32: This is your sign to NOT become "That Girl"
On self-optimization, body checking, beauty work, and the lifestyle myth
[CW: food, weight loss, body image, body checking]
You might be wondering, “Who is ‘That Girl?’” Well, the short answer is that you could be “That Girl”—the best possible version of yourself, a.k.a. you post-glow-up. At least, this is the narrative that countless TikTok creators have popularized through a trend motivating female-identifying viewers to embody a lifestyle of early rising, self-reflection, healthy eating, fitness, and productivity.
“That Girl” videos have blown up on the app, the millions of likes garnered per video suggesting the aspirational hold they have over young women. These TikToks usually include Tumblr-like photo or video montages of early morning time stamps, healthy meals (especially smoothie bowls), flat stomachs, highbrow skin and hair products, coffee, water with lemon, journals covered in pretty handwriting, highlighted self-help books, and expensive-looking athleisure. They promise you that “this is your sign to become ‘That Girl,’” even offering “perfect” morning routines to help you get there. To become That Girl, you should ideally wake up from 5:30-6:30 am, make your bed, drink water, work out, shower, do your skincare routine, get dressed in brand name athleisure, eat a healthy breakfast, journal and plan for the day, drink coffee or “tee” (as one video spells it), and begin working or studying by 8:00 am. That Girl’s life revolves around constant self-betterment, her mornings optimized to help her reach her potential in all things related to wellness and productivity.
I have an interesting relationship with the “That Girl” trend in that I came closer to becoming That Girl than I ever would have expected. I’ve discussed in a previous TWHI installment that running throughout quarantimes brought me closer to mind-body peace than I’ve ever been since childhood. In my own words:
“When so much fell away due to the impact of the pandemic, I finally took the time to put my wellbeing first, providing myself with direction in the form of running. I’m becoming reacquainted with my muscles, with seeing the frame of myself and trusting where it can take me if fueled properly and given the opportunity. Every run affords me distraction-free time and space to get in tune with myself, processing and regulating my emotions in a productive way. […] It is a small way I can re-exert control over my current experience. In a year that has felt stagnant at best and regressive at worst, running has become a tangible form of progress and a genuinely healthy coping mechanism for me.”
Beyond feeling mentally and physically better due to consistent exercise, my body changed as well. To put it plainly, I became leaner, and my muscles became more defined. It is worth noting that I achieved “results” (I use this word in quotation marks because I find it problematic that we view our bodies in this way!!!) without changing my diet beyond swapping one meal per day for a green smoothie. To bring home my point, I usually accompanied that smoothie with Oreos, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, or Doritos as I do not believe in diets or restrictive eating. I solely focused in on the fact that I wasn’t eating enough fruits or vegetables and made a change there while continuing to eat my chosen processed foods in conjunction with whole foods and meals. I also think it’s important to note that I have never once owned a scale in my life (one of the best parenting decisions my mom ever made in raising my sister and me!), so I have never tracked my weight. Consistently running about three times a week and doing one-off Chloe Ting 2 Weeks Shred videos every now and again kickstarted my metabolism, and my body changed in response. Throughout this time, I made a genuine effort to concentrate solely on endorphin production, regulating my emotions, and improving my strength and cardiovascular health.
And I was successful! Waking up, hydrating, running or doing HIIT, drinking my green smoothies, practicing good skincare and hygiene, and journaling or writing poetry gave my days structure and allowed me to feel productive and healthy even while I was unemployed and emotionally overwhelmed. I could measure my progress as the HIIT videos became easier to muscle through, my running mileage lengthened, or my body changed over time. To illustrate these changes without using pictures, the near-constant “mysterious heartlike pulsation in my abdomen” I mentioned fearing in my first TWHI essay turned out to be my abdominal aorta pulsating closer to the surface of my skin because I had so little subcutaneous fat on my stomach. My doctor noted that this was normal and healthy for me, but this development demonstrates how much my body changed over this period of time. While tangible evidence of my hard work made me feel very proud of myself, I specifically became fixated on documenting or monitoring these “results.” I became very excited by the changes I saw in my abdomen, and I wanted to look at my abs all the time. So I did.
