By Holly Eva Allen
“…our friend the poet comes into my room
where I’ve been writing for days,
drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,
and I want to show her one poem
which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,
and wake. You’ve kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone…”
Most might not be familiar with the work of the 20th-century lesbian poet Adrienne Rich. Most are likely familiar, however, with the set of trends that make up the core visual aesthetic of the clean girl — “natural” makeup, a sleek ponytail, minimalist décor, and an almost religious devotion to an amorphous understanding of wellness. Regardless of the algorithm you’ve cultivated on the short video platform of your choice, you’re almost certain, at one point or another, to receive a recommendation that makes use of the so-called “clean girl” aesthetic. An overt endorsement of the clean girl aesthetic with a “hygiene haul” that outprices most monthly rent payments. A covert deployment of the clean girl aesthetic in a sad-beige “study with me” video. The trend has many iterations, shape-shifting to accommodate the tastes of a wider viewership. Despite the apparent versatility of clean girl content, a few essential regularities are maintained. The videos almost always center on women that are thin, feminine, delicate, and minimalist. These women frequently take up or are studying in pursuit of prescriptively feminine fields, such as nursing and education. When they are not pursuing such careers, they are otherwise filling a role as a stay-at-home mother, stay-at-home wife, or stay-at-home girlfriend.
Of course, we are not living in the decades of strictly-defined second-wave feminism. There is nothing inherently shameful about voluntarily acting in such a “stay-at-home” role. However, the particular blend of prescriptive femininity associated with the clean girl aesthetic is alarming nonetheless. The clean girl aesthetic argues that a woman can be fashionable and understated, punctual and fit, all while keeping their living space clean and their men happy. As a recent article in Vogue so succinctly put it, interest in obtaining the clean girl look has led to young women “suddenly wanting to look like they had a membership to E by Equinox and were getting their eight hours.” Pursuit of the clean girl image, in other words, is pursuit of an essentially impossible ideal performance of prescriptive femininity.
Challenges to this prescriptive, clean construction of idealized femininity have been put forward in the work of activists, academics, and artists alike; often these critiques of prescriptive femininity come alongside critiques of the heteronormative bent therein. In the case of Adrienne Rich, we find all the boxes are checked — she was an activist, an academic, and a poet; her work criticized the association of femininity with cleanliness and the heteronormativity of such understandings. Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” a celebrated article, explores how “the institution of heterosexuality itself” is “a beachhead of male dominance” enforced by coding lesbianism as both deviant and unclean. Yet Rich’s article is, admittedly, dense and makes reference to academic work most will find excessively cerebral and tiresome at best. The clean girl aesthetic and the manner in which it is often presented is visually pleasing and short form. Perhaps it would be best, instead, to look at Adrienne Rich’s radical poetry, linguistically pleasing and short form as it is, to deconstruct the image of the clean girl.
“Living in Sin” is perhaps the most immediate piece a reader might think of when prompted to consider cleanliness or housework in the poetry of Adrienne Rich. The poem follows a narrator who appears to have recently moved in with her partner and is overwhelmed by the amount of housework required of her:
“She had thought the studio would keep itself;
no dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,
the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears,
a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat
stalking the picturesque amusing mouse…”
The first few lines of the piece inform the reader that the narrator was once ignorant to the amount of upkeep required to maintain a presentable home. This implies that the narrator may not have seen or recognized the amount of work expected of a married woman, specifically of married women in American households during the period in which this piece was written.
Yet another Rich poem that similarly critiques the expectations placed on women is Rich’s “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law.” This piece depicts a woman who adhered to expected gender norms and found that they did not serve her as she aged:
“You, once a belle in Shreveport,
with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,
still have your dresses copied from that time
…
Your mind now, mouldering like a wedding-cake,
heavy with useless experience, rich
with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,
crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge
of mere fact. In the prime of your life.”
The woman this narrator is addressing is one who seems to have aligned herself with the perfect feminine as much as possible. The poem communicates that she did so with great success in her youth. On a surface level, the provided reference to a peach blossom sounds entirely positive. After all, peach blossoms are redolent of spring, of sweet scents, and pastoral imagery. However, the subtlety here is that peach blossoms are both a flower and, more specifically, a flower that will one day develop into a fruit. Flowers are commonly interpreted as symbols of femininity partly due to their yonic appearance, fragrance, and fragility, while fruits are notable as they are consumables. In other words, the woman who is subject of this poem may have been described in flattering terms in her youth but these terms, when interpreted, belie the rather harsh fact that in order to maintain her proximity to the perfect feminine, she must accept that value is placed on her due to her usefulness as a young woman or sexual object that may one day grow overripe or age beyond the interest of the men around her.
In a flurry of clean girl content and minimalist fashion, the deconstruction of clean, feminine youth can be liberating. A questioning of cis-heteronormativity and a celebration of messiness can feel like a breath of fresh air in this trad-wife moment in which queer rights are being questioned and DEI work is being dismantled at every turn. If a break from the cold, hospital-like cleanliness of today’s femininity is what you need, the poetry of Adrienne Rich offers an alternative.
Works Cited
Jones, Daisy. “Why the Clean Girl Aesthetic Refuses to Die.” British Vogue, 26 Feb. 2025, vogue.co.uk/article/clean-girl-aesthetic-trend.
Rich, Adrienne, and Claudia Rankine. Collected Poems: 1950-2012. Edited by Pablo Conrad, First ed., W.W. Norton & Company, 2016.
Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs, vol. 5, no. 4, 1980, pp. 631–60. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/3173834. Accessed 14 May 2025.
