My four-year-old sister, however, is under the impression that it’s just “3D freckles”, and that they look very, very pretty. She wants all of my freckles to “pop out”, especially the ones across my nose; they’re her favourite.

And it puts me in this weird position where I can’t say, “No, this is acne, and it’s bad,” because I don’t want to teach her that it’s a bad to have unclear skin, you know?

Because the more I think about interactions I have with children, the more I realise that children will consistently compliment “flaws” until they’ve been taught not to.

Like, a kid at the library, whose sister has vitiligo, saw my scars once and suggested that his sister and I should be cats for Halloween, since I have “tabby skin” and she has “calico skin”. “I can be a black cat,” he immediately added. “It’s not AS cool, but they’re the spookiest.”

When I started losing weight, my little brother immediately demanded that I gain it back, because I wasn’t as comfortable to cuddle with anymore.

And my other little sister always wants to wear her paint-stained clothes to school so that “everyone can tell [she’s] an artist”.

“This notion of oneself as a kind of continuing career—something to work at, work on, “make an effort” for and subject to an hour a day of emotional Nautilus training, all in the interests not of attaining grace but of improving one’s “relationships”—is fairly recent in the world, at least in the world not inhabited entirely by adolescents. In fact the paradigm for the action in these recent Woody Allen movies is high school. The characters in Manhattan and Annie Hall andInteriors are, with one exception, presented as adults, as sentient men and women in the most productive years of their lives, but their concerns and conversations are those of clever children, “class brains,” acting out a yearbook fantasy of adult life.

For the past week or so I’ve been binge-watching the comedy Younger. On the show, Sutton Foster plays Liza Miller, a 40-year-old suburban mom whose daughter is off at college and has just gone through a divorce. She’s out of work, has been for years, and finds that nobody will hire someone her age back in to the publishing industry. Until her friend Maggie (Debi Mazer) brings in the magic of make-up and Urban Outfitters styling to help Liz pass off as 26. Ta-da! The girl lands a job, a boyfriend, and a BFF played by Hilary Duff all with her web of lies and slouchy knit beanies.

The show is good. Corny, yes, but well-executed and Sutton Foster is a charmer. The show is explicitly not for someone like me (read: college-aged and not receptive to jokes about hashtags) but that makes it even more fun. At the end of the first season it occurred to me that Younger is the adult version of one of my favorite bad TV movies, the 1975 Sooner or Later. It tells the tale of 13-year-old Jessie who gets her makeup done at the mall and by the POWER OF MAKEUP, passes for 16. Then she falls in love with a cheesy musician named Michael, who’s apparently 17, and pretends to be three years older than she really is. Sooner or Later taps into a very tangible fantasy when you’re a teen girl: literally just being a few years older. Because of course when you’re a teenager, kids a few years older seem like they’re decades older. But Sooner or Later, like Younger, also taps into a larger female fantasy: going up and down the age ladder undetected.

The age switcheroo (is this a real genre, I don’t know) usually aims for two goals. You’re either faking your age to get a do-over in life or an experience (see Drew Barrymore’s high-school revamp in Never Been Kissed) or you’re just trying to prove to people how capable you are regardless of your age (why Christina Applegate’s fashion-show success at the end of Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitters Dead is so god damn rewarding.) And in all these movies the switch doesn’t happen via magic or time-travel (think Peggy Sue Got Married, 17 Again) but by resumé editing and beauty products, things any person might have at their disposal.

The cynic in me says this type of story is just a way to make women feel like they need to hide their age or that make-up is demonic sorcery to trick people (“Always make her go swimming on the first date!”) But what makes Younger so great is that it tackles age stigmas head on, in love and work. Liz gets ridiculed for being 40 as much as she gets ridiculed for being 26, for all different reasons, and while we as viewers know she’s just one person with one personality, people on either side of her secret treat her like two completely different people. For every joke on the show about how stupid millennials are, there’s another very real moment about how much youngins treat middle-aged people like they’re square, decrepit seniors.

Apparently it’s a good show! It also reminds me of another show, Hindsight, that ran on Vh1 a few years ago. It was canceled after one season but followed a similar character who was getting married for the second time. She too goes back in time to her early 20s in the 90s and must re-live her life, which includes her first marriage, for reasons she doesn’t know. Spoiler: it’s to find her best friend she’s now estranged from and hold on to her tight. And the show was great, I loved it, aside from all the name-droppy “I Love the ‘90s” schtick. 

Anyway, I just got to thinking about time travel and do-overs and women and was reminded of my post here. What I love about Younger, as I said before, is the accessibility of it’s do-over, but now I’m thinking magic surely has its place. I’ve always loved time travel, ever since I sincerely thought as a child that Somewhere In Time is the best romance of all time. And I just feel like time-travel narratives seem to service women far more than they do for men. Even Sarah Connor, the lead of one of America’s weirdest, most famous time-bending action series Terminator, leads her life in the name of a do-over, of preserving the future. Connor transforms herself into an action heroine once she knew what was her future legacy was. 

When men time-travel they’re typically either saving the world or it’s some dystopian nightmare (Planet of the Apes, Minority Report) or engaging in vintage tourism (Midnight in Paris, Bill and Ted, etc.) or both if you’re Marty McFly. But I’m interested in women-driven time travel stories that hit far more close to home. Movies like Peggy Sue Got Married, Hindsight, or Being Erica are all about the do-over and put indulgent, “well what if I did THIS thing I NEVER do!” actions on a pedestal, particularly regarding relationships. Outlander’s Claire gets adventure, but she also gets some serious olde-timey action in bed. Thirteen Going on 30 taps into that same fantasy I talked about before of playing with your age but also realizing Mark Ruffalo is actually hot. I think about Lifetime and Hallmark movies like How I Married My High School Crush and The Love Letters that love to fuck with romance and time.