I would look at my abs in the mirror when I woke up, when I got dressed, whenever I went to the bathroom, and before I went to sleep. I would take mirror selfies or camera timer shots whenever the spirit moved me, and while this wasn’t nearly as often as when I checked myself out in the mirror, it was still far too often. I wouldn’t compare these photos to anyone else’s or even to previous photos of myself. I didn’t share them, either. I only sent them to Anna—she knew how much these successful lifestyle changes meant to me when not much else was going my way. Essentially, I was just taking stock of how I saw myself and how others might see me. But this self-surveillance was becoming compulsive, and I recall ~joking~ with Anna about my obsessiveness via text, slowly becoming attuned to the fact that such a seemingly good thing could soon be bad for me.
I didn’t know there was a name for what I was doing at the time, but once I learned what body checking was, everything fell into place. According to Healthline, body checking is “the habit of seeking information about your body’s weight, shape, size, or appearance.” This can include activities like checking yourself out in the mirror, stepping on a scale, measuring yourself, or taking before and after selfies. But research shows that compulsive “monitoring behaviors can […] end up worsening your mood,” leave you more dissatisfied with your body, or even lead to an inaccurate or unrealistic view of your weight and body shape. This behavior is also associated with disordered eating. Even though many of the manifestations of body checking didn’t align with my experience, I knew that my constant appraisal of my body fell in line with such negative behavior loops. Despite all of my efforts to solely focus on embodying health and wellness, I had been subconsciously fallen into the age-old trap of femininity: I was trying to become a more idealized version of myself by making myself smaller.
Due to my new routine, I looked and felt more physically “well” than I had in years, but was that actually translating into mental wellness? It’s worth noting that I was un/underemployed during this time (providing me with a lot more time to exercise than most people (way more than full-time job-having me!)) and extremely confused about most everything happening in my personal and professional life. Beyond this, I was processing heavy things like deaths and falling-outs as well as grieving the state of our country and the world at large. My single-minded focus on improvement—on becoming That Girl before I knew she existed—provided me with a sense of control in the midst of so much chaos. Seeing genuine progress and feeling physically better than I had in years felt very empowering at the time, and I benefited greatly from using exercise as dedicated time to process my emotions. That being said, the fact that I wasn’t able to sustain my lifestyle points to the fact that it was unsustainable. I only had the time to devote to becoming That Girl when the world wasn’t asking very much of me. And most importantly, I recognize that the increase in my body checking behaviors signals that one of my main driving forces eventually became how I looked—that I was beginning to seek smallness just as much as holistic wellness.
Ultimately, increased stability in my personal and professional life—as well as taking a long, hard look at myself (though not in the mirror)—led to me slowing down and exercising less. I landed a new full-time job and a new full-time boyfriend, which meant that I had less time to spend in the company of my mirror image. My priorities shifted as a result. I didn’t have the time or energy to focus on becoming the “ideal” me—I had to just focus on being me. I felt more satisfied and settled in the many areas of my life I once used exercise to emotionally process or even compensate for. I mainly walked and hiked throughout the winter, my diet went unchanged, and my body changed yet again as a result. Some of my softness returned, and some of my definition faded. I practiced body checking behaviors far less than I did while highly active.
Even so, I have written long and hard about the fact that the feeling of wellness I had while running consistently has evaded me ever since I pulled back. So when I first saw the “That Girl” trend on TikTok, I, too, thought it was motivating. The rigid routines sold as cure-alls seemed to align with my desire to feel as athletic and creatively productive as I once did. I wanted to get back to waking up early, writing, taking care of myself, and unearthing the best version of myself I could be.
But as I came across more videos entreating me to become That Girl, it became clear that things were off. They were selling an aesthetic instead of a lifestyle—a largely unattainable, exclusionary aesthetic of skinniness, whiteness, and wealth. Were we really being told to aspire to our own sense of self-betterment? Or narrowly-defined, inaccessible, restrictive perfection? The images of flat, tanned stomachs of wealthy white girls in immaculate athleisure and countless skincare products that could make your wallet cry seemed to suggest the latter. Key to being That Girl was an obsession with an idealized physical form and consumeristic existence rather than solely experiencing true feelings of wellness. The That Girl videos seemed to suggest that if you couldn’t better yourself into an unrealistic body type and consumeristic lifestyle, you couldn’t become That Girl. All your early mornings, workout sessions, journaling, and smoothie bowls would be for naught—and even these things could be inaccessible to many as the time it takes to incorporate them into your life is a luxury in and of itself! This begs the question: who is truly being empowered in this self-empowerment situation? Is what we are told to aspire to even healthy, attainable, or real? Is this what we truly want, or are we being led to believe this it because the intersecting, insidious systems of the patriarchy and capitalism are telling us so?
