Hi Ugly,
I recently chatted with a middle-aged co-worker about her friend who is unhappy being single and thinks she should lose weight. As Gen X women growing up in the 1980s, our biggest concern was weight and calorie counting to control it (now we can add wrinkles, yellow teeth and odd body hair to the list).
When I (flippantly?) suggested encouraging the friend to accept her body as it is, my co-worker said, “Well she can’t just give up!”
Giving up – that’s another thing we Gen X women have always tried to avoid. Like looking at our moms in sweatpants and no makeup and thinking they weren’t trying to be beautiful any more. My question: are there other words to describe acceptance of your looks as they are, at any age, or are we just truly “giving up”?
– Gen Acceptance
One reason talk of “giving up” leaves a bad taste in the mouth, writes psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in his book On Giving Up, is that it “is felt to be an ominous foreshadowing of, or reminder of, the ultimate giving up that is suicide, or just the milder version of living a kind of death-in-life”.
In other words: your co-worker unconsciously believes that a woman who gives up dieting might as well be dead.
Forgive me (and Phillips – and, indirectly, Freud, the father of psychoanalysis) for being dramatic. But I think it’s true! Maybe doubly true when it comes to physical beauty, which has long been framed as less ornamental than essential, particularly for women and gender non-conforming people. We often think of beauty as a declaration of self, a means of survival, a signifier of societal worth. It increases our economic and social potential. It opens doors and buys grace; it affords access and attention.
To fall short of it, conversely, is to edge toward a kind of cultural erasure.
Naturally, when one’s appearance is rewarded and/or punished like this, it starts to seem as important as life itself. Or more important. Consider a quote from a 2024 Washington Post story on the renewed popularity of tanning beds, known to heighten users’ risk of skin cancer: “I’d rather die hot than live ugly.” (A rebuttal, if I may.)
This conflation of beauty and life comes up quite a few times in your question, albeit in less extreme terms. You categorize weight loss and stray hairs as some of your “biggest concerns”. You recall worrying about your mother not wearing makeup – which only makes sense if makeup is a symbol of something more. (The will to carry on, maybe?) Your co-worker implies that giving up on thinness must mean giving up on dating, which must mean giving up on love, which, well – why bother going on, then?
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This is a bit absurd. (The unconscious is nothing if not irrational!) “The daunting association” of giving up, Phillips writes, “has stopped us being able to think about the milder, more instructive, more promising givings up,” of which there are many.
Like giving up on maintaining beauty standards, for example.
The pursuit of an unrealistic, often unhealthy and ever-shifting appearance ideal is something that paradoxically “anaesthetizes” us to life, as Phillips might say, even as we think of it as offering more life (or more opportunity). Skipping meals to lose weight can deprive the body of nutrients it needs to function properly. Getting Botox to look younger can “alter the way [the] brain interprets and processes other people’s emotions”. Self-surveilling can train us to prioritize how we look over how we feel.
“In order to feel alive one might have to give up, say, one’s habitual tactics and techniques for deadening oneself,” Phillips writes.
In this sense, “giving up” is exactly the phrase you’re looking for, Gen Acceptance. Give up, you know, starving. Give up vitamin deficiencies. Give up calorie-counting, step-counting, mirror-staring. Give up sucking in and Spanx-shaped skin indentations. Give up middle-aged men who demand someone do any of the above in exchange for happy hour apps at Applebee’s.
More from Jessica DeFino’s Ask Ugly:
If “giving up” still doesn’t sit right, try recontextualizing it as getting something back: time, money, energy, brain space, health – life, one might say.
I’m not saying it’s easy. Giving up can prompt “very real suffering”, as Phillips puts it. Quitting involves reassessing what we value, and this can get more painful with age. Maybe that’s why your co-worker is so resistant to the idea of her friend accepting her body as-is. It might force her to ask herself: could she do the same? Should she? If so, what does that say about how she’s lived thus far? Did she waste her one wild and precious existence thinking about dressing-on-the-side salads? Who is she if she’s not thin, or at least trying to be?
But if your co-worker isn’t interested in reconsidering her beliefs, I’d give up trying to convince her. Because sometimes, giving up is good.
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