"A Whole Lot Of Pink Chaos"
Ballerina Farm's Sister Is A Pronatalist Dreamgirl
Micka Wright Perry is famous only to people who have heard of Ballerina Farm. As Hannah Neeleman’s sister, Perry has appeared a handful of times on the Ballerina Farm feed (here she is doing some family sponcon for Ogee makeup, a BF collab I wrote about here). This exposure has gradually led to Perry’s sizable following of nearly 20,000. Most of Perry’s appearances on the Ballerina Farm Instagram have come courtesy of her penchant for beauty pageants, which she shares with her sister.
But unlike Neeleman, who performs a type of femininity that might appeal to even cranky feminists like me, Perry has always given the energy of a little girl who loves nothing better than playing house. Even after she grew up and experienced clogged milk ducts, defiant toddlers, and angsty teenagers.
And while Hannah Neeleman certainly adheres to every standard of femininity valued by patriarchy, she wears her Rudy Jude jeans and her floral blouses in a way that looks, for lack of a better word, cool. Aspirational to wanna-be tradwives and those of us devoted to interrogating the tradwife project from an intersectional feminist lens! Hannah Neeleman is Mormon, yes, but she doesn’t exactly scream about it. And she has many more children than someone like me could ever reasonably take care of, SURE. But her brand is appealing to a mainstream, non-Mormon audience in a way that Micka Wright Perry’s brand never could be. At least until recently.
Perry is 46, the mother of ten children, and pregnant with #11, and her entire feed is centered around her extremely unsubtle message that motherhood is a woman’s most beautiful, most sacred, and most fulfilling endeavor. Motherhood according to Perry is always soft, always gentle, and always unabashedly feminine.
Micka Wright Perry, is, in short, THE poster girl for the conservative pronatalist agenda, whether she intends to be or not.