Embodying the culture of achievement: Culture between illness and perfection is a ‘thin line’ – obtaining the ideal female body as an act of achievement

Introduction

Hurray. Several international studies show that Denmark is one of the happiest countries in the world (Helliwell et al., 2017). The Danish people are, statistically speaking, some of the most content when taking factors such as a high level of trust in the government, low inequality and traditional wealth into consideration (Helliwell et al., 2017). According to Professor and happiness researcher Christian Bjørnskov, ‘Danish happiness’ is to be explained by the fact that ‘…Danish people trust each other and have a strong feeling of autonomy in their own lives’ (Bruhn, 2016, authors’ translation). This might be the case, albeit other statistics point in the opposite direction. But such statistics tell only one side of the story.

Alongside our happiness we are, some claim, living in an ‘era of depression’ due to the fact that almost 8% of the Danish population have symptoms of depression and receive treatment by way of anti-depressive medication (Brinkmann, 2010). The Danish Governmental Institute of Mental Health estimates that 20% of the Danish population will experience problems with their mental health, hence having symptoms related to one or more mental illnesses during 1 year (Brinkmann, 2010). The number of individuals who are being treated in the Danish psychiatric system has gone up by 40% from 2000 to 2008 (Brinkmann, 2010). Today, approximately 430.000 Danish people experience symptoms of stress on a daily basis, 135.000 live with severe anxiety and 75.000 suffer from eating disorders (LMSOS, 2020). New research furthermore indicates that especially young people are among those with the most serious mental challenges (Flachs et al., 2015). Danish ‘happiness’ thus seems to clash with an increasing lack of mental well-being. How do we explain this paradox?

Some researchers argue that Danish people have become more sensitive to symptoms related to depression, anxiety, eating disorders and stress as we have built a society in which the external pressure and expectations are beyond reach – a so-called achievement society (Brinkmann, 2010, p. 19; Petersen, 2016, p. 60). Other theories, however, dispute this by arguing that the development bears witness to an increased pathologisation of normal human behaviour, entailing that increasingly more people come to live under a diagnostic description (Brinkmann, 2010; Brinkmann & Petersen, 2016). No matter what explanation one finds valid, we argue that we must take societal developments into consideration when trying to address this paradoxical phenomenon. For this, we need the right conceptual tools.

Individualisation and competitiveness

One of the societal developments of considerable influence to make way for such a paradoxical development of ‘happiness’ versus ‘mental illness’ is said to be the individualisation process (Petersen, 2016). The first wave of theories on individualisation suggested that the breakdown of the individual’s traditional limitations bound by family, class and communities would ultimately lead to the freedom of choice. Powerful institutions, such as religion, must yield to the rise of the individual as a unique, social unit with rights and responsibilities (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002, p. 2). In Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s (2002) view, the term responsibility is no longer filtered through relational ties but rather understood as the individual’s accountability of one’s own life and the successes and failures within it. On one hand, the process of individualisation has emancipatory potentials, and on the other it institutionalises the dark side of responsibility – you have only yourself to blame when things go awry (Petersen, 2016, p. 54).

In 2011, the Danish professor Ove Kaj Pedersen published his book The Competition State, in which he diagnoses the Danish society as a result of such developments. Denmark has become a competition state, following Pedersen’s (2011) claims, which means society is being built upon a logic where international competition of maximising economic growth is key rather than adhering to the standards and traditions of a welfare state. In brief, the ideals of democratic participation have given way to rationales of fortifying the competitiveness of national companies in a globalised market situation (Pedersen, 2011, pp. 72–75). A central state task, then, becomes the regulation and progress of collective and individual behaviour towards market consumption as well as (labour) activation of the so-called idle. The means to such goals are endless reforms and political management in education and labour, with structures and discourses promoting the notion that a successful and responsible life is to be achieved through constant development, optimisation, self-realisation (Pedersen, 2011) – and health (Brinkmann, 2010, p. 17). The aim in a competition state is to streamline and make institutions adaptable to global and rapid change, and the fuel for this engine has to come from industrious providers. In securing such competitiveness, the individual becomes a central performer who carries out societal demands through constant development and acquirement of the relevant competences and skills as well as staying in control of one’s health and ability to stay ‘…on top of this game of perfection’ (Dilling & Trillingsgaard, 2017). The statement is from an informant from an experimental qualitative study carried out by the psychologists Josefine Dilling and Maja Trillingsgaard. It is findings from their studies, this article builds on.

