| Summary: | In Iceland concerns have been raised about the unrealistic body ideals young women are presented with and their impact on self-esteem and body image. Quantitative research confirms these concerns and indeed it seems that women are unhappy with their body weight throughout their life course. At the same time, research into the cultural and social discourses that underpin and shape young women’s ideas about the relation between body weight and femininity, has been scant.This article adopts a feminist poststructuralist framework to explore young women’s (18-24 years old) ideas about the importance of body weight when dating. This is based on research that used a story completion methodology to explore the sociocultural ideas participants draw on when making sense of the topic. In the research, participants were randomly presented with either of two different story stems and asked to complete the story. In the first story stem a fictional female character is on her way to a date and notices when she looks in the mirror that she has lost weight. The second story stem is identical apart from the female character noticing that she has gained weight. The participants were approached on social media where they were provided with a link that directed them to the task on SurveyMonkey. In total, 81 participants provided stories. Out of these, 73 stories could be used in this research. When participants had completed their stories they were asked two further questions about the story character and then asked to answer some demographic questions. The stories were analysed thematically. The analysis resulted in 4 themes: (1) the body should not disappoint (him), (2) looks facilitate/are an obstacle to good self-esteem, (3) the body and the self constitute tasks that must be worked on, (4) resistance to body ideals consists in accepting your body.It was interesting that most of the participants seemed to assume that the story character was heterosexual and was on her way to meet a man. In the stories collected we saw clear ...
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