The Aesthetic Politics Of Ballerina Farm
Aga Stoves, Baby Names, And Makeup As Indicators Of Values
Last week,
and I chatted about mommy productivity culture and momfluencer Brooke Raybould was a big focus. She approaches motherhood like a BUSINESS and schedules nearly every second of her day in order to achieve maximum excellence.Her Husband Makes Her Seven Eggs
It was a delight to reunite with my former Cult of Perfect cohost Virginia Sole-Smith to talk about the project of Mommy Optimization in a distinctly anti-woman, pro-natalist era. Mothers as symbols are incredibly important to the conservative agenda, as is the construction of the never complaining, always hustling mommy. But who are we optimizing our lives for? How can a calendar solve…
ANYWAY, we got some comments and DMs about Raybould’s content being off-putting because of her ostentatious display of wealth. This was really interesting to me, because while I find many things off-putting about Raybould’s online presence, for whatever reason, her wealth was never top of my list. She and her husband own a gigantic McMansion, have a fancy home gym, and take wildly pricy trips to Disney on the regular, so yes, I have always assumed they’re wealthy to some degree, but that’s where my musing has historically stopped. I guess you could say I found the aesthetics of her wealth - boring?
And that made me think about what we mean when we talk about wealth, and how our own aesthetic preferences, aspirations, and insecurities inform our understandings of money and the appearance of wealth. A caveat before we bravely continue: almost every single descriptor I’m using in this piece should be surrounded by skyscraper-sized scare quotes, because every word used to describe aesthetics or style is almost always heavily laden with implied value judgements and assumptions about class, race, and gender.
Ok, so after processing the fact that Raybould’s home decor doesn’t slap me in the face with the idea of wealth, I thought about what kind of content DOES.