#social presentation

Because why shouldn’t people later in life have a scene phase?

This may seem like a joke post, and I’ve headlined it in the most deliberately provocative way I could think of, but I’m completely serious.

We as a society seem to have decided that adults over about 30 are just Not Allowed to experiment with their identity or their personal presentation at all. If you come into work or a party suddenly looking considerably different, a lot of the time, people get upset about it - especially if you try something that does not “work”, in other people’s opinions.

At least some of this is directly tied to the fact that certain styles are considered “too young” for a certain phase of somebody’s life, and that it’s automatically “cringe” to not continuously broadcast awareness of the stage of the aging process you’re in (and, by extension, your waning relevance as an agent of social change, and your own proximity to your impending death).

And while there are certainly some elements of maturity that absolutely should be expected of adults (mostly related to not being an asshole or manipulating people significantly younger than oneself), harmlessly experimenting with personal presentation shouldn’t be one of those things.

So we’ve backed ourselves into a corner where you need a Profound Reason to decide to change things up in anything beyond a subtle way. It has gotten to the point where Halloween costume parties are basically our only relief valves on this particular societal pressure (and even those are considered somewhat immature), and where makeover reality TV shows exist specifically to lend structure to something people normally just can’t do.

It gets worse. You know what group of people really, really need the freedom to experiment with their personal presentation with as little judgment as possible?

Transgender people.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen people say about late transitioners, “I’d respect them more if they actually dressed their age”. And while I think it absolutely is possible to go to a place with that that’s genuinely creepy (i.e., actual predatory behavior), I think there’s an element of that criticism that’s inherently unfair, because we as a society have decided that experimenting with your presentation is something you’re expected to have finished when you’re an adolescent. And in the case of transgender people, that’s doubly unfair because they often just completely missed that window when they actually were that age.

Also like, autistic people often have idiosyncratic senses of fashion, and sometimes people just (for example) have a hobby doing period costuming.

There are lots of perfectly valid reasons to loosen these expectations, and I think we’re genuinely making life more miserable for everybody by not doing so.