The skills required and ideals demanded in a competition state (Pedersen, 2011) have become individualised (Petersen, 2016) and spread out into all the social spheres, which individuals have to manoeuvre through. As we will show in this article, achievement of ideals is not solely a cognitive, intellectual task. In addition, it has become embodied. In the following, we will support this claim by firstly addressing what the specific culture of achievement entails. Secondly, we will locate the argument in the tradition of the sociology of the body. Then, thirdly, we will show how societal ideals can be embodied before we demonstrate, by way of a cultural psychological approach, how this embodiment can be empirically analysed. We end the article by discussing the findings and suggesting new pathways for research.

The culture of achievement

Alongside a political movement in Denmark and the historical development of individualisation on both macro- and micro-sociological levels, the burden upon the individual has grown as the collective task of securing national competitiveness relies on the individual’s successful implementation of societal demands (Brinkmann, 2010, p. 17). This development, some researchers claim, has supported a significant shift in the ways in which we understand the phenomenon of critique. Zygmunt Bauman has poignantly argued that in the realm of contemporary society, critique has become privatised and disarmed (Bauman, 2001). That is, instead of directing our critique towards societal structures that stimulate unintended negative consequences for individuals, we tend to direct it towards our own achievements and ourselves. This, Bauman states, has the unfortunate consequence of making such critique societally impotent. Instead, by turning the critique inwards, we focus on small-scale critique while neglecting large-scale critique. This movement leads to a constant self-surveillance of one’s achievements and self-regulating measurements of how you solved today’s task of being an industrious and responsible provider of success (Petersen, 2016, pp. 53–60; Willig, 2016). Such ‘measurements’ are highly institutionalised. Michel Foucault theorises on this phenomenon and calls it governmentality – one of many concepts of power (Dean, 2010). From a very early age, Danish children are tested and measured based on their skills, accomplishments and achievements when met by welfare institutions (Brinkmann, 2010; Petersen, 2016). In day-care institutions and schools, the child is confronted with collective endeavours and discourses of health, ambitions, adaptability, life-long learning, resilience, control and success. The ability to socialise, learn and develop is measured through grading systems, national and international tests, comparative evaluations, mandatory health visitations and so on (see Sommer & Klitmøller, 2018). Though promoted with the greatest of intentions, the culture of achievement manifests through this institutionalised and collective desire to develop, implement and execute ‘best practice’ in any field since a competition state is always on the lookout for ideal investments (Brinkmann, 2010, p. 17). Being an individualised, responsible human being that strives towards realising the ‘best practice’ ideal applies not only to scholastic or work/life endeavours – it becomes a way to live and perform in any given task, whether this be the optimisation of relationships or the body or the way of approaching new settings and engaging with other people. In short, one’s worth and existence is constantly measured and depends on what you do as you are what you achieve. Now, what and how to perform and achieve becomes the central question, and the institutionalised ideals become the answer: one needs to perform in an agile, flexible, adaptable and positive way that allows the individual to be constantly on their toes, ready to disrupt oneself, change for ‘the better’ and achieve. Brutally speaking, the winners in the realm of this type of society are those able to internalise and live in accordance with these ideals. The losers, in contrast, are those who are not – those, who succumb to the pressure. Thus, a culture of achievement is born.

