Thank you for this piece, we have been talking about Ballerina Farm all week in my family. Whether Hannah Neeleman loves her husband, kids, lifestyle is not really the issue and all she seemed to address in her response was that her family felt personally attacked.
I loved the profile because it actually addressed the idea of being trapped into choices that felt like her own but are all in service of the good Mormon wife and mother role. And as my sister said this week everything about that response was in service of the brand.
If I’ve learned anything reading In Pursuit, it’s that the squishiness of all things BF gets squishier at the lie fundamental to influencers and their audiences, that the performance is the life, the performance being so impossibly, perfectly guileless and intimate we feel like we can take the fantasy as truth. But the only BF life choices we can see, really see, are their choices of presentation. The profile, for all the cultural nerves it rightfully inflames, denied them control over their performance and put the life up for grabs. For people who love and need their performance vitally and personally, the profile was a violation. For people like me who love Sara’s writing about their performance and its larger meaning, the profile was above all interesting, first as another performance of a thousand choices. But also, the writer was straightforward about her sole, thwarted desire: to talk to Neeleman at length alone. That was the super potent and provocative driver of the whole thing, the source of conflict, the door to bigger cultural implications and to the funny stuff (the ditches!), and what made the piece specific to the “I” of the writer but also tapped the audience’s paradoxical hunger to KNOW Neeleman, to touch the real skin Neeleman performs in, to confirm or topple the idol, and thereby the writer made us as readers complicit in disturbing and distrusting the performance. It was great, great writing. (By contrast, the profile on Virginia Sole-Smith, whose work I love and need, was aloof and petty, without honest stakes for the writer and with an unexamined, untrustworthy obsession over Virginia’s hair and butter. It wanted to pierce a veil of influencer performance, but it created the veil it was piercing and pretended it was just reporting. The Times piece had its own agenda, as all profiles do, but it was honest about its aims. The dissonance between that candor, which is always messy, and BF’s existential and commercial need to control all aspects of presentation, was sidebar pretty interesting, too.) But much more to the point of your great writing, Sara: yes, hard agree, people invoking feminism as a righteous defense of one beautiful idealized white woman’s “choices” (and her feelings) is maybe the biggest, reddest flag of white feminism and white supremacy eeeeeeevvvvvveeeerrrr. Also, Daniel presenting as such a douche despite all their attempts at performing him otherwise is so funny. His performance turns her constant Vogue cover shoot into MAD magazine. It’s amazing. It’s so awkward. It’s unsettling to imagine how the power imbalances between them play out. It’s all somehow archetypal. How could we NOT write and think about BF? There’s too much here, too much that lets us examine ourselves through our reactions to them, and they’re choosing to perform for us! This is what culture is!
Self-edit with embarrassment: I happened upon the Times essay yesterday and realized I’d forgotten its subtitle—which sets up the feminist /not-feminist binary all the commentary was reacting to!! I can’t believe I forgot how cued readers were to go all binary and simplistic. Ugh, what an annoying subtitle!
"Every generation fucks up feminism, and I’m sure folks reading this twenty years from now will point out the many ways that I have fucked up feminism. And that’s a good thing!"
I have to push back on this. Does every generation get civil rights wrong, and that's a good thing? You mention Kate Manne -- Manne has also suggested that dividing feminism into "waves" and then repudiating each wave is unique to feminism. Other political movements can have intense discussions and internecine fights and various developments and retrenchments and lenses, and there's no big push to say those other political movements got everything totally wrong in the past but now it's all better, oh wait, turns out we weren't all better; oh God how cringe, we'd better renounce this next thing too actually.
The movement was never as it is now described. I taught feminist theory in the early 1980s, solidly "second wave". The radical feminists argued with the liberal feminists. The lesbian separatists argued with the women pushing for genuine equality in male-female relationships. "This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color" came out in 1981. The Combahee River Collective Statement came out in 1977. So it's not as though white women had no idea what women of color thought.
And this very fight -- should feminism support every choice a woman makes, or should the movement do a deeper analysis of culture and context? Should we view porn as freedom and liberation, or as contributing to the objectification and oppression and dehumanization of women? Do some women have false consciousness, or is that too condescending and degrading to even contemplate? Do we need reform, or revolution?
For many decades these discussions and insights and arguments and contested concepts have circled and risen and declined and swirled. Many go back to the 19th century.
Feminism is and has been a constellation of insights and practices and arguments and abstractions and love and anger and the desperate need for women to be fully human. We don't get it wrong every 20 years. We are always both wrong and right, just like every other political movement.
