Tate’s saturation was so complete that he reached into the blue villages of New York City, where many boys in their bedrooms found his rude and ruthless evisceration of every sacred liberal value hilarious. Tate appealed to the rural American pro-gun constituencies and to the anti-vaxx, anti-mask communities he appealed to schoolboys in Sydney and working-class immigrants in the U.K., to young rideshare drivers and to jet-setting tech bros. His fan base lived all over the English-speaking world, and it seemed to defy race, class, and religion. “You know who eats sushi? Little fucking soy boys. Eating “rice in a circle” will make men weak, Tate says, whereas his meal, fried chicken, makes men strong. In another, on a private jet, Tate taunts his brother, Tristan, for eating sushi. One viral TikTok showed Tate poolside in orange swim trunks and velvet slippers, chomping a cigar while demonstrating his nunchuck technique. But they stayed for the ostentatious, outrageous masculine display: the machetes and cigars, the diamond watches, the Bugattis and Lamborghinis, the obscene piles of banded cash like a scene out of Scarface. The boys clicked on Tate because of his striking appearance - the glossy shaved head, the physique “yoked as fuck,” as the comedian Noel Miller observed on The Tiny Meat Gang podcast, with a menacing cobra in a devil’s mask tattooed on his chest. By the end of 2022, #AndrewTate had been searched on TikTok 22 billion times. It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that if you were an American male between 12 and 20 with a TikTok account, “Top G,” as he calls himself, was an unavoidable presence, uploaded by megafans, then reposted and shared, stitched and duetted by scrollers, critics, and stans. ![]() Without warning last summer, the former kickboxing world champion obliterated the NyQuil-chicken recipes, the Minion mobs, the Amber Heard mockeries, and every other trending brainworm. For some people, at least right now, That Girl is also The Best.What the boys remember is not one particular meme or video, but how Andrew Tate conquered their TikTok “For You” pages seemingly overnight. Ideally, we’ll always stop and think about what it really means to be our “best” selves. Being alive is about looking around and choosing to mimic the best of what we see. That Girl is a reminder that so much of building ourselves starts with seeing and mimicking others. We are porous beings, enmeshed in a network of our own kind, - dreaming, imagining, aspiring. In Trick Mirror, Tolentino wrote that the complicated thing about an ideal womanhood is that “the ideal woman always believes she came up with herself on her own.” But the concept of originality is also an ideal, nobody is an isolated creation. ![]() But the absurdity of ideals is what makes them such a human thing. This makes ideals a silly thing to pursue during a pandemic. ![]() On the other hand, they often embody society's sickest obsessions - thinness, whiteness, ability, wealth. Ideals are vexing - on the one hand, just having, let alone achieving them can make you feel powerful and in control, which can help keep your head above water during, for example, a pandemic. “A lot of what is depicted on social media includes becoming the most productive, best version of yourself - working with what you have,” Alexa says, “and making the most out of it.” It’s who you believe… that ideal girl is.” In a way, the ambiguity gives people space to plug in their own version of perfection but it also creates space for repetitive, socially constructed versions of what’s ideal to seep in. “I feel like ‘that girl’ isn’t someone specific.” Alexa explains: “She is very different from person to person. Except she also doesn’t look like anyone you know at all. That Girl is super-hydrated and majorly self-affirmed she looks like a combination of Sex and the City’s Natasha and Pixel Perfect’s Loretta Modern. She exists at a remove (that) but hovers close enough to recognize (girl). It’s specific (girl), but still amorphous (that). In fact, the internet has already seen so many versions of this girl that she doesn’t even need a name, so she has a non-name: That Girl. ![]() That Girl is a trend right now, but she isn’t offering anything totally new.
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