Does This Dress Make My Performativism Look Fat?

On Ballerina Farm, the tradwife movement, Men's Rights Activism, Covid-19, RFK Jr., and Envy

Photo by Blake Colquitt

March 2020, Your Home Office. The world has just been stunned by a once-in-a-lifetime event, the first of many to take place in the coming decade. You, along with everyone else on the planet, have just been relegated to an indefinite sentence in a wholly digital plane. The only available sources of social interaction are a FaceTime call, a Zoom meetup, or a Discord chat — cheap facsimiles that just leave you longing for the real thing. You yearn for a return to the physical world: to work with your hands, to see real people in front of you, to look up at the sky and breathe fresh air.

You hit your vape, reach for your phone, open Twitter (yet to be the subject of the now-infamous ketamine-and-envy-fueled mono-glyphic rebrand), scroll, and then — something captivating crawls across your feed. A breathless, straw-haired woman in denim overalls stands in the foreground of what is clearly a small cow farm, a similarly towheaded infant in her arms. The early morning sun illuminates a handful of perfectly dressed toddlers in the barn behind her. Beneath the photo, the caption joyfully exclaims, “A little day in the life!”

What, you think, is this lifestyle? Who could this effortless, insouciant woman be?

Meet Hannah Neeleman. The principal behind the family-run farm and homemaking brand known as Ballerina Farm, Hannah is a practicing mormon, Juilliard-trained ballerina, and former Mrs. Utah. Her company packages and sells beef, pork, chicken, eggs, dairy products (including — you guessed it — raw milk), baked goods, candles, honey, sourdough, kitchen supplies, clothes, and most importantly, Hannah’s own lifestyle in the form of social media content.

Hannah’s looks, wardrobe, values, and affectation all reflect a person of a different era — one in which women were submissive to their husbands, remained in the sphere of domesticity, and took pride in what they perceived as their main source of value: mothering. Hannah is a tradwife: a traditional housewife living in the twenty-first century. But in order to understand Hannah and her place in the wider tradwife movement, you first have to know something about the far-right online political world to which she and it belongs.

“To these women of the alt-right, female empowerment comes hand-in-hand with submission to a more powerful male figure.”

In the 1990’s and early 2000’s, an online culture made up of disenfranchised men came to fruition on message boards like A Voice For Men and the subreddits r/MensRights and r/MGTOW. While this group — “MRA” (i.e., men’s rights activism) — was initially concerned with custody and divorce issues, suicide, and male depression, it rapidly flourished into the internet’s first hub of rampant misogyny. The most radicalized wing of MRA, known as the “Red Pill” community, saw themselves as, like Neo in The Matrix, awakened to the actual order of reality — namely, that men are the true victims of the social hierarchy, suffering under the unrelenting boot of third-wave feminism.

This nescient worldview would soon prove non-exclusive to male stewardship, however. In the early 2010’s, the Reddit community r/RedPillWomen was founded as a home for women who similarly rejected contemporary feminism (“RPWs”). It advocated for a return to traditional gender roles, classic femininity, and male-centric gender relations. Emphasizing inherent biological differences, RPWs argued that gender equality was unnatural; instead, women should strive to be the best possible “First Mate” for their male “Captain”. To attract a man worth of captainship, women should increase their “sexual market value” by becoming more traditionally beautiful (read: by conforming to cultural body standards).

To these women of the alt-right, female empowerment comes hand-in-hand with submission to a more powerful male figure. Take, for example, Ballerina Farm: Hannah’s husband and business partner, Daniel, is the son of billionaire airline tycoon, and founder of WestJet and JetBlue Airways, David Neeleman. Although Ballerina Farms is carefully curated to give the impression of a small settler family, living off the land, the truth is almost the exact opposite: the Neelemans are one of the most financially and socially privileged families to ever exist, in the entire history of mankind.

This should come as no surprise, after all: the tradwife movement, like Men’s Rights Activism and the Red Pill Women phenomenon before it, is a grift. Hannah and other tradwife influencers online are cogs in a machine designed to print money by appealing to the base desire of female conservatives: to return to a mythical time in which the lives of women were much simpler and easier to navigate.

Photo by Blake Colquitt

The truth is that the lives of women in pre-feminist America — even the white ones to which the tradwife movement overwhelmingly appeals (see: Taylor Swift) — were, to put it plainly, not so good. This is, or least, really should be, an obvious and irrefutable fact. But tradwives rely on the historical ignorance of their audience to push their false narrative across. In this respect, the movement hit a goldmine in the 2020’s. Covid-19 caused significant and lasting declines in education outcomes, leading to a generation of young adults that know less than ever about the world around them and their own place in it. Simultaneously, tradwives found themselves benefitting from the swelling voice of scientific illiteracy in politics and entertainment.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., heroin addict, animal carcass enthusiast, and alleged sex-pervert, has proven to be one lasting source of such scientific disingenuity. After running for U.S. President in 2024 on a platform comprised of conspiracy theories, anti-vaccine sentiment, and raw milk consumption — with support reaching as high as 10% of voters in polls before dropping out — RFK Jr. was nominated for, and confirmed as, the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services for the Trump Administration. Now, he advocates for a return to simplicity in health, science, and nutrition. Advances in science, he appears to believe, have only brought us farther away from the human body’s natural processes.

“Political affiliations aside — if you’re willing to ignore experts and history, you’re welcomed with open arms.”

To his credit, RFK Jr. really has lived the naturalistic lifestyle for which he advocates: he suffered from mercury poisoning in the early 2000’s due to fish overconsumption, had a “dead parasitic worm” (probably a pork tapeworm larva) removed from his brain in 2010, and has been hospitalized several times for atrial fibrillation likely caused by high iron levels linked to chronic hepatitis C. As the director of the HHS, he has reduced access to vaccines, promulgated beliefs linking Tylenol to autism, decried the practice of public water fluoridation, and launched an initiative to reduce the prescription of antidepressants. Oh, and most importantly, he really, really wants you to drink raw milk.

Like RFK Jr., the tradwife movement’s juxtaposition of traditional beliefs about gender relations — most often associated with American conservatives — and the witchy, pseudo-scientific health practices and crunchy diet culture of online white liberalism might strike you as contradictory. However, instead of repelling both sides of the political spectrum like you might expect, this little-of-everything ethos has acted as a unifying principle. Political affiliations aside — if you’re willing to ignore experts and history, you’re welcomed with open arms.

And in our post-fact world, is it any wonder that young women are turning a blind eye to reality in favor of their own aesthetic preferences? Self-proclaimed “soft girl” Nara Smith, model, mother of children Rumble Honey, Whimsy Lou, and Slim Easy, and maker-of-gum-from-scratch, has an audience of over 12 million followers on TikTok. Ballerina Farm boasts upward of 10 million followers on Instagram. Some women, it would seem, really enjoy this particular brand of cognitive dissonance.

They want an escape, an ideation — something to be envious of, reality be damned. And, like Richard Pryor in The Wiz, tradwives are willing to sell an image to them, whether it exists or not. What they present to the world might not be true, but it certainly does look pretty. Just don’t look behind the curtain — all you’ll find is a scared little girl, and a bunch of cow shit.

“Everything they say about me is true! I’m a phony — I got no powers!”

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Don’t Be a Sucker is a blog about internet culture and its interactions with politics, sports, tech, law, and society at large. You can visit the Archive to read past entries. Subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss anything — and consider sharing this post if you enjoyed it.

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