→ Read the full essay on PROVOKED

Editor’s Note: Off-Script—the why, what, and oh sh*t moments behind this article.

I keep my phone close. I run a business, I have grown children with babies of their own, and there’s no version of my life where I disappear for a week and pretend the noise doesn’t exist. I want the texts, the calls, the photos. I even want the Saks email at 11 p.m. telling me about the sale I shouldn’t be checking out.

So no, this isn’t a piece about going off-grid. I’m not romantic about that and neither are most women I know.

But there’s a quieter problem underneath the noise that I think about a lot: the assumption that my availability is somehow proof that I care. That if I don’t reply quickly enough, often enough, warmly enough, something is wrong with me as a person.

Linda Wattier’s pitch came in during a week when my inbox was particularly heavy. Hers was the only one I didn’t want to disappear from. Probably because she was saying something I’d been resisting for a while.

Women aren’t expected to be available because we have the capacity. We’re expected to be available because being available is how we prove we’re good. A woman who doesn’t respond quickly is negligent. A woman who goes quiet by choice is difficult. A woman who protects her time is selfish, full of herself, or my favorite—checked out.

One reader wrote in: I’m exhausted from being everyone’s emotional ATM. That sentence has stuck with me.

Most of us aren’t lonely. We’re depleted. There’s a difference, and the difference is the whole point.

What Linda did, that I think no one else writing about this lately has done, is refuse to make quiet sound like a luxury. It isn’t a luxury. It isn’t a reward you earn after you’ve answered everyone else first. It’s a baseline.

Read the full piece. Then close the tab and don’t answer anything for an hour.

Read the full article here.

→ Read the full essay on PROVOKED

Editor’s Note: Off-Script—the why, what, and oh sh*t moments behind this article.

I have a closet full of designer labels, and I dress for myself.

I love the craft of fashion—the drape of a good wool, a hand-stitched buttonhole, the way a great silhouette can turn heads. I ran costuming at Disney years ago, including the dress code for every on-stage and off-stage employee up through the executive ranks, so I know what intentional dressing looks like at scale. I also know what it looks like when you give up.

I don’t buy fast fashion. I’d rather own one good vintage piece than a closet of American lazy. I wait for the right thing to go on sale. I know the silhouettes that work on me and the ones that don’t, and I know the difference between a Chanel jacket and a Shein dupe. When I travel in Europe I look like I belong there, whether that’s Paris or Munich or London, because I’ve studied how women dress in those cities and I respect the rules enough to know when I’m breaking them.

So when Melissa Gould pitched a piece about getting dressed for a trip, I was interested but I needed her to find the spine.

The first draft came in soft. She was sitting in European cafés, watching women of every age move through cities with a physical ease she couldn’t quite name, and she knew her own packing—grays, blacks, no dresses, pure default—was wrong. She just couldn’t say why yet. We went through revisions, then pivots, then more revisions, until the through-line landed.

The through-line is this: Comfort is one aspect of dressing, but it isn’t the heart of intention. Intention is what makes you walk into a room without shrinking. It’s what happens when you put on a red suit, or a classic herringbone jacket with a leopard silk blouse underneath, pattern on pattern, and people take you seriously. It’s the difference between fading into the gray-sweats background and channeling Iris Apfel, or the Accidental Icon, every woman who ever made a room turn its head because she’d thought about what she was wearing and meant it.

Melissa got there. She bought four dresses in Europe. Not as a metaphor. She actually bought four dresses, and it’s what makes the piece work.

The response wasn’t quiet. Nearly 50 comments, readers split hard, which is what we wanted. One reader invoked la bella figura, the idea that you owe yourself and others your best look. Another called the whole framing irritating, said she finds clothes and the judgment around them exhausting, and couldn’t see why black linen pants don’t count as intention.

Both reactions are legitimate. But default and intention are different things. Knowing which one you’re operating from may be worth a few minutes thought.

Read the full article here.

→ Read the full essay on PROVOKED

Editor’s Note: Off-Script—the why, what, and oh sh*t moments behind this article.

Like every woman I know, I have a complicated relationship with my body. More specifically, my weight.

I’ve gained and lost the same 40 pounds across 40 years. I joke that I was born a size 14, but it’s only half a joke. Both my parents were overweight. Most of my extended family was overweight. The genetics weren’t subtle.

