On Ballerinas, Farms, and Pageants
and on all of us
The current internet phenomenon that is Ballerina Farm is a phenomenon largely because of her brand’s unrelatability, among other reasons. Most of us don’t have eight kids or a 400-acre cattle ranch in Utah. Most of us aren’t ballerinas turned beauty queens married to a multi-millionaire heir to an airline fortune. Most of us don’t make from-scratch lasagnas, cheese and noodles and all, in lacy Free People blouses. But I would also argue, for most of us, there is something deeply, deeply relatable about her brand, and that is precisely why we can’t look away.
And by the way — before I go any further, this is very much a brand we are critiquing. Not a woman or a person — but an Instagram account. I don’t know Hannah Neeleman, and as others have pointed out, she doesn’t let us know her. This is about the mega brand she has created.
And a second disclaimer before I get into it, about that relatability piece: though I don’t have eight kids or even one, don’t live on a ranch, am not Mormon, and could not be further from the tradwife lifestyle Hannah represents, I find an awful lot about BF disturbingly relatable, actually. Sometimes I think in a parallel universe had I been dealt a few different cards (albeit pretty crucial cards) I could have wound up with a life like hers. Like her, I grew up homeschooled all the way K-12, and on a piece of land where we grew much of our own food and had chickens. I too was a ballerina. I wore lots of gingham and floral dresses and churned butter and more recently, didn’t do pageants as she does, but competed in bikini shows. Her life looks exhausting and grueling and a big HARD PASS on the eight kids thing, but I’d be lying if I said nothing about her lifestyle was alluring or familiar to me.
In case you’ve been living under a rock and missed it, Ballerina Farm, or Hannah, the woman behind the account, is a social media influencer who’s blown up in recent years, amassing millions of followers — like more than Brene Brown, more than Glennon Doyle, more than many A-list celebrities, to put it into perspective. She’s the current reigning queen of the tradwife realm of the internet, a scary-but-real type of influencer who promotes the “traditional” woman. As in, women in the house, making her husband’s dinner, raising kids, living like it’s 1950. For months, I’ve asked myself why I can’t look away from BF’s page. Why it has me and so many millions of us in a collective chokehold. And I don’t think it’s because she’s aspirational or inspiring or completely absurd, though many people find BF to be all of those things. I think we’re transfixed because of what her page represents and embodies about what it means to be a woman in America right now.
Growing up, my family and I lived as close to off the land as we could with our two acres. In the summers we grew rows of white acre peas, sweet corn, and speckled lima beans, and spent our summer afternoons propped up in front of PBS kids shows, shelling peas and beans. Rows of giant heirloom tomatoes lined our countertops, which my mom canned for soup and spaghetti sauce. We had a flock of chickens in the backyard and my sister and I played Oregon Trail with washboards and wagons – which was a game, but also not far off from our lives in some ways. Yearning to get closer to the homesteader experience, we volunteered at a local living history museum, reenacting the roles of 1880s farmers, wearing long calico skirts and white blouses and boots — and I’ve never had a better time in my life. We cooked on a wood burning stove and churned butter by hand, which we then started doing at home off the clock too. This was pre-Instagram thank God, so I can’t help but wonder, if a cosplaying pioneer makes cornbread on a wood burning stove and no one sees it, does it really even get made? I digress…
Much like the Ballerina Farm fam, we lived in a house intentionally built to look pared down. My parents used reclaimed wood from decrepit tobacco farms and Victorian doors in our house before it was cool. We devoured the Little House on the Prairie book series and any other pioneer-adjacent literature and movies we could find. I was especially obsessed with the idea of living off the land in a log cabin. As I got older, I inhaled the PBS “Frontier House” series where modern families are made to live as 1880s pioneers. I thought, and honestly, still think at least once a week, how I’d do anything to have this experience if not altogether live in a bygone era (but, I appreciate modern medicine and anesthesia, and like being able to vote).
So, if anyone were to co-sign a defense of Ballerina Farm that I’ve heard, which is: her account is not “cosplaying poverty,” but showcasing living the way we’re meant to live, connected to the land, it’d be me. I’ve seen people passionately insist that her tradwife antics and stripped-down aesthetic exhibit someone living a life more in tune with how humans should live, how we once did. And that all of us “haters” are just jealous. In our modern-day lives spent in boxes and AC and glued to our phones, we can’t look away from Hannah’s salt of the earth, homespun existence because it’s the primitive one we all crave. That’s all!
