Written by Mimi Cotton
The rise of the clean girl is undeniable. Think of perfect, minimalist make up and simple, chic clothing, accompanied by strict health and beauty routines. It is a look and lifestyle that appears clean, beautiful and effortless, despite the mass amount of effort one must put into being a ‘clean girl.’
The term swam around on Tiktok and quickly grew in popularity with creators sharing fashion and beauty tips. It goes beyond just aesthetics; tips include fitness, diets, hygiene and even advice on things like organising your personal, love and work life. A good amount of this content contains useful tips. There is no harm in aesthetic preference and aspiring for a more organised life. However, it is worth considering the harms of this aesthetic. Is this merely a box for women to cram themselves into, adhering to strict expectations and perfectionism?
The ‘clean girl’ life is not the only lifestyle being promoted online, with ‘trad wife’ and ‘feminine energy’ content growing at similar rates. Showing women ‘aspirational’ content for them to mould their lives around including advice on how to increase their ‘value’ to men.
All of these lifestyles have something in common; a pressure to perform. They present behaviours for women to use to portray themselves extremely particularly; involving hiding faults and emotions, as well as conforming and submitting to a male gaze. Yet, there is a quiet resistance to these trends and it comes from the pages of the increasingly popular ‘messy girl’ fiction genre.
‘Messy girl’ fiction centers around female protagonists behaving badly. Perhaps due to the pressures on how women present themselves, ‘bad’ behaviour in fiction exists on a broad spectrum from women simply not conforming to gender expectations to chaotic and violent portrayals of femininity. These characters can be unlikeable, rude or sometimes straight up psychopaths. All things a clean girl is not supposed to be.
Eliza Clark’s monumental success of her books, such as Boy Parts and Penance, is a great example. Her female characters engage in violence and crime, sometimes mirroring the bad behaviour we are more used to reading about from male protagonists. Their lives are a world beyond the clean girl lifestyle. Ottessa Moshfegh is another popular author whose presentation of women defies the expected. These female characters are not crafted to be liked, but to tap into something more primal and messy.
It is not just the violent, chaotic characters that can earn the title of a ‘messy girl’. This genre can also be achieved by revealing through fiction the exact things the ‘clean girl’ life tries to obscure such as poor mental health or struggles that women are expected to keep to themselves. Nightbitch by Rachel Yonder reflects the difficulty of new motherhood and the loss of identity that comes alongside it. It does not pull punches in terms of the emotional and physical effects of modern postpartum life. It is not just behaviour but physicality too. These characters can sweat and cry and vomit. They behave like any other human, warts and all. There is no clear skin and perfect slickbacks to be found between these pages.
So, why would these two opposing trends rise at the same time? These books are particularly popular with women, ironically most likely including those trying to conform to the clean girl life. Perhaps it is because reading can be seen as a private practice. No one has to know the highly curated and minimalist woman enjoys reading about women with a taste for mayhem. Fiction is often seen as an escape from real life. For some it’s adventuring and dragons as an escape from a nine-to-five. Maybe for women a presentation of humanness or an expression of those suppressed emotions and behaviours is enough to escape from the pressure to perform in real life.
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