I love this framing btw: “we don’t get it wrong every 20 years”. What appears to be unique to feminism is how we build, which is why I appreciate the “wave” framing so much. The past arguments seemed to be between Those In Charge (perceived movement leadership) and Those Left Out (of bigger decisions, etc). Each wave moves towards a broader inclusion of those on the margins and more thoughtful use of the tools available. To me, the overall arch is so beautiful even thirty years after my official feminist studies ended I continue to stay involved, to take courses, to read contemporary thought, etc
I (kind of?) wish you had included fourth wave feminism, the wave we are generally considered to be in, that builds off of intersectionality by assessing the resulting power dynamics between individuals in patriarchical structures (building off the third wave concepts of “male privilege” and “rape culture”). Maybe a little too academic, but this framework has been SO critical in pushing forward pro-person policies at the local and state level these past ten years. The power dynamics discussion also unlocks the sinister piece of BF- that a woman married money and earns money that she may not have any access to whatsoever, helps run a business but doesn’t have a seat at the table when it comes to minor decisions much less major ones, and has farm help and animal help and business help but not child help or cooking help or frankly any help with the roles that are distinctly hers.
“Feminism cares to ask complicated questions about what choice is, and to clarify how what seems like a choice may not be one at all.”
This is what I have been thinking about for years now and couldn’t really find the words. Thank you for saying this out loud and clarifying my thoughts. So many decisions I personally made from my young adult years up until present day I thought were choices but now I’m seeing weren’t really choices at all. I was just doing what I was told was the “right choice” and I was told that “we all have choices and freedom but we all know what the right choice should be.”
This may seem nitpicky but having grown up on a farm I'm always bothered by how messy everything seems at Ballerina Farm. All the old school farmers I know take great pride in keeping their land and animals as well maintained and orderly as possible as you can be on a farm and the day in and day out work of these chores takes up most of their (and the hired help's) time. I always get the feeling they're in over their head and don't really know what they're doing.
Yes! This! I was raised, and still live, on a family farm. I run a flock of sheep and it’s time-consuming AF. Every time I see an animal of theirs I’m thinking: who checks that animal every day? Who gives it worming meds? Vaccinates it? Maintains its hooves? Treats it for lice? Who looks after it if it gets sick?
Anyone in the farming area where I live could take one look at that account and call out the fakery. It irritates me so much. And then people think, oh but she has 8 (!) young kids and still has time to run a farm, cook all the meals from scratch, homeschool and compete in beauty pageants (!!!). My arse she does!!! No-one does all that by themselves.
They will have *plenty* of staff (who hopefully somewhat know what they’re doing) actually working the farm, and she poses for the pictures. In a recent reel she & hubby were working out in a home gym in the morning. Not down in the cowshed milking, then. And who was watching their baby & youngest children while they worked out at the same time? Also, they always show her milking by hand - I want to see the inside of that new dairy.
BF is a weird rich person’s return to pioneering times cosplaying fantasy that has nothing to do with real farming. Coming from a long line of very hardworking farmers I find this BS quite insulting.
Thanks! Another point is that a 328 acre ranch is (very?) small by US standards. Where I live, farming is generally done on a smaller scale than in the US. Even here, a 328 acre farm would nowadays be considered too small to support a family, especially if you’re only farming livestock (tho admittedly I’m not familiar with pig farming).
This article goes into much more detail on the economic aspects:
Yeah, I think the messiness is part of the stage setting. Like how the little girls are wearing pretty floral dresses perfectly flecked with just enough mud. It's all part of the look.
Being brainwashed since birth to want a particular dream, then later “choosing” it is not part of feminism. It’s programming and living out a program. With the threat of being judged or disowned by family for failing to follow the program. Secondly if she is treated by her husband on a daily basis an an unpaid employee rather than a human being with valid feelings and needs, then nothing going on here is either feminist or part of her making open-eyed adult choices. It is exploitation. Is she asked if she wants another child? Is she offered birth control? The list goes on.
Love, love, love this piece Sara! I was really just feeling so “icky” about the whole BF response. And, then, you came along with such an eloquent piece that spoke to the many layers of this topic. Thank you! I feel sane(ish) again.
I would not be able to verbalize my unorganized pile of thoughts about what it is to try to be a truly helpful, progressive, thoughtful white woman in 2024 without your help (and Virginia, AHP, Amanda Montei, etc). Sharing your work and paying for your substack feels like the *absolute bare minimum* I can do to help society move in a healthier direction!
Thank you for this piece, we have been talking about Ballerina Farm all week in my family. Whether Hannah Neeleman loves her husband, kids, lifestyle is not really the issue and all she seemed to address in her response was that her family felt personally attacked.
I loved the profile because it actually addressed the idea of being trapped into choices that felt like her own but are all in service of the good Mormon wife and mother role. And as my sister said this week everything about that response was in service of the brand.
I don’t think she could have addressed anything else in her response and pulled it off. It was a very true to brand non response.
