Why Is Everyone Mad About Ballerina Farm Now?

In the modern annals of social media obsessions, there may not be any woman who has inspired as much debate, discourse, hand-wringing, and mudslinging as Ballerina Farm.

For the obsessively and chronically online, or those who make a career out of dissecting every inch of the modern female experience and doing so through the curated social media profiles of influencers, the mere whisper of Ballerina Farm, a.k.a. Hannah Neeleman, produces a variety of conspiracy theories, opinions, and rhetoric.

To them, Neeleman—a beautiful, Juilliard-trained, Mormon mother of seven children who lives on a ranch in Utah and chronicles her experiences on social media to an audience of millions—has for several years represented the pinnacle of the unrealistic expectations placed on American mothers.

These women, many mothers themselves, watch Neeleman’s Instagram Stories of herself delivering her babies near a hearth, without drugs and surrounded by her loving brood, and feel attacked by their own, less idyllic birthing experiences. They stare at her lithe dancer’s body, her perfectly proportioned face and wide smile, and cry foul that any woman could pretend that looking that good after so many babies is easy. They pick apart her clothes, her home, and her meals that she makes from scratch. They insist she must have a secret army of nannies at her disposal, that she is faking most of her life for content.

Over the past few years, a prevailing narrative has emerged. Neeleman, they say, is a business designed not only to sell us a product, but a political operative intent on convincing young girls to give up their agency to bake bread pregnant and barefoot in their kitchen and cede all authority to their husbands. She’s been dubbed the “queen of the trad wives”—an increasingly large group of young women aiming to return to a subjected marital life, even though Neeleman herself has never used the phrase.

After Neeleman shared her experience earlier this year competing in the Mrs. World pageant mere weeks after giving birth to her eighth child, the internet exploded with women decrying Neeleman as a traitor to her gender, a mother actively hurting other mothers, and perhaps most memorably, “not a person.”

But as I wrote at the time, Neeleman, let’s say, exists in the context of all which came before her. The anger and ire that is constantly directed at her is not actually a reflection of anything she is doing, which is, in truth, not hurting anyone. Her life and the picture she portrays online are instead triggering the collective stress, ennui, and anger of American mothers, who are themselves striving for an ideal they are ill-equipped to reach. In a society where motherhood is forced on thousands of women, yet women have little social support once they actually have a child, opening social media and seeing a woman who is, frankly, more beautiful, more relaxed, and able to get more things done in a day, is enough to make people’s heads explode.

Up until this point, Neeleman herself has never really commented on any of the intense and unending rhetoric against her. Even when her choice to compete in the pageant made headlines across the internet, Neeleman continued her normal content—baking bread, making butter from scratch, riding on a tractor with multiple kids in tow—without, it seemed, a care in the world.