I wasn’t paying much attention to GLP-1s when they first came out. I’d heard the chatter the way you hear about anything new in pharmaceuticals, interesting, possibly hyped, probably not for me. Then I sat down with my doctor about an elective surgery I wanted, and she told me my BMI put me at elevated risk. The risk was mine to manage. That was the moment it stopped being an abstract conversation.

I’ve taken GLP-1s for three years now. I lost 40 pounds on Ozempic and I’ve kept it off on a maintenance dose. I’m not going to bury that disclosure at the end of this piece or frame it carefully so it reads as something more defensible. I’m not ashamed of it, and I won’t pretend it doesn’t complicate my position on this subject, because it does.

That’s exactly why I said yes when Wendee Nicole pitched this piece.

She was in the middle of her own mess. She’d done the work, genuinely made peace with her body, stopped letting the scale run her life. Then her mother visited, commented on her weight over pasta, and one month later Wendee started Wegovy. She doesn’t pretend the timing was coincidental.

What she does in this piece is something harder: she sits with the discomfort of wanting something she thought she’d stopped wanting, and asks honestly what that means.

I didn’t want the tidy resolution.

I’ve read enough my journey pieces to know that the ones that wrap up with self-acceptance and a renewed sense of purpose are not always the truest version. What I wanted was the real question, the one most women are navigating quietly right now:

Is choosing weight loss a betrayal of body positivity? Who decided which bodies were allowed to want what? And in midlife, when our bodies are already rewriting the rules without asking, why are we adding more rules on top?

Wendee doesn’t resolve it cleanly because it doesn’t resolve cleanly.

What I will say, and what I think this conversation needs more of: the GLP-1 conversation right now is sensational, complicated, and fraught with defiance on every side. For some of us, it is genuinely a miracle drug—the thing that finally quiets decades of food noise and let us live in our bodies without negotiating every meal. For others, it’s an easy quick fix to drop a dress size before a reunion or a wedding even when you are already a size 4. For the Hollywood elite, it’s something else entirely, and it’s scary to watch. Celebrities shrinking on the runway in ways their faces can’t keep up with. See my piece on the Academy Awards shrinkage. All while the long-term effects of all of this aren’t fully written.

What I’m hopeful about is what’s coming next. Pharma is pushing toward a pill version, faster and cheaper. If it gets safe enough that every woman who needs it can take it the way we take a statin or a blood pressure medication—to keep us healthier, to free us from a lifetime of disease and high risk conditions and of hating ourselves—that’s a win.

Read the full article here.

→ Read the full essay on PROVOKED

Editor’s Note: Off-Script—the why, what, and oh sh*t moments behind this article.

I watched Julia Child before I knew what an influencer was, back when the only algorithm involved was whether the antenna was pointed the right direction.

That towering woman banging pans, dropping things, laughing too loud, tossing in another stick of butter like it was a completely unremarkable decision—she was unlike every other woman on television in a way I couldn’t have articulated then but felt immediately.

She didn’t perform confidence. She operated from it. Most of the women on your screen right now don’t know the difference.

So when Abby pitched a piece about Julia? No hesitation on my part.

I love cooking. I loved Julia then, and I still love her now. But somewhere between “this will be funny” and “final draft,” Abby did what she does best—she followed the thread all the way down.

What started as jokes about influencers turned into something much sharper: an ode to a woman who refused to make herself small in a world that demands women do exactly that.

She writes Julia like a cultural disruptor, someone who refused to apologize for every indulgence and tone it all down before anyone got uncomfortable.

Our readers felt it immediately.

“I remember watching her when I was MUCH younger. I will never forget her booming voice. She was so full of life and joy! Give me ALL the bread and butter!”

“Hooray! It’s nice to hear someone push back against the thinness war of low cal, low fat, and factually low pleasure. Child was an icon and we’re lucky to have had her in our lives. Thank you for reminding us what a wonderful women’s warrior she is.”

“Thank you so much for this! I’ve been channeling Saint Julia for the last 30 years! It’s so nice to see someone put the ‘why’ into words.”

Because Julia didn’t just teach us to cook.

She showed us how to live like we mean it.

And always—always—use the good butter.

Read the full article here.

→ Read the full essay on PROVOKED

Editor’s Note: Off-Script—the why, what, and oh sh*t moments behind this article.

There’s a corporate euphemism that has quietly become one of the most insulting phrases in professional life.