If I’ve learned anything reading In Pursuit, it’s that the squishiness of all things BF gets squishier at the lie fundamental to influencers and their audiences, that the performance is the life, the performance being so impossibly, perfectly guileless and intimate we feel like we can take the fantasy as truth. But the only BF life choices we can see, really see, are their choices of presentation. The profile, for all the cultural nerves it rightfully inflames, denied them control over their performance and put the life up for grabs. For people who love and need their performance vitally and personally, the profile was a violation. For people like me who love Sara’s writing about their performance and its larger meaning, the profile was above all interesting, first as another performance of a thousand choices. But also, the writer was straightforward about her sole, thwarted desire: to talk to Neeleman at length alone. That was the super potent and provocative driver of the whole thing, the source of conflict, the door to bigger cultural implications and to the funny stuff (the ditches!), and what made the piece specific to the “I” of the writer but also tapped the audience’s paradoxical hunger to KNOW Neeleman, to touch the real skin Neeleman performs in, to confirm or topple the idol, and thereby the writer made us as readers complicit in disturbing and distrusting the performance. It was great, great writing. (By contrast, the profile on Virginia Sole-Smith, whose work I love and need, was aloof and petty, without honest stakes for the writer and with an unexamined, untrustworthy obsession over Virginia’s hair and butter. It wanted to pierce a veil of influencer performance, but it created the veil it was piercing and pretended it was just reporting. The Times piece had its own agenda, as all profiles do, but it was honest about its aims. The dissonance between that candor, which is always messy, and BF’s existential and commercial need to control all aspects of presentation, was sidebar pretty interesting, too.) But much more to the point of your great writing, Sara: yes, hard agree, people invoking feminism as a righteous defense of one beautiful idealized white woman’s “choices” (and her feelings) is maybe the biggest, reddest flag of white feminism and white supremacy eeeeeeevvvvvveeeerrrr. Also, Daniel presenting as such a douche despite all their attempts at performing him otherwise is so funny. His performance turns her constant Vogue cover shoot into MAD magazine. It’s amazing. It’s so awkward. It’s unsettling to imagine how the power imbalances between them play out. It’s all somehow archetypal. How could we NOT write and think about BF? There’s too much here, too much that lets us examine ourselves through our reactions to them, and they’re choosing to perform for us! This is what culture is!
A-FUCKING-MEN - also I audibly guffawed at this ("untrustworthy obsession over Virginia’s hair and butter")
😂we will never stop hating that profile.
Thank you so much for today’s newsletter. Clearly, I loved it!!!!
Becky I love you!
The feeling is so so mutual!
Self-edit with embarrassment: I happened upon the Times essay yesterday and realized I’d forgotten its subtitle—which sets up the feminist /not-feminist binary all the commentary was reacting to!! I can’t believe I forgot how cued readers were to go all binary and simplistic. Ugh, what an annoying subtitle!
Excellent writing.
"Every generation fucks up feminism, and I’m sure folks reading this twenty years from now will point out the many ways that I have fucked up feminism. And that’s a good thing!"
I have to push back on this. Does every generation get civil rights wrong, and that's a good thing? You mention Kate Manne -- Manne has also suggested that dividing feminism into "waves" and then repudiating each wave is unique to feminism. Other political movements can have intense discussions and internecine fights and various developments and retrenchments and lenses, and there's no big push to say those other political movements got everything totally wrong in the past but now it's all better, oh wait, turns out we weren't all better; oh God how cringe, we'd better renounce this next thing too actually.
The movement was never as it is now described. I taught feminist theory in the early 1980s, solidly "second wave". The radical feminists argued with the liberal feminists. The lesbian separatists argued with the women pushing for genuine equality in male-female relationships. "This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color" came out in 1981. The Combahee River Collective Statement came out in 1977. So it's not as though white women had no idea what women of color thought.
And this very fight -- should feminism support every choice a woman makes, or should the movement do a deeper analysis of culture and context? Should we view porn as freedom and liberation, or as contributing to the objectification and oppression and dehumanization of women? Do some women have false consciousness, or is that too condescending and degrading to even contemplate? Do we need reform, or revolution?
For many decades these discussions and insights and arguments and contested concepts have circled and risen and declined and swirled. Many go back to the 19th century.
Feminism is and has been a constellation of insights and practices and arguments and abstractions and love and anger and the desperate need for women to be fully human. We don't get it wrong every 20 years. We are always both wrong and right, just like every other political movement.
