The Mythology of "That Girl"

It is not the state of being clean (or thin, or wealthy, or desirable) but the process of becoming that signifies deliverance.

“That girl” is productive and healthy, organized and nameless. She has a morning routine full of skincare and matcha lattes and earth-tone athleisure sets. On Sundays she restocks her fridge with farmer’s market produce and deep-cleans her beige-on-beige apartment. The social media content that defines “that girl” is both “aesthetic” and instructional, a tutorial for a pretty life. 

“That girl” is a depersonalized amalgam of trending features of ideal femininity — hence the nebulous moniker. She is all about becoming, which is what makes her content on TikTok, Pinterest and Youtube so tantalizing. The goal is not merely to look like “that girl” but to be “that girl,” because she’s not just an image, she’s a process.

We believe that if we can locate the requisite self-control, expendable income and free time, we can engage in the process of becoming — more beautiful, more put-together, thinner, presumably happier. 

It seems that every decade, diet culture and the beauty imperative — two of the patriarchy’s most powerful tools of social control — trot out a new it-girl for young women to aspire to. When the paragon is a peer, just relatable enough to feel attainable, we’re less likely to recognize the pressure to conform as discipline benefiting structures beyond us.

As someone who survived the thinspo/fitspo Tumblr era (I wish I could say I survived unscathed, but I am most definitely scathed), I recognize “that girl” as yet another model of monumental femininity.

As my day-one readers well know, the monumental body — as opposed to the grotesque body — has characterized the western feminine ideal for the last few centuries. The monumental body is closed, self-contained and static, while the grotesque body is porous, ever-changing, full of contradictions. The grotesque feminine is multiple, while the monumental feminine is singular: only white, only cis-het, only thin, only able-bodied, only neurotypical.

Feminine-coded media is dominated by monumental images, and cleanliness is a central feature of these. Gen-Z’s “that girl” — who is all about clean eating, a clean house and clean skin — spawned the “clean girl” aesthetic, while #CleanTok has developed simultaneously as a whole genre of “satisfying” content for the older TikTok crowd.

Social media is currently awash with videos of suburban moms sanitizing their kitchen sinks and teenagers doing a ten-step “glass skin” skincare routine. I’ve seen commenters say a video of a woman organizing snacks into clear plastic bins is “so soothing” and tell another woman she “looks so clean,” meaning this as the highest praise.

In this essay, I want to get into the weeds of what cleanliness means, because the way it’s trending in such a literal way freaks me out. 

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Clean aesthetics being talked about alongside actual cleaning is the kind of semiotic layering that happens invisibly all the time. I’m reminded of theorist Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, a 1957 collection of essays that speak to the tendency of social value systems, such as cinema and advertising, to create myths, a myth being an elevated sign.¹ 

Boiling down the semiology developed by linguist Ferdinand de Saussure a generation-plus before Barthes, a signifier (such as a word) and a signified (the object it is connected to) form a sign.² Barthes writes that when a sign is used as a signifier, another layer of meaning is added, creating a myth.  

One of the pop culture myths that Barthes unpacks in Mythologies is cleaning chemicals. In the essay Soap-Powders and Detergents, Barthes discusses the 1954 “Detergent Congress” that heralded a new age in household cleaning: the previous standard comprised abrasive chemicals such as chlorine bleach, but in the 50’s softer detergents were developed, promising effective cleaning without the violence. 

While bleach is a “total fire, a savior but a blind one,” modern detergents are “a police action, not all-out warfare,” Barthes writes.

Barthes argues that the advertising language around these products points to a psychological shift in the way people perceive the threat of dirtiness. Cleanliness and dirtiness have always been loaded psychological concepts, to be sure; like other binary oppositions such as nature versus culture and light versus dark, the clean versus dirty binary is connected to humans’ ancient fear of chaos, our impulse to order the world by splitting it into opposing groups. 

This organizational project soothes the anxiety caused by the invisibility of disease, the incomprehensible scale of natural disasters. We bind ourselves up in a walnut shell and count ourselves the lords of infinite space.³ And by god, that space better be spotless.

According to Barthes, the spry powders and luxurious foaming agents that replaced harsh solvents promised to “liberate the object from its circumstantial imperfection: dirt is ‘driven away’” rather than obliterated. Filth is thus demoted from an existential threat to a treatable condition.

On foaming agents specifically, which introduced an unexpected measure of delight to household cleaning, Barthes writes:

“Foam can even be the sign of a certain spirituality, insofar as the spirit is reputed to be capable of producing everything from nothing, a great surface of effects from a tiny volume of causes… The important thing is to have successfully masked the abrasive function of the detergent under the delicious image of a substance at once deep and airy which can control the molecular order of substances without damaging them.”

I myself can attest to the ecstasy of certain cleaning products as well as cleaning content on social media. Seeing an object renewed by soap and elbow grease restores an almost spiritual sense of hope in my own agency, my own capacity for perfection, for bloodless revolution.

My point here is that the action of cleaning signifies far more than just getting rid of filth — it’s almost always a baptism. (And I’m not just saying that because I read How to Read Literature Like a Professor in high school.)