Overqualified.

On the surface it sounds polite. What it usually means is you’re too old.

We have built a workforce that pretends to admire experience and quietly shows it the door. Overqualified is the word that lets everyone do it without saying what they mean. The dismissal sounds like a compliment. The woman leaving the interview is left to figure out whether to feel insulted or grateful.

I assigned this piece to Joanne Helperin because she has the voice to call it what it is, and because money pieces written for women are almost universally terrible. Preachy. Boring. Or written like a lazy LinkedIn post. Our money coverage has to deliver real service and real cultural argument in the same piece.

Joanne interviewed women who were passed over, ghosted, nudged out, or told that having grandchildren and having a job were somehow mutually exclusive. But the piece is bigger than four women’s stories. It is about the word itself, and what overqualified is doing right now, in a job market where AI is replacing the sectors women run. HR. Marketing. Sales. Communications. Social. The fields women built careers in are the among first ones being gutted. And then a woman who stepped out for a few years to caregive walks back in and meets a twenty-six-year-old recruiter who has already decided she is from another century.

One of our readers said it in the comments better than any of us could:

I want to go back to work and I have extensive experience. But the baby recruiters look at me and I hear it in their voice. Oh, you haven’t worked in a couple years? Yeah, but I didn’t forget anything. I’m still relevant.

She is. We are. Our experience is not a threat.

Dismissing it as “too much” is.

Read the full piece here.

→ Read the full essay on PROVOKED

Editor’s Note: Off-Script—the why, what, and oh sh*t moments behind this article.

Middle-aged women have been branded bitter for doing the unthinkable. Telling the truth. Enforcing a boundary. Saying no without an apology attached.

The label is lazy. It is also useful, which is why our culture can’t let it go.

Dr. Gayle MacBride is a clinical psychologist with more than twenty years in practice, co-founder of Veritas Psychology Partners, and a regular voice in US News & World Report, and WebMD. She is the kind of clinician you actually want when something is hard. Patients rate her in the top of her field for trust and for outcomes. That is why she is a regular contributor within this content vertical for PROVOKED.

Her early drafts for us came in the way most expert writing does. Technically perfect. Emotionally balanced and polished. Useful, but not PROVOKED.

So we pushed her to drop the academic buffer and the ‘on-the-one-hand’ hedging and write what she actually sees in the chair when women hit forty, fifty, sixty and stop playing nice. This piece is what happened when she did.

The bitter old woman is a lazy trope that refuses to die. Gayle drags it under a bright light and answers it with six F-words that have nothing to do with being “difficult” and everything to do with finally taking up the space we’ve already earned. She doesn’t reach for memes or tidy empowerment slogans. She writes like a clinician who has watched the same loop play out for twenty years: a woman keeps everything running for everyone else, and the first time she refuses, that’s when she gets called bitter.

What makes this piece different is that it does not ask you to be nicer about aging. It asks you to be more precise about it. It names what is actually happening when a woman is called bitter. She finally stopped absorbing the work nobody wanted, and she quit thanking people for noticing. The world has no idea what to do with a woman who is fresh out of f*cks to give.

I love this piece because it gives you the language to push back. Not with anger, though anger is valid, but with clarity.

You are not bitter.

You are done.

Those are not the same thing.

Read the full article here.

→ Read the full essay on PROVOKED

Editor’s Note: Off-Script—the why, what, and oh sh*t moments behind this article.

I couldn’t stop watching the same ritual unfold every week.

A woman posts a mirror selfie with three dress options and the comments arrive with polite diplomacy until someone tells the truth.

And then the thread implodes.

She just wanted help choosing a dress for her 50th high school reunion. By sunset, she’d shut down comments and left the group because someone told her the truth, and truth has been criminalized.

I’m done pretending this is normal.

Because most women posting “Which dress?” aren’t asking about fabric or fit. They’re asking if they’re still visible, still relevant, still here.

We’ve weaponized sensitivity so effectively that honest feedback gets branded as body-shaming, toxic energy, mean girl behavior. Meanwhile, empty flattery is called “support” and “sisterhood.”

This is the culture we’ve built. It’s exhausting, and what’s left isn’t community—it’s performance. So yes, I wrote this piece because I'm done watching this play out every week. Not at the woman looking for fashion advice, but at all of us.

