Unspoken: The Taboos That Shape Women’s Lives And What Brands Can Do About It
From health to money to aging, silence surrounds the most important parts of being a woman. Let’s talk about who it’s serving. And who it’s hurting.
Why is so much of a woman’s life still considered taboo? It’s 2025, and yet we still whisper about the very things that define our lives: our health, our money, our minds, our aging bodies. Yeah, we’ve made progress. But when you look closely, you’ll see that the silence is still deafening.
We know how to talk about empowerment. But we’re still afraid to talk about menopause. Or miscarriage. Or the crushing weight of caregiving. Or the shame that surrounds women who are sick, broke, angry, grieving, or simply getting older.
A taboo isn’t just about what we don’t say...it’s about what we’ve been trained to carry alone. The result? A culture where women are isolated in their most human experiences. And a marketplace that too often ignores, censors, or sugarcoats our reality.
And we've had enough.
Why? Because silence keeps power in the hands of those who benefit most from the status quo: patriarchal systems, profit-driven industries, and cultural gatekeepers who benefit when women are quiet, agreeable, and easier to sell to through insecurity rather than connection. When women speak openly about what they've been told to hide, whether it's the realities of their bodies, their finances, their mental health, or their mortality, it disrupts the carefully curated illusion that everything is fine.
Talking about taboos challenges these systems. It calls out injustices, demands better solutions, and reclaims agency. It forces the people in power to confront truths they’d rather keep invisible. And that’s exactly why so many of these conversations have been labeled "too much," "too messy," or "not appropriate."
But women aren’t staying quiet anymore.
And even those of us who think we’re being honest and pride ourselves on being open, real, and unfiltered still find ourselves covering up parts of our lives. We downplay our pain. We gloss over our bank accounts. We joke about aging instead of owning it. And when we hide enough of ourselves for long enough, especially in front of others, we start to hide it from ourselves too.
What Is a Taboo, Really?
A taboo is deeper than what’s considered rude at the dinner table. It's a form of social control. A taboo marks something as unspeakable, inappropriate, or shameful, even when it’s entirely human. And once something gets labeled a taboo, it becomes easier to ignore, stigmatize, and perhaps most dangerous, suppress.
We learn taboos early. Sometimes explicitly: "It's not polite to talk about money." Sometimes indirectly: through the absence of conversation about fertility, or the way social platforms restrict information about our bodies and the way they work. These silences shape our understanding of what’s safe to express and what’s better kept hidden.
And women bear the brunt of that. Because so many of the things that happen to us biologically, socially, and emotionally don’t align with what society has historically wanted women to be: neat, pleasant, manageable. The reframing of something normal as taboo shows up where our realities make people uncomfortable, and it sticks because breaking them often comes at a cost.
That cost might be professional (maybe you're seen as less competent or more difficult), social (people thinking you're too emotional), or even physical (like when speaking up leads to misdiagnosis, withheld treatment, retaliation in the workplace, or withdrawal of critical support from family or institutions). So we learn to self-silence. To stay in bounds. To protect ourselves by avoiding the truth.
The Everyday Taboos Women Live With
One thing I've noticed in the past 13 years at Fancy is that the more you start to really examine women's lives, the more you really realize how deeply embedded taboos are. How they influence the way we speak (or don’t speak) about our bodies, our bank accounts, our feelings, and our futures. Some are loud and obvious. Others are so normalized we barely recognize them as taboos at all.
Take health, for example. We often assume the taboos here begin and end with reproductive health, but they reach much further—into everything from chronic pain to autoimmune disease to mental illness. If a condition challenges the image of women as reliable, energetic, or "low maintenance," it becomes something we’re expected to keep quiet. Miscarriage, perimenopause, and infertility are just the beginning. We endure so much in private because speaking out often brings judgment or pity instead of support.
Forget aging. Once a woman turns 40, it’s like she starts to disappear. Unless, of course, she’s “aging well,” in which case she gets held up as an exception, not the rule.
