From Millie Bobby Brown to Pamela Anderson: Why are we so terrified of a woman growing older on her own terms?
I was 12 when the electrician uncle—thrice my age—looked at me and said, “Beta, aap apni umar se zyada badi lagti ho. Aise kapde toh bacche pehente hain.” You look much older than your age. The clothes you are wearing are meant for kids.)
I was wearing my favorite yellow and green striped tank top with a pair of jorts, an outfit I had chosen with the thoughtless joy of childhood. But his words, heavy with something unsaid, settled on my skin like dust—like the first shadow of a storm I didn’t yet understand.
He was the first, but certainly not the last.
In the years that followed, I would hear many versions of the same sentiment—sometimes whispered, sometimes thrown like a stone—until it became clear that girlhood, for me, was something conditional, something I had failed to preserve. If my body had undergone puberty early, as is true for many girls now, then I must carry myself as a woman, and erase the remnants of childhood.
And yet, as I stepped fully into womanhood—becoming the 25-year-old adult I am today—the expectation shifted once more. Now, the world demands that I shrink myself back, that I grasp at youth with desperate fingers.