Premature aging UPDATED

Elizabeth Nolan Brown has an interesting new blog called "This Is 30," which thus far consists of celebrity photos of what 30-year-old women really look like. I'm 29, so I'm listening.

"This Is 30" brings to mind Kate Harding's BMI Project, which sought to show that women (and some men) whose BMIs labeled them overweight or obese looked otherwise. In fact, it showed that the medically overweight do tend to look overweight, the medically obese obese - a separate issue from whether the medical profession is overusing BMI. Affixing photos to these numbers may have helped to humanize the women with whichever dimensions, and to remind us that big doesn't mean unfit or unattractive. But unless one happened to be approaching this imagining that "obese" means an honest-to-goodness crane is needed to extract someone from their home, I'm not sure what surprises were in store.

I fear that the same will be true of "This Is 30, at least if real, non-Botoxed/airbrushed 30-year-old women start appearing on it. I'm 29 and my best guess is, I look it. I'm small, and not a candidate for premature wrinkling. I don't look 50, but I've seen photos of myself from the start of grad school and there's a definite if hard-to-put-your-finger-on-it difference. What I'm saying is, I don't think I've aged especially a lot, or especially badly, but I think virtually all of us would be fooling ourselves if we felt we hadn't aged perceptibly since reaching adulthood.

So it's really Elizabeth's third fact I'm not so sure about: "most 30-year-olds look more-or-less the same as they did in their mid-20s [.]" Aging is gradual, so yes, a 30-year-old doesn't suddenly look different from 25, and is still, given current life expectancy, quite young. While these are tough calls to make on an individual basis, I suspect that few among us would have trouble telling, for example, who are the first-year graduate students, and who's waiting nervously for the job-market info session to begin. (Or is it just that grad school ages a person?)

When it comes to women being 30, I'm reminded of the first episode of the Mary Tyler Moore show, where Lou Grant, oh-so-inappropriately, asks Mary's age while interviewing her for a job. She reveals herself to be 30, then asks, coyly, how old she looks. He pauses for a moment, looks at her, and responds, "30." And it's funny precisely because she-the-actress does, and because it's so clear, in that moment, that the possibility that she-the-character might not only be but also look 30 has not yet occurred to her.

My own realism on this front comes, indirectly, from my line of work: I teach undergraduates, and I've lived in France. Students stay the same age year after year, while their instructors only get older. (When you know full well what 19 looks like, you can't trick yourself into believing that undergrads are actually eighth-graders.) And when I studied in Paris at 20, I was "mademoiselle." At 26, definitively "madame." This before wearing any marital-status-signaling jewelry.

We always feel an age we once were, or maybe a bunch of different ones, but just not the one we are. We remain the same amount younger than our parents, and our peers age as we do. A number - or, more often, a detail - will get fixed in our mind as intrinsically part of our identity. As in: 'I am someone who gets carded. '(Maybe so at 24, but by 38, unlikely, except at places that make a point in carding even the elderly. Not that 38 is elderly! Not that there's anything wrong with being elderly! Gar!) Or - and this is for the laydeez - 'I am someone who wears a size six,', or, 'who takes an A cup.' We often think of our builds as what they once were, and fail to immediately hone in on the sizes/styles most appropriate for our current shape.

And this carries over to celebrities as well, especially stars we remember from their time as child actresses. If we think of Alexis Bledel as that girl from "Gilmore Girls," of course it's shocking that she could be 30. But if we look at the photo of the woman who is 30, not so much. She looks good - famous actresses do tend to manage that - but older than when she was playing a teen.

Thus - I suppose - the expression "premature aging" - it all feels premature.

So some of this isn't even about wanting to be/look young, but more of a pretentious musing on the passing of time. But we also want to look young - and this one's gender-neutral - for reasons not unlike scrappiness oneupmanship, reasons specific to living in a meritocracy. If you've achieved X before you started going gray, or before you noticed those lines on your forehead, then you're basically a child prodigy. For those new at any life stage, there's something amazing about the fact that you do the same thing as that real grown-up over there.

But the obvious one is that we - women, but not only - want to not look 30, or want "30" to look like something other than 30 because of cultural messages we've received about 30 being the official end of attractiveness. Which - as all the drama that goes on among the over-30 set should attest - it does not. All those people writing to advice columnists about their spouses having affairs with coworkers, well, not everyone working in an office is 22, and the 22-year-olds by and large want little to do socially with those much older.

Much like the BMI Project, "This Is 30" could be helpful in showing us that yes, 30 looks like 30, but looking 30 isn't a disaster. Anything that gets us away from images of the overweight as permanently gloomy and eating fries from a drive-through, anything that gets us past the idea that at 30, all women go from fun and lighthearted to haggard, worn-out from family life or, conversely, cougar'd up in desperate search of a man, I suppose can only help.

And I fully agree with Elizabeth's fifth point, especially re: 30-year-olds looking better than they did at 16. We-as-a-society seem incapable of comprehending that while the very prettiest of 16-year-olds are what our culture deems most attractive, most individuals at that age have bad skin and the wrong haircuts for their hair type or facial structure. Yes, young girls get more street attention than grown women, but this is less because men prefer the barely-pubescent than because that's who's most readily intimidated on the street, that's who one can get a rise out of.

(MucinexD-fueled) UPDATE

This was to be my response in the comments to one commenter, then another, then all, so I figured I'd throw it here. But basically, my question to all who say that they looked forward to turning 30, that 30 is really quite young and not so different from 25, etc., is what our goal is here. As in, is our point to say that our entire societal conception of age is messed-up and misogynistic? Or that while 30 isn't old, some other age is - be it 40, 50, or just 35?

Bringing up - sorry! - another sitcom reference: the episode of "Absolutely Fabulous" where Edina turns 40. Edina refuses to acknowledge this fact, and stays upstairs for most of her own 40th birthday party. Meanwhile, downstairs, the new, New Agey wife of one of Edina's ex-husbands is holding forth on how happy she was to turn 40. At which point Edina's mother (think a British Betty White) asks her, "And when will you be 50?" Which sends her into full-on panic mode, at which point the ex-husband dude says, "She hasn't started 50 therapy yet."

Point being, one way is a feminist rejection of social constructions of age, the other simply moving up the age at which a woman becomes "past-it." The latter isn't necessary anti-feminist, and is to a certain extent just common sense. 30 these days isn't, at least in some milieus, what it once was. Yes, yes, fertility remains fairly set, but a) not every woman wants to have biological children (or can, even at 20), and b) the vast majority of situations a woman will find herself in have zilch to do with her capacity to bear a child. But to point out that 30 still constitutes "youth" isn't exactly a feminist message, because it doesn't change the terms of the debate.