Let Ballerina Farm Live

Instagram: Ballerina Farm

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.

The Utah-based influencer has become a repository for the collective stress, ennui, and anger of American mothers, even if she doesn’t seem to notice.

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.

However, last week the Times of London published a profile of Neeleman, finally asking many of the questions that countless internet pundits had been screaming about for years. The result has led to an interesting twist in the narrative surrounding Ballerina Farm—now she is no longer a villain, but a victim.

Because while Neeleman did answer a few questions about how she feels about the internet’s perception of her (she finds it hurtful but tries to ignore it, she doesn’t consider herself a “trad wife”), the most revealing parts of the profile were in writer Megan Agnew’s inability to have a real conversation with her subject. After writing that Neeleman kept being pulled away to tend to this or that child, leaving her husband, JetBlue heir Daniel, to do the talking, Agnew expressed frustration that she couldn’t get as deep with Neeleman as she had hoped.

Still, she got enough to make people’s heads spin. Some of the most salient details? Neeleman’s husband pulled strings at his father’s airline to sit next to her on a flight to ask her out, the couple doesn’t use birth control, Neeleman got married and pregnant while still training in ballet at Juilliard, effectively ending her career, and she had epidurals at a hospital with only two of her children because her husband “wasn’t with her” for those births. Perhaps the detail people have glommed onto the most was an anecdote from Daniel.

“Daniel says Neeleman sometimes gets so ill from exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week,” writes Agnew, noting that Neeleman does all the cooking, grocery shopping, and childcare for the family of 10 herself.

The reaction was swift, and the 180 on Neeleman was nearly head-spinning. For years, she had been decried as an almost sinister presence, a calculating businesswoman willingly selling an unrealistic version of motherhood for monetary and political gain. But now, many began to believe she was essentially a concubine, or, as one person put it, “vulnerable young woman” forced by a rich heir to become his “own personal incubator.”

Many very explicitly accused Daniel of abuse of his wife.

As someone in this space, I’ve sat by and watched as Neeleman has gone from an obscure and ultimately inconsequential influencer to a “queen of the trad wives” to now, a woman without agency who must be rescued by the collective power of femininity. And I have to wonder, when is it enough already?

Because amid all of the think pieces and TikToks and viral tweets and unending speculation and discourse, there was always very little truth. The real truth is that people were able to project whatever they wanted onto Neeleman. She was never the enemy, and she was never the problem. And faced with what appears to be clear-cut evidence that all of the fantasies spun about her were largely projections, there seems to be little reflection of how we got here. That maybe, using one woman as a collective dumping ground for our anger and frustration is unhealthy at best, and actively harmful at worst.

So now, is she a new cause to champion? I find it a tad rich that after turning Neeleman into a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern mom internet, there is now a collective drum beat to “save” her from the imagined hellscape of her life. Is Neeleman oppressed? Is she a victim? Is the queen of the trad wives locked in a tower from which we now must break her out of? Maybe, but that’s not up to us. Neeleman doesn’t owe us anything, really. You can follow her, or not. You can bake her bread and look at her cows and silently judge her behind your phone screen, or not. You can actually log off, and put your energy somewhere else that deserves it.

I’d like to think that everyone could maybe at this point, in the words of a wise person, “Leave Hannah alone.” Because if making her the enemy wasn’t helping her, constantly pontificating about how oppressed she is on the internet certainly isn’t going to either.

Originally Appeared on Glamour