And if that’s all there was going on, I’d be inclined to agree. Living in the hellscape that is late-stage capitalism, with our processed foods and unnatural work routines and isolation from true community, there’s a certain primal allure of imagining leaving our 9-5s and spending our days getting our hands dirty and doing “good honest work.” I get it.
But if it were all as simple as a human desire to reconnect to the land that has us transfixed, why is it that all farmers, all ranchers, aren’t garnering 8 million followers on Instagram?
Because while BF may choose to milk cows and sell sourdough, they rely on neither to pay their bills or keep a roof over their heads (see, the millions of airline inheritance wealth.) But there are are plenty of people in this world — millions —who do actually rely on their land. So why is it that every homesteader and farmer isn’t as glorified on social media? Could it be because they don’t have the time and help and safety net to spend hours curating reels of making from-scratch lasagna? Is it because they’re not all as thin, white, and conventionally beautiful according to heteronormative beauty standards? Is it because the actual reality of living off the land is a backbreaking, underpaid slog, not a blonde ballerina making homemade lemon meringue pie in a Free People dress?
Another way in which I can relate to Hannah, perhaps more than many, is on the ballerina front. Pre ranching days, Hannah was a Juilliard-trained ballerina before they left it all to raise livestock. That means she, as I did, surely grew up immersed in the grueling world of classical ballet. Which is beautiful and artistic and magical but also trains boys and girls but mostly girls, from a very young age, to suck in their stomachs and make the backbreaking look effortless. It’s an art form crucially built upon the idea of making it all look easy. From age 4 to 21, I listened to my ballet teachers yell to “zip my belly button to my spine” so my “lunch wouldn’t show” and learned how to stifle our gasping breaths to never reveal how hard we were working. We learned to tape up our bleeding feet in our pointe shoes and carry our aching and often injured bodies through the air to look like we were floating. We were taught to always stay smiling, stay graceful, ignore any molestation or inappropriate behavior that went on backstage or onstage, and of course, always stay skinny. Under the lights, we floated like fairies in a sugarplum dream of rhinestones and satin. Backstage, girls starved themselves until they ended up hospitalized — but it was all worth it if we stayed looking beautiful to those watching. A lesson you don’t have to be a ballerina, just a woman in America, to absorb. Aren’t we all taught in some ways to be polite, not rock the boat, put up with it? Or, as one commenter wrote under Hannah’s recent post of competing at the Mrs. World pageant 10 days post-partum, to “get our duty done!!”?
I don’t know what goes on in Hannah’s head – as mentioned, none of us get to know her as a human, which is also part of the brand. But it would make perfect sense to me that a trained ballerina of the most elite caliber would repurpose the core ballet philosophy— of dressing up hard, painful work beneath the veneer of ease and grace — to her Instagram presence. It may not be bleeding feet or torn hamstrings, instead, it’s eight kids, 400 acres, and countless animals and a business that she’s making look easy, breezy, beautiful. However easy or not it is in actuality to Hannah, matters little. Because the message implied is, it should be this easy for you too. Not only can we do it all, we should do it all. The “ideal woman” does and with a smile on her face!
As Sara Petersen has so brilliantly pointed out in her (many!) writings on Ballerina Farm, which has given me a lens to understand why I can’t look away in the first place, thinness is at the core of all of this. If Hannah herself wasn’t thin, if Hannah didn’t “snap back” (a chilling term) to her pre-baby body each time, would she be celebrated in quite such enthusiastic terms as the perfect, godly, ideal, superhuman, exemplary mother and wife? For generations at least, we’ve equated thinness with morality and goodness, wrapping up self-restraint, willpower, and dedication with beauty, ideal womanhood, virtue, and moral superiority.
If Hannah took a more typical amount of time to lose baby weight, or never did, would the thousands of mostly women take to her page to congratulate her on showing that women can have it all? What are we judging her success by if not by how she looks? It’s all we can see. If the thinness is the point so is the hard work, the self-sacrifice, and pink satin bow of EASE that wraps up the whole production. Whether it’s the intent or not, it all makes us all ask ourselves, if she can do this all, what’s wrong with me?