Beyond this, coming across @rogueweasel’s TikTok response to the “That Girl” trend was a watershed moment for me. She explains that That Girl represents “what the contemporary archetype of an ideal woman is under capitalist patriarchy.”
“More than ever, womanhood is treated like a project; like something to be good at, and something that demands hard work and entrepreneurship. By embodying and reproducing the values of the marketplace, the ordinary woman becomes the ideal woman.”
She then quoted from Jia Tolentino’s book Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, a collection of essays I’ve long wanted to read (and perhaps stared longingly at over a few bookselling shifts back in the day…):
“These days, it is perhaps even more psychologically seamless than ever for an ordinary woman to spend her life walking toward the idealized mirage of her own self-image. The ideal woman has always been conceptually overworked, an inorganic thing engineered to look natural.”
These two sentences knocked me over. They completely captured the project of becoming That Girl—a project that is never-ending because That Girl is an idealized mirage, and society’s conceptions of success and beauty will constantly shift to keep her out of reach. The amount of work we are expected to put in to reach a baseline sense of contentedness and wellness is completely unnatural, but we have been programmed to view anything less than this level of constant productivity and sacrifice for mental and physical order to be laziness or some kind of moral failing. What is That Girl if not an inorganic thing engineered to look natural? But moving beyond That Girl, these two sentences caused me to self-reflect: what was I doing if not ultimately walking toward the idealized mirage of my own self-image?
The uncomfortable heat of self-awareness spread through me, but so did a feeling of validation—of understanding why my mission to achieve overall wellness had devolved to include my need for reassurance that I was small enough. I immediately searched the Tolentino quote online and came across a full PDF of Trick Mirror (you’re welcome). I only read the “Always Be Optimizing” chapter @rogueweasel mentioned as I plan on buying the book, but I came away with so much hard-to-swallow food for thought. I’m going to share the excerpts that have cemented how I view the “That Girl” movement and redefined how I aim to approach my relationship with self-improvement.
“The ideal woman has always been generic […] She looks like an Instagram—which is to say, an ordinary woman reproducing the lessons of the marketplace, which is how an ordinary woman evolves into an ideal. The process requires maximal obedience on the part of the woman in question, and—ideally—her genuine enthusiasm, too. This woman is sincerely interested in whatever the market demands of her (good looks, the impression of indefinitely extended youth, advanced skills in self-presentation and self-surveillance).”
“The ideal woman, in other words, is always optimizing […] The same is true of her body, which no longer requires the traditional enhancements of clothing or strategic underwear; it has been pre-shaped by exercise that ensures there is little to conceal or rearrange. Everything about this woman has been preemptively controlled to the point that she can afford the impression of spontaneity and, more important, the sensation of it—having worked to rid her life of artificial obstacles, she often feels legitimately carefree.”
“Figuring out how to “get better” at being a woman is a ridiculous and often amoral project—a subset of the larger, equally ridiculous, equally amoral project of learning to get better at life under accelerated capitalism. In these pursuits, most pleasures end up being traps, and every public-facing demand escalates in perpetuity. Satisfaction remains, under the terms of the system, necessarily out of reach. […] But the worse things get, the more a person is compelled to optimize.”
“When you are a woman, the things you like get used against you. Or, alternatively, the things that get used against you have all been prefigured as things you should like. […] Wanting to look good—taking pleasure in trying to look good—[is], too.
