A group of four friends, without exchanging a single word, begins decorating a piece of horizontal road signage instructing drivers to slow down to 30 kilometers per hour as if it were a giant birthday cake for someone’s thirtieth birthday. Together, they carefully lay down a “cream” border and “frosting” made of satin. The center is ringed with a thin roll of plush pink “marzipan.” They insert plaster-cast cherries and add traditional birthday candles with white spirals. Colorful cake sprinkles made from dyed corn puffs are scattered across the feared and celebrated number thirty.
I’m twenty-seven, and the creeping approach of thirty is starting to do something to me. My parents ask about grandchildren, while I find myself growing increasingly distant from the idea of ever having a child. I can go through as many waves of adolescent turmoil as I want, but the world will never again see me as someone in the process of growing up. Aging seems to be presented as a slow loss of youth, a fall into a pit of time from which there is no way back.
We are flooded with tutorials for the “no-makeup” makeup look, anti-wrinkle creams, Forbes-style lists of “30 under 30,” the pedophilic standard of the hairless female body, exhausted mothers, and women chasing a new, trend-driven body type every other year. I’m trying to come to terms with the fact that I, too, whether I like it or not, crave nonsense.
The obvious clip-on, artificial, blond strands are a nod to the ambiguous societal connotations of blond hair. There’s youthful, almost childlike, asexual innocence and purity, but also the cinematic pop-cultural archetype of female sex appeal, a blond bombshell.
Suddenly, in the middle of darkness, the silhouette of the host’s face appears. Illuminated by a spotlight, she turns toward the camera and lip-syncs the six-second intro of the song Slunečný hrob (1969) by a famous underground Czech group Blue Effect:
“I’m falling asleep, and I wish I could go back a few years.
To be a little boy again, who loves to play and who is with you.”
I found it amusing to use a song that speaks so clearly about boyhood, not girlhood. Because girls are warned from a young age never to go out alone, to cross the street if they see a man in a hoodie, to be careful about what they wear — not only when leaving the house but often even inside it, because it might make male relatives uncomfortable. They are taught not to attract attention, to be obedient and good, clean and gentle, while “boys will be boys” and can express rage and aggression more freely because, allegedly, that’s nature, not social conditioning.
Perhaps, just for a moment, it would be nice to go back a few years and be a little boy again.