Adulthood

Janka and Rhia write on adulthood. I don't think such a thing really exists, certainly not in the sense in which we (or I, anyway) imagined it when we were kids and not in any other useful qualitative sense, except for the legal one. It sort of makes sense quantitatively: people live, age, mature, learn new tricks and become more adult, as opposed to less adult. But they don't become adult, as opposed to a child, in any sense but legal.

The legal concept of adulthood as an age when a mentally healthy person is legally responsible for everything he or she does is undoubtedly quite useful, and the fact that there are various degrees of being a child is useful too. But I find adulthood as a social concept to be oppressive, and often childhood as well.

In my experience when people refer to me as an adult, a child, a young person, etc., it's usually done in an attempt to control me. For a person who is legally a child such control is sometimes needed (I don't think it would have been a good idea if I were allowed to get a driver's license when I first started to want it at 8) but for a legal adult, and in many instances for a legal child as well it is not.

"You are too young to wear that dress", "you are too young to wear makeup", "you are too young to stay out so late", "you are too young to read that" are things that people say to children, often not because doing any of the above is likely to cause some damage to the child, but because doing it is somehow incongruent with the speaker's idea of what a child should be doing. One can argue about what degree of control should the parents have over all of the above, but I've heard all of the above also from people who were not my parents and had no genuine control over me whatsoever.

I hoped that they would stop when I become a legal adult, but they didn't. Granted, nowadays the only time people say that I am too young for something is when I bring up the subject of sterilization. Nowadays people tend to tell me that I am too old for various things, and these are usually the same people who used to say that I was too young for various other things earlier. It does not help that I am more open about my tastes now than I was 20 years ago. As a teenager I (and probably many other people) had a need to prove adulthood, or some degree thereof; at 32 I have nothing to prove anymore and can watch kung fu movies, play at being a murderer-for-hire with big sword, read bad Star Wars novels, etc., without anyone really taking me for a teenager. And when I talk about most things that I consider fun, I hear a choir of "aren't you a bit old for that?" and "when are you gonna grow up?", mostly consisting of relatives who for some reason cannot face the fact that I have grown up, and that I have grown up to be a person who squeals in delight when somebody kills everybody else with a katana in a ridiculous onscreen battle.

A lot of people have some idea of what an adult should be and try to tell other people, sometimes of the same age and older, that they should become adults, which means that they should do what the speakers says they should do. IMO that's what the concept of adulthood is mostly used for nowadays.