I love this framing btw: “we don’t get it wrong every 20 years”. What appears to be unique to feminism is how we build, which is why I appreciate the “wave” framing so much. The past arguments seemed to be between Those In Charge (perceived movement leadership) and Those Left Out (of bigger decisions, etc). Each wave moves towards a broader inclusion of those on the margins and more thoughtful use of the tools available. To me, the overall arch is so beautiful even thirty years after my official feminist studies ended I continue to stay involved, to take courses, to read contemporary thought, etc
I mean, I think JK Rowling is doing Feminism wrong and I wish she heard and GAF about that criticism…
I (kind of?) wish you had included fourth wave feminism, the wave we are generally considered to be in, that builds off of intersectionality by assessing the resulting power dynamics between individuals in patriarchical structures (building off the third wave concepts of “male privilege” and “rape culture”). Maybe a little too academic, but this framework has been SO critical in pushing forward pro-person policies at the local and state level these past ten years. The power dynamics discussion also unlocks the sinister piece of BF- that a woman married money and earns money that she may not have any access to whatsoever, helps run a business but doesn’t have a seat at the table when it comes to minor decisions much less major ones, and has farm help and animal help and business help but not child help or cooking help or frankly any help with the roles that are distinctly hers.
“Feminism cares to ask complicated questions about what choice is, and to clarify how what seems like a choice may not be one at all.”
This is what I have been thinking about for years now and couldn’t really find the words. Thank you for saying this out loud and clarifying my thoughts. So many decisions I personally made from my young adult years up until present day I thought were choices but now I’m seeing weren’t really choices at all. I was just doing what I was told was the “right choice” and I was told that “we all have choices and freedom but we all know what the right choice should be.”
This may seem nitpicky but having grown up on a farm I'm always bothered by how messy everything seems at Ballerina Farm. All the old school farmers I know take great pride in keeping their land and animals as well maintained and orderly as possible as you can be on a farm and the day in and day out work of these chores takes up most of their (and the hired help's) time. I always get the feeling they're in over their head and don't really know what they're doing.
Yes! This! I was raised, and still live, on a family farm. I run a flock of sheep and it’s time-consuming AF. Every time I see an animal of theirs I’m thinking: who checks that animal every day? Who gives it worming meds? Vaccinates it? Maintains its hooves? Treats it for lice? Who looks after it if it gets sick?
Anyone in the farming area where I live could take one look at that account and call out the fakery. It irritates me so much. And then people think, oh but she has 8 (!) young kids and still has time to run a farm, cook all the meals from scratch, homeschool and compete in beauty pageants (!!!). My arse she does!!! No-one does all that by themselves.
They will have *plenty* of staff (who hopefully somewhat know what they’re doing) actually working the farm, and she poses for the pictures. In a recent reel she & hubby were working out in a home gym in the morning. Not down in the cowshed milking, then. And who was watching their baby & youngest children while they worked out at the same time? Also, they always show her milking by hand - I want to see the inside of that new dairy.
BF is a weird rich person’s return to pioneering times cosplaying fantasy that has nothing to do with real farming. Coming from a long line of very hardworking farmers I find this BS quite insulting.
I've always been SO fascinated by farmer's take on the BF expanded universe - thank you for sharing your perspective!
Thanks! Another point is that a 328 acre ranch is (very?) small by US standards. Where I live, farming is generally done on a smaller scale than in the US. Even here, a 328 acre farm would nowadays be considered too small to support a family, especially if you’re only farming livestock (tho admittedly I’m not familiar with pig farming).
This article goes into much more detail on the economic aspects:
https://annehelen.substack.com/p/the-edenic-allure-of-ballerinafarm?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
YES loved that interview so much!
They are playing a part, and they do have employees. But this is not a real farm, it is a instagram set, a social media backdrop.
And it’s almost like the chaos is part of the brand in order to appear more “authentic”
Yeah, I think the messiness is part of the stage setting. Like how the little girls are wearing pretty floral dresses perfectly flecked with just enough mud. It's all part of the look.
Being brainwashed since birth to want a particular dream, then later “choosing” it is not part of feminism. It’s programming and living out a program. With the threat of being judged or disowned by family for failing to follow the program. Secondly if she is treated by her husband on a daily basis an an unpaid employee rather than a human being with valid feelings and needs, then nothing going on here is either feminist or part of her making open-eyed adult choices. It is exploitation. Is she asked if she wants another child? Is she offered birth control? The list goes on.
Magnificent.
So so good, Sara. Thank you for writing this so beautifully and thoughtfully 💜
Love, love, love this piece Sara! I was really just feeling so “icky” about the whole BF response. And, then, you came along with such an eloquent piece that spoke to the many layers of this topic. Thank you! I feel sane(ish) again.
Dropping bombs over here! YES!
Brilliant, thank you so much Sara!! I will be sharing this with as many people as I can.
ah thank you! that means a lot ruth!
I would not be able to verbalize my unorganized pile of thoughts about what it is to try to be a truly helpful, progressive, thoughtful white woman in 2024 without your help (and Virginia, AHP, Amanda Montei, etc). Sharing your work and paying for your substack feels like the *absolute bare minimum* I can do to help society move in a healthier direction!
Not that this is the only thing I'm doing, I am active in many other ways.... Wow, I wish Substack let us edit comments 🫣