As Petersen (2016) claims, depression is diametrically opposed to the ideals of the achievement society. With its ineffective, slow and rigid conditions, depression has become a ‘seismograph of our time’ (Petersen, 2016, pp. 20–21). The competitive race against others and the need to constantly move forward as an internalised standard from a competitive society deprive the individual the sense of a meaningful belongingness and sense of autonomy, which Bjørnskov (Bruhn, 2016) claims is an essential feeling in the recipe for ‘Danish happiness’. Where competition, when thinking of economic growth or sports is appreciated, competition of achieving such individualised ideals seems like a misfit. Competing against one another on Instagram divides people into two groups – winners and losers (Petersen, 2016, pp. 25–28). The winners are those who successfully maintain ‘speed’ and movement towards new goals of self-optimisation. The award of winning is acknowledgement by and membership in the group of the ‘happy Dane’. Petersen (2016) looks at the enormous number of people suffering from depression as society’s ‘losers’ as depression is the very opposite, the ‘unhappy Dane’. Now, living in an individualised society, the depressed person has only himself to blame for his condition.

The equation between one’s achievements and one’s value in society has been paved, and our argument in this article is that different discursive and embodied practices of obtaining the ideals expressed in an achievement society have been internalised, externalised and materialised in the social world. This argument arises through a conceptualisation of what it means to ‘embody’ something alongside an analysis of the central empirical findings from the qualitative experimental study by Dilling and Trillingsgaard (2017).

The sociology of the body

In Professor Shilling’s (2007) analysis of a ‘sociology of the body’, it becomes clear how several theoretical attempts to define processes of embodiment often overlook subjective and individual agency when subjected to societal forces. Historically speaking, the body is often described as a container or victim of powerful discursive practices when addressed form a sociological point of view (Shilling, 2007, p. 7), as with second wave feminism, where the female body suffers under suppression from the patriarchy or in the psychoanalytic terminology of ‘hysteria’ (Malson, 1998, p. 25f). Helen Malson portrays post-structuralist perspectives when seen through the prism of Foucault:

Discourses construct the body in particular ways, ‘exercising upon it a subtle coercion…obtaining holds upon it at the level of the mechanism itself – movements, gestures, attitudes, rapidity: an infinitesimal power over the active body. (Foucault 1977b, p. 137 in Malson, 1998, p. 45)

But as phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty (1945) argues, we ought to acknowledge the body as more than a mechanical object or ‘container’. Professor Svend Brinkmann infers that ‘[Merleau-Ponty’s] philosophical writings attempted to overcome the objectification of the body in modern science and philosophy by developing a more adequate phenomenology of the body’ (Brinkmann, 2019, p. 9). Instead, the body is a ‘lived body’ as we act, engage and experience the world through our bodies. In cultural psychology, the same comprehension goes for culture. As with the body, culture is ‘lived’ since culture and the individual are not regarded as separate entities (Valsiner, 2012, pp. 6–7). Instead, the individual, society and culture are inseparable – we live through culture, which exists in us, with us and around us and is not constrained nor defined by national borders (Cole, 1996, p. 119; Shweder, 1991). This entails that cognitive processes and conscience work in dialogical processes (Hermans, 2001) with sociocultural discursive practices and through the phenomenology of the body. We might never know if the forces that carry us belong to us or belong to our body – or rather, such that they are never entirely our body’s or entirely ours (see Merleau-Ponty, 1945). Therefore, a more nuanced understanding of the body is needed to unfold the different processes of embodiment on the physical, socio-material, cultural and individual levels.

For contemporary scholars of embodiment, the body is rarely just to be understood as a corpus (Johnson, 2007, p. 276 in Brinkmann, 2019, pp. 9–10). In addition, the body is seen as a communicative instrument; it is a tool, an organism, medium and materialisation of values, virtues, moral attitudes and accomplishments (Boero & Mason, 2020; Malson, 1998; Orbach, 2016). As Shilling illustrates: ‘…the body as appearance and achievement was associated with a decline in a traditional Christian approach to the flesh as a container of sin and a rise in the treatment of embodiment as both a project and a form of physical capital’ (Bourdieu, 1978; Shilling 1993 in Shilling, 2007, p. 7). Through the individual’s achievements, the body is modelled and shaped to symbolise internalised ideals as a form of externalised psychical capital to trade with ‘…recognition from participants in common cultures’, as Emile Durkheim claims (Durkheim, 1995 [1912], p. 125 in Shilling, 2007, p. 4). Thus, embodying something can be seen as dynamic processes of the internalisation, externalisation and materialisation of values, virtues, moral attitudes and accomplishments.