Because we’ve created an impossible paradox: We crave honesty and then punish the women who deliver it.

If every honest answer is bullying, the problem isn’t the dress.

It’s us.

​Read the full article here.

→ Read the full essay on PROVOKED

Editor’s Note: Off-Script—the why, what, and oh sh*t moments behind this article.

Every time someone mentions customer service, there’s a look. The thousand-yard stare, the involuntary exhale, the story that starts with “I was on hold for 47 minutes…” and ends with someone screaming “REPRESENTATIVE!” while the chatbot cheerfully types, ‘I understand you’d like to buy a refrigerator!’”

We keep pretending shitty service is just one of those things, a quirk of capitalism or minor modern inconvenience like traffic or slow Wi-Fi.

It’s not.

Because it’s not just bad experiences anymore. It’s a slow-burn psychological experiment and system designed to make you give up.

This piece came from Abby Heugel—our editor and writer who has a gift for making you laugh at things that should make you flip tables. And the reaction in the comments turned into a support group, with people trading war stories like veterans comparing scars.

It took off because it lets us laugh at the descent, and maybe feel a little less unhinged for having lived it.

And no, humor doesn’t fix broken systems. But it does remind you that you’re not alone, you’re not imagining it, and you’re not the problem.

Read the full article here.

→ Read the full essay on PROVOKED

Editor’s Note: Off-Script—the why, what, and oh sh*t moments behind this article.

Lauren Manaker—a registered dietitian, decades of experience—pitched this piece and I almost said no. Not because we didn’t need it. Because we’ve all read it. Where was the PROVOKED angle I asked. The next “rethinking diet culture” essay from another expert that we have all read a thousand times. Sanitized. Hedged. Talking at readers instead of with them.

Then she admitted something most experts won’t: she feared carbs. Despite her training. Despite the science. Because the cultural messaging was that loud.

That’s when I said yes.

I told her to get vulnerable and to question the narrative she’d been taught—and taught others. To stop hiding behind the credentials. It wasn’t easy. She did it anyway.

What you get isn’t a diet plan. It’s a dietitian revealing the lie we’ve all been sold: that carbs are the enemy, that discipline is virtue, that women’s relationship with food should be monitored.

The response was immediate. Emails from women saying it was a relief to hear a trained dietician say out loud what we were all thinking.

I have personally survived Fen-Phen, Atkins, Keto, Slim-fast, Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, Cabbage Soup, and the Scarsdale Diet. And now GLP-1s. There was nothing I didn’t try over the last 40 years. One thing is clear, carbs are not the enemy. I will do my homework, better then I did in my 20’s, and make informed decisions about the food I eat.

We need each other to tell the truth.

Read the full article here.

→ Read the full essay on PROVOKED

Editor’s Note: Off-Script—the why, what, and oh sh*t moments behind this article.

How often do you think about sex?

And more specifically, how often do you think about monogamy versus what other options might be out there?

For a lot of women, monogamy isn’t a choice. It’s the default.

For others, the phrase “non-monogamy” goes off like an alarm. Time to clutch those pearls and defend our marriage certificate.

If you’re in the second camp and already whispering “absolutely not” while your thumb hovers over the scroll button—hold up.

Because a lot of women are curious. Not porn-curious. Curious about what non-monogamy actually looks like when it’s lived by grown, thinking adults.

When writer Mariah Douglas pitched this piece, I knew exactly what it was: a chance to drag open relationships, polyamory, and ethical non-monogamy out of the shadows and ask, without flinching: What is this really, and what have we been lied to about?

And I’ll be honest. I sat on the story for months.

Not because the piece wasn’t ready. It was. I wasn’t sure our readers were. We’ve earned their trust on hard, messy topics, but this felt like stepping over a line I couldn’t fully see. Would it read as an honest, necessary interrogation—or just cheap provocation?

Then we crossed 20,000 readers. The inbox got sharper. The comments got braver. Women stopped pretending their questions were hypothetical.

And it hit me: if we’re not ready to have this conversation now, we’re never going to be.

So we ran it.

And the readers showed up. The women already living non-monogamous lives, the quietly curious, and the cautious. The “I would never, but I need to understand why other women do” crowd. The ones reading with one eyebrow raised and both eyes locked.

This piece doesn’t sell you anything. It doesn’t recruit. It doesn’t shame anyone for choosing one partner for life. And it doesn’t shame you for not knowing what you don’t know.