And money, it turns out, doesn't actually talk. Or rather, we can't really seem to talk about it. Many of us were taught it’s tacky to discuss salaries with our friends, or we're embarrassed to admit to financial struggle. That conditioning runs deep. It keeps women from negotiating, from asking questions, from planning futures they actually own.
Even death and grief aren’t exempt. They often become taboo not because they’re rare or shameful, but because we assume they’ll make others uncomfortable. And discomfort, whether ours or theirs, keeps us from saying the things that most need to be said. We avoid talking to a friend who’s lost a child. We don’t ask the questions we really want to ask someone who is dying. We skip the hard conversations because we’re afraid of saying the wrong thing, or of facing something too big to fix. But silence doesn’t protect us, it distances us. And it robs everyone of a chance to be present at the exact moment when connection matters most.
Taboos are everywhere in our everyday reality, and what makes them so powerful is that they rarely get questioned. When we don’t challenge them, we can't help but begin to believe them.
Who Benefits From the Silence?
Taboos don’t just appear and linger by accident—they’re useful to someone. When women are quiet about what they’re experiencing, someone else stays in control.
Healthcare systems don’t have to fix what’s broken when women stay silent about their concerns being dismissed. Beauty and wellness brands profit when women feel their natural bodies are problems to be fixed. Employers benefit when women don’t talk openly about salaries, making it easier to perpetuate wage gaps and avoid accountability.
Entire industries thrive on women second-guessing themselves.
And then there are the media platforms and policies that claim to protect “community standards” while consistently censoring ads and content related to women's sexual health, while those for erectile dysfunction sail right through.
What All This Silence Does to Women
When we can't say what's true about our health, money, personal pain, etc., it makes those things harder to bear. Taboos isolate us. They make us think we’re the only ones going through something that’s actually super common. And it's that loneliness that cracks the door open to shame. So you don’t ask for help. You don’t share what you’ve learned. You just try to deal with it quietly and move on.
But silence doesn’t just hurt individuals. It slows everything down. If women aren’t talking about their symptoms, things don’t get diagnosed. And when they don't get diagnosed, investors don't think they're a big enough problem, and they don't get funded. If we’re not talking about money, inequity goes unchecked. If we’re not talking about aging, or rage, or mental health, we’re left to navigate it in isolation—and so are the women coming up behind us.
And let’s be real: the impact isn’t evenly distributed. Taboos land harder on women whose lived experiences don’t match society’s narrow comfort zone: Black women, disabled women, trans women, fat women. The further you are from what’s considered "acceptable," the more likely you are to be asked (explicitly or not) to hide your reality altogether.
Taboos might start as whispers. But left unchallenged, they become barriers.
How Brands Can Help Break the Silence.
If your brand operates in a stigmatized category like femtech, sexual wellness, incontinence, menopause, or mental health, you’re already in the arena. But how you show up matters. Don’t tiptoe around what you offer. Speak directly, honestly, and without shame. Normalize your product by anchoring it in real women’s lives, using language and visuals that reflect clarity and confidence. Your brand has the opportunity, and you've heard me say it before, the responsibility, to push the conversation forward. Own the taboo, don’t dance around it.
Let’s be honest, if you’re in this space, you already know the risks. But you also know the upside. When you say what others won’t, people pay attention. Women pay attention. You stop being just another product on a shelf and start becoming a brand that actually stands for something. That’s rare. That’s valuable.
A lot of emerging brands are already doing this—and doing it well. But without the budgets, influence, or distribution power of legacy players, it’s hard to move culture at scale. That’s why we need the brands that think they have the most to lose by rocking the boat to proudly step up and lead the change. They’re the ones with the power to shift the default, to normalize what’s long been silenced, and to prove that doing the right thing can also be good business.
And Women...Stay Loud.
We’ve seen what happens when women stay silent. And we’ve seen what happens when they finally speak up.
The more we say the things we weren’t supposed to say, the more we give other women permission to do the same. And when brands boldly join that conversation, they don’t just stay relevant, they help reshape the culture that got us here in the first place.
This isn’t about being edgy. It’s about being honest. And we could use a lot more of that.
