We are a society that bases everything on age: our rights, our behaviors, our health habits, our family priorities, our looks: all of these things are centered around the number of years we’ve been alive. It’s an understandable yet flawed system: we want to protect minors from things that we don’t feel they are ready for, developmentally, and we want to protect ourselves from the effects of time, as our bodies are, as Fiona says, extraordinary machines—machines that require care and maintenance and that have, whether we like it or not, a breaking point. Being aware of one’s age, in terms of health issues and developmental issues, seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to ask of people. But what about those “rules” that are supposed to apply to everyone based only on numbers that really don’t have anything to do with health or maturity? There’s a shot in the opening credits of What Not To Wear that declares…