And what better or more visible a stage to showcase and celebrate this thinness and patriarchal standards of a “good woman,” than by literally competing for the #1 spot, in Mrs World a mere ten days after giving birth! My third commonality with Hannah is that after I quit ballet I too went into pageantry of sorts, finding a new outlet for the performing energy I no longer had ballet for. I chose a different type — bikini shows — the type with deep brown spray tans and tiny crystal-covered bikinis. At the time, I defended it the same way I see many of BF’s commenters talking; that doing a show was a testament to my strength and capabilities. And in a way it was — I was challenging my body to the limits, to go through months of hard work to build muscle and see just how lean I could get. But I now see I was also doing it to adhere to heteronormative beauty standards, and to be told quite literally by judges with clipboards whose faces I couldn’t even see, that I was enough. Something I’d never been sure of — and that ballet had convinced me wasn’t true.
Much like Hannah, I shared my journey of months of prep on Instagram for my much smaller audience to see, and much like Hannah, I failed to acknowledge the immense privilege and resources that got me there. Pop Apologists, a brilliant pop culture podcast that’s done deep dives into BF spoke recently about the dangers of her shilling of a body type and lifestyle life while failing to acknowledge that they’re multi-millionaires who don’t have to sell a single cut of beef to pay their bills. The message is, if you just work hard enough and pull yourself up by your bootstraps, anyone can have this life and this body and this postpartum experience! It’s the American Dream dripped out over Instagram stories and a website selling sourdough starter packets. It’s a lie that fails to account for the immense leg-up Hannah’s had and so many Americans lack. And it places the responsibility and also blame conveniently on the individual without accounting for systemic structures. As long as we see examples of women like Hannah “doing it all” and a mere ten days after birth with a mega watt smile on her face, why do we need to fight for maternity leave or bodily autonomy or our rights at all? Look how Hannah is thriving, beautiful, and healthy – what’s our problem for wanting anything more?
I know the time and work it took to get pageant ready, or at least I can imagine it — and we all saw the chugging of spirulina water, the cold plunges, weight lifting, stretching, and body checking days after giving birth. We didn’t see the nannies, the trainers, the employees, and the bank account that also got her there. And to pretend this is doable, possible for you too, and the model of how a woman should be is cruel and manipulative.
I listened to an interview recently with Hannah herself, a rare example of hearing her actual thoughts. She mentioned how if it had been up to her, she would have stayed in NYC, working as a professional dancer. But because her husband had an urge to rough it pioneer style (a fact, she says, she had no idea of until after they were married and he sprung it on her!) they uprooted their city lives and by default, left her ballerina career she’d trained at Julliard for. “Do you miss ballet?” the interviewer asked? “Yes, I really do!” lamented Hannah, “but I believe everything has a time and a place.” After I heard this interview I better understood why a mom of eight might still do pageants, though she surely doesn’t need the prize money (why she got into pageants originally.) She left her whole lifestyle and art form and career for her husband’s dream! It makes total sense to me why she might reclaim the one avenue for self-expression, or want one hobby or interest to still call her own.
Would we be so obsessed with Ballerina Farm if this was 30 years ago? If we weren’t in America? I think not. Hannah’s brand has gained a following I think thanks entirely to the moment in time we live in. She’s a token of America as it stands right now. For some, representing everything they want our country to be and go back to, and for others representing so much of what is wrong with it, so many of its shortcomings and warning signs.
BF encapsulates everything I’m trying to unlearn in therapy: the patriarchal capitalistic fatphobic drive to be thin, pretty, blonde, do more, and be more, and that only if I can do that, will I be good enough. And yet I can’t look away.
I, and I think millions of us, relate to the Ballerina Farm brand because while our ideals and values might be polar opposites, we know what it’s like to never feel like we’re enough. We know what it feels like to tell ourselves we are lazy, not good enough, not thin enough. That we should be doing more, should be further ahead, should be skinnier, should be better. I think we all know what these thoughts feel like in our own heads. Her Instagram feed just gives us a daily reminder.