It just cuts through the bullsh*t and says: here’s what happens when women start treating their desire, their boundaries, and their relationships as theirs to define—not the church’s, not the group chat’s, not culture’s. Not your mother’s.

If monogamy is your choice, you can handle reading about what else exists.

If it isn’t, you deserve better than whispers and someone else’s panic.

Read the full article here.

→ Read the full essay on PROVOKED

Editor’s Note: Off-Script—the why, what, and oh sh*t moments behind this article.

I couldn’t shut the hell up about Landman.

I tried. I really did. But every scene felt like a slap from someone who’s never met a real woman in this world.

I’m an oilman’s wife. The real kind. Not the one swanning around in stilettos and emotional vacancy.

A real oilman’s wife is a logistics officer and an emotional first responder, not a poolside extra. Our husbands do dangerous work in places that can kill them; they make decisions that hit like a gut punch when the phone rings at 2 a.m.

The women in those expat compounds were engineers, teachers, lawyers, artists. Smart as hell. Capable. Whole. And watching Landman, you’d never know we existed.

Because once again, the women aren’t people.

They’re props.

Sexual scenery.

Orbiters.

Every scene built for the male gaze, not the female reality.

I expect more from the men with the pens—and the budgets. A man this successful, this powerful, should be able to write at least one woman who doesn’t exist just to be f*cked, saved, or silenced.

I wrote this piece because I was furious, and because no one else could. Because women like me are done watching ourselves flattened into background noise.

Because if you’re going to profit off our lives, you’d better at least get the damn truth right.

Read the full article here.

→ Read the full essay on PROVOKED

Editor’s Note: Off-Script—the why, what, and oh sh*t moments behind this article.

I like to think I’m rational, educated, and confident to a fault.

Then a pitch like this one lands in my inbox and I realize I’ve been sold a bill of goods that profits off my panic.

And so have you.

We love to perform “age is just a number” while collectively dumping billions into products, potions, and pills that promise we can buy our way out of mortality.

The longevity industry isn’t selling hope.

It’s selling fear with better packaging.

Writer Joanne Helperin pitched this piece mid-panic spiral about her own aging. She’d figured out that her panic wasn’t just psychological, it was a profit center. So she stopped spiraling and started digging.

This one took a few rounds to get right.

Because it would’ve been easy to write another “wellness is a scam” finger-wag and call it done. But we wanted the mechanics. How the machine actually works.

Here’s how: Beauty brands and the trillion-dollar wellness racket don’t see complex humans with decades of hard-won experience. They see exploitable anxiety: crepey skin, sagging everything, slowing metabolism, and the lie that aging equals obsolescence.

They rebrand fear as empowerment and charge you $200 for it.

I wasn’t interested in influencer testimonials or sponsored studies or anyone who’s never sweat through a work call. I wanted the real question:

What happens when anti-aging stops being about health and becomes profit disguised as self-care?

We’re not here to sell you a fix.

We’re here to show you the con, so you can stop funding your own fear.

Read the full article here.

→ Read the full essay on PROVOKED

Editor’s Note: Off-Script—the why, what, and oh sh*t moments behind this article.

Here’s what we’re not supposed to say out loud: When things built by and for women disappear, they’re almost never treated as a loss. They’re framed as a fix, a modernization, or a market correction.

Progress, apparently, just happens to look like women losing places, rituals, and power—again.

We’re told to adapt and streamline our needs into something more palatable, more profitable, less … emotional. And if we feel something about it? That’s just nostalgia talking, sentimentality, weakness.

This piece came from anger disguised as grief.

Yes, there’s nostalgia in it. But what we’re actually responding to is the slow, relentless dismantling of women’s spaces, followed by the cultural gaslighting that insists nothing important was lost.

There’s a pattern here, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Anything rooted in care, relationship, or ritual is labeled inefficient the moment it can’t be endlessly scaled or monetized. Finance doesn’t know what to do with human emotion, or with spaces designed for connection rather than corporations. So it declares them obsolete and moves on, leaving women to absorb the loss quietly, like we’ve always been expected to do.

What’s being erased is permission, and too many people still believe these losses are accidental.

They’re not, at least for those us paying attention.

Read my full article here.

→ Read the full essay on PROVOKED

Editor’s Note: Off-Script—the why, what, and oh sh*t moments behind this article.