Eating disorders

Interpreting how humankind communicates their inner world, concepts, states, values and attitudes through psychical and bodily ways of expression has been of great interest to pathologists as well. Through the 17th, 18th and 19th century, a list of descriptions about how young women starved themselves for inexplicable reasons began appearing in the literature of medicine (Lunn, 2010a, p. 31). The first case descriptions of this peculiar behaviour are often associated with Richard Morton (1637) in 1689. Several doctors and pathologists tried to describe and comprehend the apparent connections between extreme emaciation, the absence of menstruation, sadness and anxious cares. For years, the condition was believed to have a psychical origin without any further aetiological explanation (Lunn, 2010a, p. 31). But thanks to Hilde Bruch’s (1904) and Mara Selvini Palazzolis’ (1916) clinical research, the disease of anorexia nervosa was redefined as a mental disease with the discovery of three important psychological factors: a distorted body image, the inability to perceive and interpret inner bodily stimuli and the experience of personal inefficiency and paralysis which transcends thoughts, emotions and normal activities in life (Lunn, 2010a, p. 34). It cannot be stressed enough how many different reasons exist to explain the development of eating disorders today. In this article, we make way for only one of many comprehensions from a cultural psychological and sociological standpoint.

Today, anorexia nervosa is considered a mental disease where a distorted bodily self-perception and morbid anxiety of obesity are the dominating psychological expressions (Lunn & Rokkedal, 2010, p. 47). Since the discovery of anorexia nervosa, a variety of different eating disorders have been acknowledged and the latest statistical analyses from the Danish National Organisation Against Eating Disorders and Self-harm show that 75.000 individuals suffer from eating disorders in Denmark (LMSOS, 2020). As psychologist Lunn (2010b) states, we have experienced an increase in patients with eating disorders during the last 50 years in the Western world (Lunn, 2010b, p. 83). One of the alarming observations made in research on the topic in Denmark is that an average of every fourth person between 9 and 20 years of age are at risk of developing an eating disorder based on observable risk-related behaviour such as dieting, excessive exercising and ideas of health, weight, food and appearances (Fairburn et al., 2007 in Waaddegaard, 2010, p. 1246; LMSOS, 2020). Thus, addressing risk-related behaviour is needed.

Body ideals – an ‘embodiment’ of societal demands

As a term, ‘body ideal’ does not reveal specific psychical or aesthetic features. Thus, it becomes a cultural process of ‘filling in the gaps’ and making sense of how to represent the ideal body. Social psychologist Serge Moscovici (1928) built a theory to describe the processes behind anchoring and objectifying unfamiliar – or ‘empty’ – concepts, such as a body ideal (Marková, 2012, p. 489). When confronted with new information, discourses, concepts and suggested meaning, the individual anchors this ‘unfamiliar’ phenomenon in already socially and/or individually defined categories in sync with his/her habitual modes of perception and understanding of the world (Marková, 2012). As Moscovici and Duveen (2001) express it: ‘It is rather like anchoring a stray boat to one of the buoys in our social space’ (Moscovici & Duveen, 2001, pp. 15–16). Any dialogical process of developing social representations is simultaneously a process of labelling and classifying an alien concept. The tendency to classify unfamiliar concepts reflects the human desire to understand the world and the need to distinguish phenomena as conforming to or divergent from experienced norms. Thus, norms are highly sensitive to cultural contexts in their formation, construction and manifestation in the social world as the processes of anchoring, on a micro-sociological level, constantly redefine categories or dichotomies such as ‘normal/abnormal’ (Moscovici & Duveen, 2001). Social representations emerge, not merely as a way of understanding a particular object but also as a form in which the subject (individual or group) achieves an identity function, which means that representations also express a symbolic value, which the individual either identifies with or dissociates from. For example, when the individual consumes images on the social media platform Instagram, the individual interprets different images in accordance with contemporary norms and either accepts or declines an image as a social representation of a body ideal. The individual thereby co-creates, transforms or reproduces collective norms and ideals through their interaction with such images. This theoretical framework might help when comprehending how internalisation and externalisation processes occur in support of how ideals become embodied.

