I have a question for you: who is “that girl”? Doom-scrolling on TikTok, I see “that girl workout routine,” “that girl morning routine,” and “things I did in 2023 that made me that-girl.” I just want to know who she is.

I asked my younger sister (a fifteen year old girl who never parts from her Stanley-cup tumbler) to explain the concept to me, and she told me, “That girl is, like, the perfect girl who has the perfect life. She eats healthy, wakes up early, reads a lot. She’s just perfect.”

The phenomenon of that girl reminds me of a couple of things. It reminds me, primarily, of a modern equivalent to finishing school. Girls of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were sent to Parisian or even Bostonian finishing schools for the purpose of learning how to become a woman–no, a perfect woman. How to hold a cup of tea, how to walk in a balanced way like Anne Hathaway in the Princess Diaries, how to prepare a meal, and how to bat your eyes just right. But the purpose of it all was to learn how to lure a man with stacks of gold in the bank (or, more modernly, the absence of a PS5 and the presence of a stable job) to your table in the salon, at the speakeasy, in the club, or right into your Instagram DMs. 

Sound familiar?

That girl walks for thirty minutes at twelve incline and three speed on the treadmill while drinking one of her goal-three Stanley-cup tumblers of water and journals when she’s out of the shower where she shaved her underarms and legs and vulva with a vanilla bodyscrub. Her journaling is a greater percentage aspiration than it is reflection, but does that matter when everyone seems to love her? Does that matter when everyone seems to want to be her?

A friend of mine and I met up in Los Angeles recently, and during one of our many joint philosophical musings, she brought up a girl she’d met on her recent trip to San Diego State University. This girl, my friend said, lays a moodboard on her nightstand where most people lay their alarm clocks, so that it is the first thing she sees when she wakes up. Not dissimilar to a 2004 teen’s compilation of Seventeen clippings, these were printer-paper cutouts of Pinterest pins, captioned with affirmations. A supermodel and, underneath her, “my skin is this clear.” Rory Gilmore and, underneath her, “my grades are this good.” Laminated with packing tape and stuck to a cardboard backing is “that girl” in her ephemeral state. This year, that girl is smart like Rory Gilmore and clean like a lifestyle influencer. She has the same hairless body men who don’t see a problem with wanting to fuck a high-school girl unapologetically crave. Next year, that girl smokes Marlboro Reds and wears her hair like the protagonist of a One Direction y/n fanfiction–in a messy bun, so that Harry Styles sees she is that girl, and not like other, less perfect, ones. It doesn’t matter what you want. It matters what they want. 

When I was a young girl, perhaps spanning the ages of eight to thirteen, I would read over and over again the nationwide bestseller, “The Body Book for Girls”, compiled and distributed by the American Girl Doll corporation. The Body Book for Girls made apparent that, in order to remain healthy and beautiful, I had to follow these simple steps: brush your teeth for two minutes twice a day, wash your hairbrushes in warm water twice a month, be kind to your friends, go bra shopping with your mother at the precise moment you see dimples form beneath where your breasts might one day be, change pads or tampons every eight hours when you are on your period which is precisely five days per month and wear pantiliners when you aren’t, clean the insoles of your running shoes so you don’t get ringworm, and absolutely eat according to the food pyramid that nutritionists will repeatedly recall and change so that each year you take health class you are told something different. 

“The Body Book for Girls” did feature a range of body types, hair colors, boob sizes, and, depending on which edition sat on your bookshelf, skin colors, but that girl remains a nameless, faceless goalpost that refuses to rest at any sort of stopping point. No amount of achieved goals or implemented tactics toward perfection are ever enough to be happy with ourselves as we are.

Girlhood is a state of desire. Girlhood is a state of aspiration. Girlhood is riddled with goals, and a place where successes go undermined or unacknowledged because there is always something new to want. But I know you know that. 

Finishing schools were not taught by fathers or husbands, but mothers and wives. “The Body Book for Girls” was not written by a collective of men, but a group of women, because men have never cared to learn the intricacies of the female body. They prefer to let it remain a three-pronged monolith: personality, tits, and (unbeknownst to the clitoris) the vagina, whose purpose is solely sex and has nothing to do with periods or childbirth or anything so uncomfortable. And the “That Girl” hashtag on TikTok is in fact not cluttered with men trying to tell women how to eat or how to dress or how to exercise in order to become the epitome of perfection. It is women that bow down to “That Girl” like she is the feminist messiah. It is women that offer other women simple and easy steps to perfection.

These are practices of “self care.” But if you follow the simple and easy steps to perfection and you are not perfect by the end of it, then there’s just something wrong with you. 

But are you truly ugly, or do you just not do pilates? Womanhood is plagued by a pandemic of insecurity. If the Stanley-cup gets your girlfriends to drink their lemon water and their skin is looking great and the supermodel on your nightstand moodboard is staring back at you with the lie you call an aspiration written underneath her, you will buy the Stanley-cup. And if the iPad Pro is how all the girls on the internet take notes in their classes and their grades are tantalizing and Rory Gilmore’s Virgin Mary demeanor hangs before your eyes like a carrot on a stick, you will buy the iPad Pro. Keeping women insecure is great for business.

But why are we complicit? Why, when we know perfection is impossible to achieve, do we force it upon each other and spin aimlessly in the hamster wheel that is womanhood?

I suppose the better question is, how can we not be complicit? All of us in a hamster wheel running as fast as we possibly can is not a cycle that ends. Progress is slow. Equality is daunting.

Girlhood is a state of desire, but it should not be a state of aspiration. When the world doesn’t change and the pressure isn’t released, what else are we to do but mitigate? “That Girl” is not our feminist messiah, she is simply the ideal we have concocted of a woman who can escape this never-ending story. “That girl” is on a one-way trip away from the patriarchy. We simply hope we can hitch a ride.