Age-Appropriate Content

Youth is wasted on the young.

“Age is a state of mind.”
“Never trust anyone over 30.”
“Life begins at 40.”
“Forty is the new 30.”

As human beings, most of us are preoccupied with chronological age. We spend the first part of our lives looking forward to doing all sorts of fun things we’ll be allowed to do and understand “when we get older,” then we spend our prime years being too busy to do the fun stuff we looked forward to being old enough to do, and finally, we become too old and physically infirm to do the fun stuff we didn’t make time to do in our youth.

It happens faster than one may think. Suddenly, in one’s second half-century of life, he or she finds himself or herself looking back and thinking, “Gee, I wish I hadn’t spent so much time acting my age!”

Age is a fairly concrete concept, serving to mark the passage of time and allowing people to measure their lives, successes and failures in years (and gray hairs and wrinkles). Maturity, on the other hand, is relative. It represents a combination of education, experience, and chronological age, and it most often manifests itself in attitudes and abilities. At the age of adulthood — 18, or (legal disclaimer) 21 in some jurisdictions — some people are ready to venture forth and make their marks on the world, while others live at home with their parents until they’re 30 (or older). Although it doesn’t happen as often today as it did in previous generations (thanks to the invention of “assisted living facilities” and “retirement communities”), the process completes a circle when elderly folks lose their mental acuity or physical integrity and wind up living like children in their children’s homes.

But I digress. (Perhaps you can forgive me for that, as in entertainment industry terms, I’m about ready for a nursing home myself.)

More than any other, entertainment industries put a premium on youth and idealized appearance. For the most part, audiences don’t want to see old, out-of-shape people behaving in ways the audience fantasizes about behaving. That’s too much of a mortality jolt, and no one likes to be reminded his or her time on this mortal coil is limited. When it comes to sexual activity, in particular, the ravages of time and hard living are terribly unattractive (which, one may suppose, explains at least part of the “May-December romance,” “trophy wife,” and “boy toy” phenomena). Chronological age is particularly poisonous to entertainment-industry denizens, and many of them go way out of their ways to hide it from what they view as nosy members of the public (who may, in fact, only be trying to reassure themselves there’s still time for them to do something worthwhile before they’re too old to matter anymore).

—Kathee “Dorian Gray” Brewer

(A longer version of this column originally appeard in the August 2007 issue of AVN Online.)