Studying body ideals thus can be a way of interpreting historical concepts of morality, normality, health, beauty, etc. in different sociocultural settings. According to Karen Klitgaard Povlsen, we see that different social representations of body ideals have strong connections to what is perceived as the ‘good life’ alongside expectations of proper male and female behaviour, historically speaking (Malson, 1998; Povlsen, 2010). For decades, the fashion industry and aristocracy have had the primary influence on what the newest trends in popular culture in the Western world should be – how to dress, how to look and implicitly how to perform in order to become successful and resemble the elite (Ahern et al., 2008). As front figures and exponents of an elite today, fashion models are often associated with such power, wealth and beauty as symbols of an embodied success (Ahern et al., 2008; Soley-Beltran, 2006). As one of the participants from Dilling and Trillingsgaard’s study states: ‘If you ask me for the extreme–extreme ideal, you should look at Victoria’s Secret models on Instagram’ (Dilling & Trillingsgaard, 2017, p. 221, authors’ edit).

The social representation of body ideals, as historically dependent symbols of embodied success, has and will continuously change in irreversible time. As an example, men and women with fat bodies used to symbolise wealth and a high social status since obesity communicated abundances (Brok, 2017; Jespersen & Møller, 2010, pp. 210–214; Orbach, 2016). Today, we experience a dominating ‘first position of thinness’, as the Danish body activist Andrea Storgaard Brok claims (Brok, 2017), and this ideal is not – as ideals used to be – reserved for the elite or iconic personalities such as Twiggy, Marilyn Monroe or Aphrodite. Instead, ideals have been democratised with the distribution of social media platforms and global technological developments which enable the individual to manage him or herself online. Through the technologies of ‘hashtags’, ‘likes’, ‘shares’, ‘posts’ and ‘comments’, it has become a collective practice to display one’s achievements and appearance in exchange for immediate feedback and acknowledgement from others. Thus, some bodies we ‘like’ and others we do not. Here, images of the body and achievements function as narrating mediators of the individual’s exposed ‘reality’ and self-promotion. Thus, the ‘elite’ has been broadened though the standards of perfection remain. As a female participant in Dilling and Trillingsgaard’s (2017, p. 77) study says: ‘When I look at my own body, I feel very influenced by how women are supposed to look’.

A cultural psychological study of body ideals

Dilling and Trillingsgaard’s (2017) study seeks to bring answers to different research questions, including the following: ‘How does the individual experience, construct and use social representations of body ideals in their daily lives to make sense of themselves and their own bodies? What differs in the perceptions about the ideal female body represented by a woman with no history of pathological eating, a woman with a history of risk-related eating behaviour and a former eating disordered patient? The aim was to build a theory on how the individual constructs, internalises, externalises and materialises female body ideals as a way of making sense of her own and others’ bodies as a mediator of identity. Thus, the construction and use of contemporary body ideals is not perceived to occur outside of the individual’s mind; rather, the dialogical constitution and manifestation of the semiotic ways we relate to phenomena in specific contexts (here, the body) define how ideals are expressed and altered in the social world (Wagoner, 2011, pp. 19–20). Secondly, the aim was to investigate and carefully compare the concepts of the ideal female body across a continuum of eating behaviour, represented by three individuals: a woman with no history of pathological eating, a woman with a history of risk-related eating behaviour and a former eating disordered patient

Methodology

By showing three female participants a series of bodies developing in size with help from computer-animated figures, the participants in Dilling and Trillingsgaard’s (2017) study were asked to project their own thoughts about female body ideals onto the images and make visible what happens when they (1) consume images of female bodies, (2) analyse different body types and construct social representations of ideal and nonideal bodies and (3) mediate their self-perception through the consumption of images (Figure 1).OPEN IN VIEWER

The way in which the series of images was used is in line with psychologist Lev Vygotksy’s (1934) use of double stimulation in microgenetic experimentation in research on child development (Diriwächter, 2009; Wagoner, 2009; see also Dilling & Trillingsgaard, 2017 for elaboration on the methodology). Moreover, inspiration was found in an experimental study conducted by Joanna Moussally and colleagues (see Moussally et al., 2016).

