When it was released Sex and the City It was 1998, I hadn’t been born yet, and the main characters were already almost ten years older than I am as I write this article. I’m now 25 and I’m absolutely terrified watching Charlotte refuse to turn 36 at the beginning of season 5. But not with the moralistic terror that you might expect from someone who grew up in the generation of Twitter threads and #loveyourself (because you’d be surprised to know that my peers and I are, in some things, less deconstructed than you think), but with the terror of the inevitable future.
The terror of ‘es muss sein’, as Kundera would say. And I also refuse to turn 36, although not out of conviction; I have seen the punishment inflicted on those of my condition (women who get older, who age) and I do not want to suffer the same fate as them. People laughing their heads off while pointing their index finger at your thyroid – which is not metabolizing as it used to –, children crying because you don’t use retinol, friendships breaking up because your breasts are not as firm as they were a few years ago and calls from a hidden number in the early hours of the morning telling you in a distorted voice that Anne Hathaway is the same as she was in 2006 and you are not.
I can’t put my hand on the fire and say that reaching 36 years old is exactly like that, but I suppose it’s something similar. What I can say with certainty is that I read the comments that people write every time they post a photo. Selena Gomez (original Disney child, later hottie and currently rejected due to the physical changes caused by the lupus medication) and I can not only not be afraid of aging, but of going over 29. Not because I am a stupid and frivolous person (which I am also, because politeness does not take away courage), but while Samantha –from the same school as Charlotte, determined to stay at 35– does not think about cosmetic surgery until she is well into her thirties (an idea that she ends up discarding, by the way), those of my generation have been explained with more determination what it is baby botox that the Cl@ve PIN. For those who are lucky enough not to know it, baby botox an Anglo-Saxon term that comes from baby (scam) and Botox (pyramidal), it consists of a preventive aesthetic treatment for wrinkles, that is, it prevents you from having wrinkles when you don’t have wrinkles. I have no idea about the Cl@ve PIN anymore.
What I mean is that it is very difficult for us girls to make friends with our bodies, and then we are sold the idea that the greatest betrayal comes from it, “the greatest conquest is the body itself,” said Umbral in Open letter to a progressive girl. They are enveloping us earlier and earlier with this fear of aging when, curiously, it is the second most imminent reality that awaits us. The first is death, which is not so scary because there is still no quorum on what awaits us later; but if Hinduism is right and we are reincarnated in species according to the acts of our past life, those of us who are girls in this one must have killed someone in the previous one.
This is why, when I see Fortune is an old lady (3×05), I can’t blame Charlotte for being unable to turn 36, as reprehensible as it is to argue that “men prefer 35-year-old girls”; I can’t blame Miranda for taking a single change of clothes for a weekend in Atlantic City, because she only has a jacket that covers her first-time mother’s ass; nor can I blame Samantha, Carrie and Charlotte for screaming to some punks that that ass isn’t hers (now yes, because she just became a mother, but hers isn’t that one). And the funny thing is that surely five or six years ago I would have done it, but, as much as it costs me to empathize with them because they are disgustingly successful and all their apartments have natural light and cross ventilation, I don’t blame them. Now, at 25, I have become more benevolent, like a little old lady (because as I told you, I’m getting older). I have also realized that, despite what I have been thinking all my life, youth is not an intrinsic quality that I am endowed with, but a state that at some point I will abandon or that – in the least dignified of cases – will leave me. And today, aware of my condition and its finite time, I would like to take advantage of it more than ever, but the only things I can think of are things like skydiving, trying psychotropic drugs or going to La Pampa, and the truth is that I don’t feel like doing any of them, so I will continue doing the same thing I have been doing until now.
Growing up is one of the many things that (sorry for the redundancy) you only learn when you get older; like doing the weekly shopping or that being an adult doesn’t mean not being afraid of the dark anymore, but also being afraid of the light because it’s expensive. Things have been going very fast lately, I don’t know if it’s because of rampant postmodernism, because adulthood changes your circadian rhythms or because of the after-effects of COVID (which hasn’t been blamed for anything for a long time), but I see people my age saying that they will never have the same body they had when they were 18, which, although it’s undoubtedly true, it’s too soon to admit it. They’ve been telling us for so long that we were very mature for our age that we’ve ended up having a midlife crisis at 25.
