Aging Is When Your Body Becomes Everybody Else’s Business

Source: Created by Author with ChatGPT

The medical-industrial complex has a remarkable ability to strip older Americans of more than their clothes. Somewhere between the hospital gown and the colonoscopy, modesty becomes a luxury nobody seems particularly interested in preserving.

There was a time when modesty meant something. We closed the bathroom door, changed clothes in private, and considered the prospect of exposing ourselves to strangers sufficiently horrifying that entire industries were built around preventing it. We bought bathrobes, installed locks, and spent considerable energy making sure that certain parts of our anatomy remained known only to ourselves and a very select audience.

Then we got old.

Not all at once, of course. The surrender of bodily privacy is a gradual process, beginning with an innocent annual physical and progressing through an increasingly elaborate series of examinations, procedures, scans, and indignities until one day you find yourself lying naked on a table while three people you’ve never met discuss the positioning of your left buttock.

And the truly remarkable thing is that you barely care anymore.

Welcome to the medical-industrial complex, where the average senior citizen eventually discovers that modesty is a young person’s luxury and the…