The participants in Dilling and Trillingsgaard’s study were asked to inform the researcher what they were looking for in the images when constructing and choosing an image of the ideal female body. They reported on what they liked and disliked as well as what they felt emotionally and thought about during the task (for theoretical elaboration, see Branco & Valsiner, 2010). In sum, while looking at the images, they were asked to ‘think out loud’ (Wagoner, 2009, p. 110). The important thing was not the participant’s actual choice of image but rather the processes of ambivalence, decision-making, construction and representation of an ideal female body as it was culturally mediated through the use of the images (Wagoner, 2009, p. 103). Dilling and Trillingsgaard carried out the study using various methods. In this article, we analyse fractions of the experiment, where three participants were included based on different criteria. One was selected to represent a non-pathological standpoint (meaning the participant did not have a history of disordered eating). Another was selected based on her history with risk-related eating behaviour, such as excessive dieting, and the third was selected because she was a former eating disorder patient. Other versions of the study investigated solely non-eating disordered male and female participants from Denmark and Brazil.

General interpretation of empirical findings

In the study, the ideal female body is primarily characterised as thin or ‘skinny’ throughout the experiments by all three participants (Dilling & Trillingsgaard, 2017). Having a ‘thin’ or ‘skinny’ body type proves to be the most desired and most well looked upon female body type, aesthetically speaking, with strong connections to what is perceived as ‘pretty, beautiful, and nice’. The ‘skinny’ body is often associated with fashion models and thin women in general who signalise ‘success and control’. The social representations of ‘success’ and ‘control’ become anchored when the participants perceive that being thin equals ‘…power! Then you are in control. It is the same as signalizing to the world that you are in control of other aspects of your life and can participate in society’ (Dilling & Trillingsgaard, 2017, p. 137, authors’ edit). A participant elaborates on how difficult it is to maintain and obtain such ideals, and how she wishes she ‘…could have anorexia!’ The underlying ideal, mediated by the psychical appearance of thinness, is to be ‘…on top of the game of perfection’ (Dilling & Trillingsgaard, 2017, p. 136).

Embodying the culture of achievement

Embodying the culture of achievement can be understood on different levels following the previous analysis of the sociology of the body, social representation theory and the central findings in Dilling and Trillingsgaard’s (2017) study.

In order to achieve the right ‘skinny/healthy’ body, the individual has to look for ‘recipes’ and methods. As Petersen (2016) puts it, the ‘recipe’ of success in an achievement society is to move forward and be adaptable, agile, flexible and constantly willing to optimise and be the best version of oneself (p. 75). In body ideal obtainment, such recipes are to be found as well. As a participant says: ‘[In order to obtain the ideal body] I would have to get a personal trainer, eat very strict and healthy. I would have to have a totally new lifestyle to have my body as a brand and totally change my appearance, get my hair done, my teeth straitened, my eyes lifted! Also, bigger breasts!’ (Dilling & Trillingsgaard, 2017, p. 218). The ‘recipe’ of success becomes embodied in food logs, diets and workout programmes as psychical tools to alter the body and materialise the expectations. The practices connected to obtaining this embodied ideal centre upon the individual’s ability to perform and achieve. For that to happen, the individual has to be in control. As an embodiment of an achievement culture on a level of individual agency, this means practising a willingness, resilience, strength and ability to overcome the challenges on the road to success. Some of these challenges are interpreted as ‘thin lines’ in Dilling’s and Trillingsgaard’s study.

