Ballerina Farm and the agony of nice women
MAGA, but make it pretty.
Since the election, much has been written about how the podcast bros and the manosphere delivered Trump to the White House.
warned us about it, and has analyzed it. wrote here a few weeks ago about how voters were being fed a diet of hate served up by the manosphere, driven by a group of highly-coordinated and exceptionally well-funded right-wing activists and influencers.In the back of my mind, I have been wondering: What about the women? What about the tradwives, the “soft life” influencers, and the right-wing wellness women creating alt-right pipelines with weird diets and sourdough starters, with followers in the millions?
We have been slower to point a direct finger at the women on the internet who created an online culture that helped put Trump in the White House, perhaps because they smile and wear floral dresses and pastel Lycra, instead of yelling angrily into microphones in what appears to be their mom’s closet.
I’m guilty of this, too—these accounts are nice to look at and they seem relatively harmless.
It’s worth remembering though, as we go into the next four years, that women have always been key to softening the image of the alt-right.
Especially women who are pretty, pleasing, well-dressed, conventionally feminine, and most often white and wealthy.
Remember when we were introduced to this version?
Ivanka Trump was pivotal in delivering us into our current predicament and the MAGA-Trump era. When she chose to join the campaign, her “soft” image next to her father, especially after he was caught on tape talking about assaulting women, gave him a kind of halo effect.
I often think about a woman I met once at a party who had met Ivanka Trump in person. This woman worked in the fashion industry, and had been invited to a big meeting where Ivanka was present, back during the first Trump campaign when Ivanka’s primary business was still selling high-heeled pumps.
How did she describe Ivanka? “She was so nice,” this woman said to a circle of people that formed around her at the party to hear the tale. “She had such a nice smile. I had to keep reminding myself who she is, even though she looks like Barbie and smells like vanilla.”
The woman telling this story was a Black woman who was deeply opposed to MAGA politics, which made it even more intriguing to me that she found herself feeling the seductive pull of a “nice” pretty, female celebrity. (It also makes the choice of “vanilla” as a descriptor seem poignant, as MAGA has weaponized white identity politics to gain power.)
And now, we also have this version.
Hannah Neeleman, tradwife mega-influencer of Ballerina Farm, recently had her official MAGA moment on the cover of Evie, a right-wing propaganda magazine.
As
, veteran chronicler of all things tradwife reported: “For years, Hannah and Daniel Neeleman have held onto an increasingly tenuous shred of plausible deniability vis a vis their politics. But the gloves are off.”At Trump’s victory party, Trump’s people openly thanked the manosphere for their triumph:
“I want to thank the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, Bussin’ With the Boys, and last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan,” said one of Trump’s biggest backers, Dana White, who is the Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO.
Joe Rogan has 18 million subscribers. Ballerina Farm has 10 million followers on Instagram, and 9.8 million on other platforms. So clearly, she’s holding her own in terms of influence.
It almost makes you wonder why women like her didn’t get a mention at Trump’s victory celebration. The snub almost seems kind of rude, actually!
Ballerina Farm’s MAGA moment is not particularly surprising to me—the signs have always been there and as I wrote about last summer, she rose to influencer fame on a wave of Christian Nationalism. Appealing to the alt-right crowd would prove to be wildly successful for the Ballerina Farm brand, just as it has been for Ivanka, J.D. Vance, and bros like Joe Rogan and many others.
And Ballerina Farm isn’t the only one of course, it’s just one of the biggest success stories. There are plenty of copycat influencers following the same savvy business model, Whether it’s other “soft life” tradwife influencers like Nara Smith, or celebrity Youtube antifeminist Hannah “Pearl” Davis—known to her 1.3 million followers as the female Andrew Tate. (Note the be-floraled blonde aesthetic still in action!).
What is interesting is how many people, including some feminists, are still loathe to denounce the ladies of the alt-right pipeline.
People who would openly acknowledge that Joe Rogan is a vampire squid on the face of humanity (no offense to the vampire squid), are more loathe to call out the MAGA “femis-phere.”
In fact, the same week that Hannah Neeleman appeared on the cover of alt-right propaganda rag Evie, the New York Times ran a downright fawning fangirl profile of her, asking: but what if she’s actually just a really good business person? Like, a tycoon??
Which…is not a question that anyone is asking about Joe Rogan, or the Nelk Boys, or Nick Fuentes, or any of the manosphere bros that are cashing in making a fortune on peddling alt-right ideologies.
Questions about whether Ballerina Farm is a feminist icon or a shill for the Christian far-right seem misplaced when said “feminist icon” appears in an alt-right magazine with the words “The Importance of Being Sexy” and “Why Society Needs Aspirational Beauty” super-imposed over her image.
(And all while she’s wearing a “raw milkmaid dress” ala RFK Jr. and his right-wing MAHA raw milk extremists). She’s definitely presenting as an icon of…something!
(Here’s Emily Amick’s excellent explainer on the raw milk weirdness in case you need it, btw)
(And for a deep live on the Raw Milkmaid dress, I can’t recommend this highly enough!)
Last week Emily Amick introduced a podcast on this Ballerina Farm debate by admitting that even she, a feminist who has written many critiques of influencers like Neeleman, finds the content bizarrely likeable: “You might be surprised by this, but I’m something of a Ballerina Farm-stan. I love her content. I love the aesthetic. I love the cooking. I want her dresses. I don’t want to come across as some kind of tradwife apologist here, but I completely understand the appeal.”