When Diane Keaton died, I knew I had to write about her. But I also knew I couldn’t let it become another weepy tribute piece about a Hollywood legend we will all miss. Not as nostalgia porn.

Screw that.

I’ve been watching Diane Keaton my entire life—and what she taught me had nothing to do with being likable.

Back when she was filming Annie Hall in men’s trousers, a vest, a tie, and that hat, I was finding my own sense of style. Learning early that clothing wasn’t decoration. It was armor. It was intention.

It was saying, “I’m here without asking permission.”

I followed her for decades after. Not because she was chasing trends. Because she refused them entirely.

While the fashion industry kept pushing women to chase youth, stay f*ckable, stay small, stay relevant—Diane Keaton built a uniform that said:

I’m not here to please you.

Bowler hats. Layered menswear. Shoes built for walking away mid-conversation. Nothing soft. Nothing apologetic.

She didn’t “age into” great style. She claimed it at 30 and sharpened it for 50 years—as her agency grew louder and her need to explain herself evaporated.

Here’s what I couldn’t say in the main piece: Writing this made me furious all over again.

Furious that we still have to justify dressing with intent. That women are expected to fade gracefully into beige cardigans and “age-appropriate” bullshit. That visibility at midlife is treated like a privilege we have to earn back—not a right we never lost.

Diane Keaton spent half a century saying no to that. Not with words. With fabric, structure, and presence.

She left a blueprint. Not for being admired. For standing the hell up.

That’s why I own my style.

That’s why I wrote this.

Read the full article here.

→ Read the full essay on PROVOKED

Editor’s Note: Off-Script—the why, what, and oh sh*t moments behind this article.

My inbox looks like an episode of Hoarders.

I read more newsletters than pairs of shoes that I own (and I own a lot of shoes.)

I get annoyed when it takes longer than two seconds for a website to load on my phone like I didn’t grow up using a landline to call an operator to find out the time.

In other words, I’m busy.

And of course, I’m not alone.

That’s why women are claiming “flashing”—not the kind that can get you arrested or one of the “perks” of menopause—but Flash Journalism.

Writer Beth Kanter’s pitch hit me right where it counts: You no longer have time for meandering metaphors, literary foreplay, or writers who confuse long with meaningful. You want impact. You want precision. You want something that hits hard, tells the truth, and gets out of your way—because you have a life to live. (Or at least a Netflix show to binge.)

I was all in.

Women claiming their voices, their time, and their identity—in 1,000 words or less.

No fluff, no filler, and no apologies.

Read the full piece here.

→ Read the full essay on PROVOKED

Editor’s Note: Off-Script—the why, what, and oh sh*t moments behind this article.

I started PROVOKED to give women over 50 a place that sparks hard conversations, torches stereotypes, and refuses to let aging equal irrelevance.

So when writer Nicole Pajer pitched an interview with online dating coach Andrea McGinty, I thought: solid service piece. Practical advice for navigating the hellscape that is midlife dating.

And it is that. Andrea’s no bullshit. She tells it straight—sometimes the problem isn’t the apps, the algorithms, or the general decline of civilization. It’s you. Or at least how you’ve been playing the game.

Then shit hit the fan.

Comments rolled in fast. The article was wrong. The apps are trash. There are no good men left on the planet. Fine. We encourage those conversations. Sometimes that is the case.

But then came the personal attacks on Nicole.

Not for her interview questions. Not for her credentials—which include bylines at some of the biggest publications on the planet. But for how “young” she looked. Based on one picture they saw on the masthead.

One picture.

And the claws came out.

Here’s what I couldn’t stop thinking: If this story had been softer—if it told women they were right and the dating world is just broken beyond repair—would those same women have left those comments? Or if Nicole had looked older? Grayer? Less threatening?

Nope.

But because someone dared to suggest they might need to shift their approach, they went for the cheapest, cruelest shot available—perpetuating the exact “mean girl” trope we’ve spent decades trying to dismantle.

I removed the offensive comments. Reached out privately. Because I encourage dialogue, but I don’t allow degradation.

And Andrea—unprompted—left her own rebuttal that says exactly what needs to be said:

Sometimes it’s not them. It’s you.

In more ways than one.

Read the full piece here.

→ Read the full essay on PROVOKED

Editor’s Note: Off-Script—the why, what, and oh sh*t moments behind this article.