A social representation in need of an ‘anchor’

Throughout this article we have tried to apply the theory of social representations to issues of body ideal obtainment carried out in a culture of achievement. One of the central findings in the empirical study was that previous and otherwise sensible arguments and constructed borders against disordered eating was the discourse of ‘health’. In other words, what used to differ pathology from normality were clear indications of healthy moderation and behaviour. The social representations of the ideal female body used to be dictated by an elite but has now become democratised and intertwined with societal interests and social media. The normative ideals of what is normal and expectable of the average person become individualised matters to navigate in and are easily disrupted by conflicting concepts of ‘health’. Applying the theory, we learn that the social representation of the ideal female body is in need of an anchor. The cognitive polyphasia of health (being the different and even contradictory modes of thinking about the same issue and co-existing in the individual and social groups) leaves the individual ensnared on the ‘thin line’. As pointed out earlier, social representations emerge not merely as a way of understanding a particular object but also serve as an identity function. The individual co-creates these representations in order to negotiate whether they identify with or dissociate themselves from foreign concepts. Not being able to anchor skinny as neither ideal nor ill makes it impossible for the individual to decide how to position themselves in the discursive jungle. As seen in the experimental study, the participants manage this tension by turning their, otherwise legitimate criticism of the ideals, towards themselves and conclude how ‘…it is probably my own fault’.

Conclusion

Is it a surprise, as we have shown in this article, that the culture of achievement is not only an overarching ideal but rather a lived ideal that is embodied and can be achieved? Not really. What we have stressed in this article, however, is how the body becomes a vital tool via which one is able to signalise that one is able – or not – to become one of the winners in the achievement society. Whereas some research has focused on how the self-writ-large has become the centre of attention when optimising oneself and hence enhances one’s chances of performing successfully (e.g. Bröckling, 2016), others have paid attention to how the body can be moulded to fit the society of achievement via aesthetic surgery (see Gerisch et al., 2019) or by ways of medicine (see Borkenhagen, 2019). Here, we show that one’s ability to perpetually shape – and legitimise the shaping of – one’s body according to the norms and standards of the achievement society is indeed an ongoing process. The body is, hence, under constant revision and thus one’s friend at one time and one’s foe at another, something that gives the participants in the study an ambivalent relationship towards their body. Perhaps, we are able to shed even better light on this by using the concept of curating that German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz has coined in order to explain how people in late-modern society perform their singular selves (Reckwitz, 2020). The participants in this study, indeed, curate their bodies, and not only for the sake of their own liking but also in order to obtain recognition from others. In obtaining recognition, the participants are supported in thinking that they are doing the right thing, hence also supporting them in the process of legitimising their ongoing work on their bodies.

What is more, a failed implementation of the right body can become the reason for the occurrence of diverse mental illnesses – and hence an obvious sign of unhappiness. In an achievement society, in which happiness is almost an expected state of affairs, unhappiness is thus a violation of the overall idea of an achievement society and hence a sign of moral decay. Being unhappy is simply morally wrong – and definitely something one should do something about. Translating unhappiness to a mood becomes depression. Translating unhappiness to body practices means ‘…letting yourself decay to comfort eating and weight gain. Rather, you could starve yourself and use it for the better’ (Dilling & Trillingsgaard, 2017, pp. 268–269, authors’ edit). It is, more specifically, up to women themselves to annul their potential unhappiness and strive towards happiness, meaning thinness and control. By working with and on their body, they are – perhaps – able to achieve this. But some are not. They lose out, and their body becomes their enemy in the process. It becomes something they blame themselves for and are ashamed of, thus turning criticism of inhumane ideals into self-critique and self-contempt.

Now, this type of research surely directs attention to the fact that the female body is a central locus in the achievement society. But it also questions the inclination in this society to push – here young women – to strive for internalisation of the societal norms and rules in view of how these can inflict pain and suffering. We believe that future research should have even more focus on the pain and suffering caused by the achievement society – it seems pivotal to address this in light of the situation in which the prevalence of mental problems and disorders is continually on the rise.