Amick speaks to why so many people, and especially women, might be drawn to her content because the appeal is real. “I’d love to live in a world where I can love Hannah’s content unfettered from concerns of the concerted attack on women’s rights in America. But in a time when we still have Martha, Ina and an infinite amount of lifestyle gurus on the internet, I know that giving her my clicks and eyeballs is giving power and purpose to the political strategy she is a part of,” Amick writes.
I find this relatable because I do the same thing. I am also a sucker for pretty things on the internet, even sometimes when they seem a bit off. Having come from actual Mormon pioneer polygamist wives, this particular tradwife aesthetic does not appeal to me. But have I occasionally coveted the MAHA clean girl aesthetic that comes with a side of RFK Jr. and low-key anti-vax vibes? Have I lingered over Hailey Bieber’s pink Pilates princess gear? I sure have. And who among us has not caved to a Goop purchase?? (Let she who has never overspent on French pharmacy products throw the first serum.)
And yet, there is something tricky going on when a brand like Ballerina Farm still evades criticism even when they do something really explicit, like say, out themselves in anti-feminist alt-right propaganda backed by MAGA mega-donor and J.D. Vance bestie Peter Thiel.
So, I have been trying to put my finger on why women content creators feeding the MAGA/alt-right pipeline women are able to fly more under the radar.
I think female influencers evade criticism not just because their content is pretty, but also because of the feminine power of appearing nice.
Ballerina Farm is a great case study in this because the brand is so, so nice. And here’s the tricky part: it seems not nice to say anything critical about something that seems nice! Case in point: Here is Neeleman, and she’s just out there, being nice, doing her thing, and crushing it with her floral dresses and her sourdough starter. And who is she hurting?
It’s all packaged as perfectly harmless and perfectly nice. (I get zero comments and DMs when I write anything critical about the manosphere—trolls notwithstanding. But tradwives or Ballerina Farm? The stans come out in force because it’s just not nice!).
To unpack how powerful the appearance of niceness is, you have to ask, what does “nice” mean? What are we talking about when we talk about a woman who is “nice”?
When we talk about a woman who is nice, we are really talking about a woman who is performing patriarchal femininity correctly.
When we talk about a woman who is not nice, we are talking about someone who is angry, who is critical, someone who is complaining, someone who raising her voice and talking too loud.
Someone who is nice is someone who is pleasing, who smiles. A nice woman is well dressed and nice to look at. She puts others’ needs above her own needs not just occasionally, but habitually. She’s doing caretaking for other people and she’s uncomplaining.
The problem with being nice is that when you’re being nice, you can’t stand up for anybody or anything—even yourself. Maybe especially yourself.
And this is why patriarchy likes nice women so much. “Nice” women will not stand up against injustice—not for anybody else, or themselves. They have to be self-betraying in order to remain pleasant, uncomplaining. To do otherwise is to cease being “nice.”
And that brings us back to brands like Ballerina Farm because that brand is so nice. And it’s hard even for me sometimes when I engage with the content—because it’s performing this version of niceness that I’m so familiar with, and I have been heavily conditioned to respond to in a positive way. In fact I’ve been conditioned not just to like it, but to be like it.
So what’s the cost of the “harmless” niceness of this kind of content, and its pipeline to Christian Nationalism and the alt-right? And who loses from that relationship while content creators cash in?
Who loses from that relationship and that performance of niceness is anyone who is harmed by the alt-right’s extremism, which trades on white nationalism, Christian supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and antisemitism, for starters.
And it’s worth thinking specifically about the women and girls that are harmed—the ones who are the very target audience for these creators.
Who loses from this performance of niceness? Rape victims who are forced to give birth due to abortion bans, including children as young as twelve. Pregnant women dying in record numbers and bleeding out in parking lots because of abortion bans. A whole generation of young women who are now seeing a rapist and criminal ascend to the highest levels of power with no consequences. And a whole generation of young men who are seeing that happen too, and teaching their female peers to fear them saying things like, “Your body, my choice,” or just internalizing it.
All of which is…not nice!
Can we lay the entire agenda of the alt-right at the feet of female influencers? Maybe not. But under the agonizing niceness of Ivanka, we got a rogue Supreme Court and we lost Roe.
What will we lose under the newest wave of nice women? That depends, in part, on our ability to call them out for what they are, and resist them.
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Further reading:
MATRIARCHY REPORT is written by Lane Anderson and Allison Lichter.
Lane Anderson is a writer, journalist, and Clinical Associate Professor at one of those universities for coastal elites. She has won fellowships and many SPJ awards for her writing on inequality and family social issues. She has an MFA from Columbia University. She was raised in Utah and lives in New York City with her partner and young daughter.
Allison Lichter is associate dean at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. She has been a writer, producer and editor at New York Public Radio and the Wall Street Journal. She was born and raised in Queens, and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
This is such great analysis! Love this whole piece and the finger it puts on who is harmed by all the performance of “niceness.”
“Who loses from that relationship and that performance of niceness is anyone who is harmed by the alt-right’s extremism, which trades on white nationalism, Christian supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and antisemitism, for starters.”
I have tried to articulate this before to my friends from different backgrounds. I call it the Midwest Nice*, which is this ability I see in the white, female, Christian ladies in my family and childhood region to smile and fawn while stepping on necks, upholding status quo, filibustering any progress. They craft such careful cover stories (I'm just a mama bear fighting for her babies! I just want my family to have a holiday without arguing! Your story is so sad but we can talk about that depressing stuff...later!!) it makes you doubt what you are seeing with your own eyes. But then you walk away from their glow and you realize it's all a front to keep you from challenging them.