I’ve been thinking about regret a lot lately. Not because something blew up. Just because by midlife, you’ve lived long enough to know some of your decisions were shit.

Some regrets cut deep—failed relationships, careers you walked away from, the person you stayed with three years too long. Others sting in their own stupid way—like cutting your own bangs or thinking yoga after a Double Supreme from Taco Bell was genius.

But here’s the truth nobody wants to say: Society treats regret like a character flaw.

Something shameful to hide. Proof you didn’t manifest hard enough or learn your lessons fast enough.

Especially for women.

When writer Melissa Shultz pitched this, the first draft came in reflective. Thoughtful. Way too “lessons learned” for what this topic actually demands.

Because regret isn’t a meditation retreat.

It’s messy, loaded, and for women, admitting it feels like admitting we failed—which we’ve been trained to never, ever f*cking do.

So we pushed. Hard.

To move this past comfort and into the cultural WHY: Why is regret shaming—even ourselves—giving our power away? Why do we treat it like moral failure instead of being human? Why are women expected to spin every bad choice into a “growth opportunity” while men just get to shrug and move on?

The final piece doesn’t coddle. It interrogates.

It names the weight women carry when we’re not allowed to say “I wish I’d done that differently” without someone weaponizing toxic positivity or a bullsh*t Instagram quote about divine timing.

This is permission to name your regrets. Own them. Stop letting them rot in silence while you perform gratitude you don’t feel.

One face-palm moment at a time.

Read the full piece here.

→ Read the full essay on PROVOKED

Editor’s Note: Off-Script—the why, what, and oh sh*t moments behind this article.

There’s something I can’t keep quiet about anymore.

The polite rules of society don’t vanish the second you set foot in a grocery store.

If you think express lane etiquette is negotiable, you pick up frozen pizza and abandon it in the shampoo aisle like some kind of conceptual art installation, and your cart has a mind of its own—usually blocking an aisle or claiming a parking spot—then congratulations.

You’re the antagonist of every decent human’s weekly food run.

Abby Heugel—our managing editor who’s at the store so often they greet her by name—feels our pain. She considers throwing a shoulder at someone ambling down the middle of an aisle like they’re touring the Sistine Chapel. She silently (or not so silently) curses the cart abandoners, aisle hogs, and checkout creepers who treat the “20 items or less” sign like a loose suggestion.

The second I read this piece from her? I had no notes. No edits.

It was sharp, unfiltered, and packed with just enough righteous fury to make you feel seen somewhere between Aisle 8 and the checkout lane from hell.

Our readers agreed. Hard. Even now—months after publication—comments still roll in with grocery store horror stories and solidarity rants.

Because here at PROVOKED, we encourage you to own your space. And sometimes that means the last two feet of the checkout conveyor belt, the express lane, and yes—returning your damn cart.

Read the full piece here.

→ Read the full essay on PROVOKED

Editor’s Note: Off-Script—the why, what, and oh sh*t moments behind this article.

Do you consider yourself a feminist?

I used to grimace at that question. Not anymore. Because I finally realized: What the hell? Of course I am.

The problem was never feminism.

It was the half-baked, sanitized, “be reasonable” version I grew up with—the one that told me to negotiate with patriarchy instead of dismantling the damn thing.

That revelation sparked this article. One of the first I wrote when I started PROVOKED.

And here’s what I didn’t know when I hit publish: how many women would respond with relief.

Not agreement. Not “yes, queen” cheerleading. Relief.

Relief that someone finally said out loud what they’d been thinking but couldn’t name. That the polite, palatable version of feminism they’d inherited felt like a trap. That wanting power, safety, autonomy, and respect without apologizing for it wasn’t selfish—it was sane.

What I’ve learned since is that too many women still treat feminism like some weird family heirloom they’re not sure what to do with. Thanks to decades of media bullshit, they think it comes with a checklist. Do I have to protest? Hate men? Apologize for my ambition?

No. You just have to stop performing the “cool girl feminist” who never makes anyone uncomfortable.

Because feminism that prioritizes comfort over change isn’t feminism. It’s PR with a selfie filter.

I wrote this piece angry. I’m still angry. Because we’re a year past publication and women are still being told the problem isn’t systemic inequality—it’s their tone.

This one matters more now than it did then.

Feminism needs everyone.

But it doesn’t need permission.

Read the full article here