What does pay the big bucks (although apparently not as often as we think) is this trick of looking 30ish while actually being 13, as long as you are also very tall and able to maintain the body mass of a cricket. This has always been the case, but recently it has become even more so, making it harder to ignore the question of how young is too young to dedicate your life to trudging down a glorified auction block on your way to the fashion abattoir. Runway models provoke the same kind of dissonance as toddler beauty pageants, which similarly ask us to hold two irreconcilable messages (sexy baby) in our minds at the same time, and thus produce psychological discomfort by subconsciously calling attention to the cultural practice of systematically replacing images of adult women with images of kids in old-lady drag.

Still, the issue hadn’t seemed particularly pressing until I read a series of Op-Eds in a New York Times Room for Debate series about a guideline by the Council of Fashion Designers of America that suggests a minimum age requirement of 16 for runway models.

“Note that the gender-neutral models that need protecting here are implicitly girls, not boys,” wrote Ashley Mears, an assistant professor of pop culture and gender sociology at Boston University and the author of a book about the economics of modeling, in her Op-Ed. “Partly this stems from the entrenched celebration of women, not men, on display, and partly because male models in fashion tend to be older than their female counterparts. A 16-year-old boy on the catwalk would be as rare a sighting as a 35-year-old woman.”

Of course I already knew this. Everybody knows this. But sometimes you’re blinded to the reality of something by its sheer, naturalizing prevalence. A couple of weeks ago, I was flipping through the September issue of Harper’s Bazaar when I stopped to look at a guide titled “Fabulous at Every Age” — detailing how to look stylish in your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s-plus. Mostly, the guide was made up of pictures of garments laid flat against a background, unviolated by human form. But each decade was also accompanied by a large photo of a model and a small insert of a nonmodel (half of whom were former models) representing her age group. The whole thing seemed fairly inclusive and democratic. (They went all the way to the 70s and older.) But the discrepancy between the models and the “real people” grew more jarring as the ages advanced, so that by the time we arrived at 70-plus, a small photo of Barbara Walters was dwarfed by a picture of a 16-year-old girl who could have been her great-granddaughter, looking sad in her dowager costume.

Pairing pictures of adolescent girls with adult men, or of young women with middle-aged men, to suggest age parity produces cognitive dissonance on a mass scale. So does constantly reinforcing the idea that a 33-year-old woman like Kaling is somehow “older” than a man who is seven years older than she. By locating the aspirational ideal squarely in the past of nearly everyone who consumes it, it puts almost all women and most girls in an ontological double bind from which nobody emerges unscathed. The most insidious thing about it, however, is that it promotes a false equivalence between youth and worth, between adolescence and adulthood. As one commenter on the Room for Debate series wrote: “Looking at children as examples of my adulthood feels wrong.”

It’s funny that they made that Barbie who said she thinks “math class is tough!” Girls love math. We never stop doing it. When I was 12, I often lay awake in bed frantically performing mental calculations to help me figure out when, exactly, I would get to live my life as an adult. If I finish graduate school at, say, 28, that leaves me six months to a year in which to work/live before having children by the drop-dead cutoff of 30.

This was around the same time that I waited breathlessly for the twice-yearly arrival of the newspaper fashion supplements that had row after row of small photos from the clothing collections. Something about the monastic severity of the models spoke to me. They looked so grown up, so deadly serious in their exquisite, artful, status-conferring garments, signaling discretionary income, power and leisure to burn. I guess that what I thought I was looking at was a kind of ideal of adult womanhood in its most fully realized state — unencumbered, sophisticated, youthful in outlook and yet mature, witty and cosmopolitan. I would have been so surprised to learn that the same girls, off the runway, might have been just a couple of years ahead of me in school.

For years, I worried that I would be dismissed for being too young right up until the moment when I started being dismissed for being too old. That means I spent a disproportionate piece of my 20s and 30s thinking it was all over. I remember crying to a male friend that my time was running out; that I didn’t think I would be able to squeeze it all in before my built-in expiration date. I was 24. Meanwhile, my 23-year-old roommate would languish on the couch wailing, “I feel like a piece of fruit rotting on the vine!” I look back at this now — at how bad, how ashamed I felt for letting myself turn 29 — and I can’t believe how much of my youth I squandered on feeling old.