I like trying to look good, but it’s hard to say how much you can genuinely, independently like what amounts to a mandate. In 1991, Naomi Wolf wrote, in The Beauty Myth, about the peculiar fact that beauty requirements have escalated as women’s subjugation has decreased. […] Where women in mid-century America had been occupied with ‘inexhaustible but ephemeral’ domestic work […] they were now occupied by inexhaustible but ephemeral beauty work, spending huge amounts of time, anxiety, and money to adhere to a standard over which they had no control. Beauty constituted a sort of ‘third shift,’ Wolf wrote—an extra obligation in every possible setting.”
“…Mainstream feminism has had to conform to patriarchy and capitalism to become mainstream in the first place. Old requirements, instead of being overthrown, are rebranded. Beauty work is labeled ‘self-care’ to make it sound progressive.”
These quotes distill down everything that’s wrong with becoming That Girl—with the endless third shift of beauty work and self-optimization we feel forced to saddle ourselves with while living under a patriarchal capitalist society. We’re controlling every part of our lives and our bodies in the hopes that it will lead us to some sense of true satisfaction or freedom, but the unmeetable demands upon our time and energy will continue to compound as they always have. It’s a vicious cycle, continually aligning ourselves with what society asks of us, but we are compelled to do it. This is especially the case nowadays, when women like me or girls striving to become That Girl or even you might not even be aware you’re doing so because these asks have been rebranded as things we should like or forms of self-care. It all feels thoroughly embedded in our lives, thoroughly inescapable.
I don’t know about you, but I want to escape from that which seems inescapable. I want to live my life and engage my body and mind in a way that actually contributes to my genuine wellbeing. I want to transcend the compulsion to compare my lifestyle and my body to those of other women… or even to past or present versions of myself. I don’t want to obediently devote my life to walking toward a funhouse mirror image of myself—one that’s manufactured to be distorted and ever-changing. And I’m starting by questioning these “wellness” trends and my personal inclinations toward what Tolentino calls the lifestyle myth: “a paradigm where a woman can muster all the technology, money, and politics available to her to actually try to become that idealized self, and where she can understand relentless self-improvement as natural, mandatory, and feminist—or just, without question, the best way to live.”
The best way to live cannot be one-size-fits-all. We cannot and should not be That Girl because she’s not real. She is a generic, idealized aesthetic that we’ve been socially-conditioned to aspire to, and working that third shift to try to become her will not bring us true happiness or wellness—and especially not freedom. To quote Tolentino:
“The ideal woman looks beautiful, happy, carefree, and perfectly competent. Is she really? To look any particular way and to actually be that way are two separate concepts, and striving to look carefree and happy can interfere with your ability to feel so.”
I am going to work hard to develop my own conceptions of beauty, happiness, carefreeness (yes, this is a word), and competence. I’ll do what I can to be conscious of how I reframe and seek my own wellness, trying to decouple the pressure to be smaller from my notions of health and betterment. It won’t be easy. If this essay and its liberal Trick Mirror citations have done anything, I hope they’ve brought home the fact that it will not be easy to redefine our own notions of feminine health, wellness, and beauty as they are so inextricably tied to patriarchal and capitalistic institutions. But I’d rather labor to find acceptance in myself before I continue endlessly laboring for acceptance from a system that will never accept me as a real woman—as an individual instead of an aesthetic. We deserve more than what the alternative offers us: further immersion in the cycle of unworthiness. We can’t keep striving toward our own smallness—toward the diminishment of every aspect of our being, of what makes us us—or there will be nothing left. What’s the worth in that? And what is our worth?
I’ll leave you to sit with this vital question posed in the closing sentence of “Always Be Optimizing.”
“What would you want […] if you had succeeded in becoming an ideal woman, gratified and beloved, proof of the efficiency of a system that magnifies and diminishes you every day?”
This GQ interview with beloved Mountain Goats frontman John Darnielle on how running fortifies his creativity. Anyone who knows me knows I adore John, and I expect you’ll understand why after reading this short piece. He offers practical advice on developing a healthy relationship with exercise, including:
“You're haunted by this self image of yourself exercising in public. You really have to say, ‘No, I don't care what anyone thinks if they see me. I don't care, because what does it mean to me if somebody thinks I look funny out there? There's no reason for that to matter to me.’ […] You start to own it, and you go, ‘This is how I look when I'm taking care of myself.’”
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