–44)

This is the headline event. Uranus takes about 84 years to orbit the sun, so around age 40–42 it reaches the exact opposite point from where it was at your birth. Astrologically, Uranus rules rebellion, individuality, sudden change, and breaking free of structures. The opposition is read as the psyche demanding authenticity after two decades of building a conventional life — hence the stereotypical “sports car, sudden divorce, career pivot” narrative. It typically arrives in a few waves (Uranus stations and retrogrades), so people often feel it as 2–3 distinct jolts rather than one clean event.

3. Neptune Square Natal Neptune (~ages 40–42)

Neptune orbits so slowly (165 years) that this square is one of the few Neptune-based aspects most people experience. It’s tied to disillusionment — the collapse of idealized self-images or illusions people built in their 20s and 30s, forcing a more honest, less romanticized sense of identity.

4. Pluto Square/Opposition Natal Pluto (varies by generation, often 38–45)

Because Pluto moves unevenly through the zodiac, this aspect’s timing depends heavily on birth year. It’s associated with confrontations with mortality, power, and transformation — themes like career upheaval, facing death more directly (parents aging/dying), or a compulsive need to rebuild identity from the ground up.

The Nodal Reversal (~age 46–47)

The North and South Nodes (where the Moon’s orbit crosses the ecliptic) move continuously backward through the zodiac, completing a full cycle in about 18.6 years. Two full cycles land the second Nodal Return around age 37–38 — but between 40 and 50, the event that matters is the midpoint of the third cycle, roughly age 46–47.

At that midpoint, the transiting North Node reaches the exact position of your natal South Node, and the transiting South Node reaches your natal North Node — a complete flip. Some astrologers call this the “nodal reversal,” others the “half nodal return” or “nodal opposition.” What it’s supposed to mean: The Nodes describe a life axis running from South Node (comfort zone, inherited patterns, the past) to North Node (growth edge, unfamiliar territory, the future you’re meant to grow into). At the reversal, that axis flips polarity in the sky relative to where it sat at birth. The reading is that whatever felt like “destiny” or “the goal” in your 20s and 30s (your North Node) has now been lived into — and the psyche pivots to integrate what it left behind (the old South Node qualities), while a new growth-edge opens up. Practically, astrologers describe this as a sense of “which way was I even facing?” — a disorientation around purpose that’s less about crisis-as-collapse (like the Uranus opposition) and more crisis-as-reorientation: the compass needle swinging.

2. Chiron Return (~age 50, sometimes felt from 48)

Chiron, the “wounded healer” asteroid/planetoid, takes about 50 years to complete one orbit. The Chiron return is associated with confronting one’s core psychological wound directly — not to reopen it, but supposedly to finally integrate it. It’s often described as the moment someone stops running from an old pain and starts using it as wisdom (hence “wounded healer”).

6. Saturn Transits (various hits between 40–50, though the actual Saturn Return is 58–60)

While the second Saturn Return doesn’t hit until the late 50s, people in their 40s often pass through Saturn squares or oppositions to their natal Saturn (roughly every 7 years), which are tied to reality-checks on responsibility, career structure, and long-term commitments — reinforcing the “am I on the right path” feeling.

Put together, the astrological case for a “midlife crisis” isn’t one event — it’s a cluster of slow-moving outer-planet cycles (Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Chiron) that happen to converge in this decade because of their orbital periods, layered on top of a Saturn check-in.

So, the changes in astrology mirror the changes in a woman’s hormonal makeup during her perimenopause. It makes her more authentic, more real, more attuned to what life is all about. And that is everything that is not patriarchal. 

So, yes, I fully love my forties. Because I am in charge. I am not governed by a need to be liked or desired, because I know shit, I understand it now – and I am utterly unsympathetic towards white men who do not listen to women, but fully participate in the patriarchy.

Your forties are nothing to fear or worry about, age is nothing to fear or worry about. You have the privilege of aging, something many are derived of. So, use your female rage and insight that will come to the forefront in your forties. Your forties are when you are finally seeing where you are going, what you want and what still has a place in your life. It’s a total mind bend actually – and to me it’s almost too much to take in. There is so much to process and to achieve in your forties.