As “that girl” labors and labors, sticking to her 6 a.m. morning routine and workout regimen and 80-20 diet, her process, like a cleaning chemical, “emphasizes the mode of its action.” Barthes says the user of a cleaning product is “engaged in a sort of experiential mode of substance, one that makes [her] the accomplice of a deliverance and no longer merely the beneficiary of a result…” It is not the state of being clean (or thin, or wealthy, or desirable) but the process of becoming that signifies deliverance.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it a thousand times more: diet culture doesn’t want us to be healthy, it wants us to be dieting; the beauty industry doesn’t want us to be beautiful, it wants us to be ugly in our mind’s eye. Tracking, striving, purchasing, toiling, distracted. The cleaning is the content.

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Beyond signifying humans’ longing for deliverance, I see the emphasis on the act of cleaning rather than the state of cleanliness as evidence of a resurgent superstition, a growing dependence on purity rituals even more ancient than baptism. Returning to last month’s discussion of Jungian archetypes, there is an unconscious element to these rituals, which makes them dangerous. (Insert Euphoria clip in which a wild-eyed Cassie wakes up at 4 a.m. to get ready for school.)

In an episode of This Jungian Life — clearly, I highly recommend this podcast — titled “Contagion: Pollution, Protection & Purity,” host Lisa Marchiano suggests that cleansing rituals soothe archetypal fears about contamination, contamination being associated with both disease/death and religion/death. She points to the act of carrying a personal bottle of hand sanitizer as a very modern iteration of the protective rituals that humans have been engaging in for millennia.⁴

“Partly, that is a rational behavior that’s driven by science, that’s driven by public health information, but it has a psychological and archetypal element…” Marchiano says. “What we’re doing is ritually cleansing ourselves to shield ourselves from illness.” The hand sanitizer is a protective talisman that implies a sort of bargaining: if I wear this evil eye pendant or mount stone gargoyles on my church, make physical offerings to some nonphysical force, I will be safe from the invisible.

Though modern science has allowed us to see many of the forces of destruction that we used to fear, such as viruses and weather patterns and the stars, those fears are still lodged in the unconscious and emerge as archetypes or abstractions in times of stress. After all, the world is still a scary place.

As we enter Year Three of the pandemic, the perceived threat of COVID-19 has decreased for many people, but there has been no truly satisfying, collective resolution. Rather, we are individuals grasping at individual rituals to cope and heal. An increased interest in household cleaning is completely rational in a time like this, but the pursuit of purity seeping so visibly into other areas of our lives points to our desire to protect our minds as well as our homes and bodies from contamination.

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As I watch another TikTok video of a young woman showing her mastery of the “that girl” process, I feel convinced that I could eliminate every bad habit from my life if only I could afford a Dyson V11 wall-mount vacuum and an in-house washer-dryer. I imagine the late-night snacking and random fits of crying and hours wasted on social media swirling around in the vacuum’s slim body as if wrenched from the floor by an F5 tornado. I imagine my hip dips and back acne and body hair dissolving in a vortex of hot water and dye-free detergent.

“That girl” is an image full of rituals — a daily baptism in exercise and anointing with skincare. A productive morning routine, a calming evening routine, a Sunday reset routine — these must be consistently repeated to effectively transform into an optimized version of the self. These rituals allow us to feel like our fate is in our own hands, purified and holy in a world that constantly makes us feel helpless.

I love routine as much as the next person, and I don’t think rituals are inherently pathological. Establishing routines and rituals in the home amidst the isolation of the past few years has been hugely important to me, in fact. But, I’m wary of the unconscious bargaining that happens when we launch a new body project or fitness journey or self-care routine. If the bargain involves an erasure of multiplicity, a closure of the self rather than an opening, my advice is to just leave the mess alone. Resist the further entrenchment of the monumental, allow the grotesque dirt to yield a hearty flower.

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For the benediction, a passage from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, which inspired my writing on the grotesque versus monumental body five years ago. Esther Greenwood was preoccupied with purity in a way that I found myself relating to, so her suffering felt like a warning.

I never feel so much myself as when I’m in a hot bath.

I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near onto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don’t believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.

I said to myself: “Doreen is dissolving, Lenny Shepherd is dissolving, Frankie is dissolving, New York is dissolving, they are all dissolving away and none of them matter any more. I don’t know them, I have never known them and I am very pure. All that liquor and those sticky kisses I saw and the dirt that settled on my skin on the way back is turning into something pure.”

The longer I lay there in the clear hot water the purer I felt, and when I stepped out at last and wrapped myself in one of the big, soft white hotel bath towels I felt pure and sweet as a new baby.⁵

1. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2013).

2. Ferdinand de Saussure et al., Course in General Linguistics (London: Peter Owen, 1960).

3. William Shakespeare and Philip Edwards, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

4. Deborah Stewart, Joseph R. Lee, and Lisa Marchiano, hosts, “Contagion: Pollution, Protection & Purity,” This Jungian Life (podcast), Jan 27, 2022, accessed March 16, 2022, https://thisjungianlife.com/episode-199-contagion-pollution-protection-purity/.

5. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (London: Faber & Faber, 2019).