Jamie Loftus

It reminds me a lot of Friend of the Pod, Max Fisher's book, The Chaos Machine, in which he fully illustrates the ways in which modern algorithms are designed to enrage. That's why we have so many social media stories that are rooted in backlash and then backlash to the backlash.

Tradwife narratives fall neatly into this pattern because for every bit of praise, there's an essay that's written in stark disagreement. So why is this content so popular in the last few years?

While these accounts have millions upon millions of followers who view the content as soothing or aspirational, there are plenty of modern moms who are completely fucking baffled by it. Because I've engaged with so much of this content that my algorithm will never bounce back, I feel comfortable saying that tradwife content is often a lot about subtext, right?

Projecting a message without explicitly stating it. Maybe the 50s were a great time for women. Maybe we need to bring it back. But there's a sense of encouraging to submit to the status quo. A status quo that existed before a lot of necessary civil rights were fought for. But online now. Whew, trad wives, man. But let's bring it back to the Mormon side of this content specifically.

Because, as we're trying to get to the bottom of, Mormons have found a lot of success in this space. Momtalkers are far from the only prominent Mormon content creators dominating social media today. The most popular, and so by extension the most embroiled in controversy, is the second major Mormon influencer story of the summer, Ballerina Farm. More when we come back. Welcome back to 16th Minute.

The more I learned about tradwives, the more it became obvious that they developed in response to the capitalism is for girls to actually slay rhetoric of the mid 2010s. But like, is it that different when you're a tradwife entrepreneur? It kind of seems like you're doing the same thing. But the thing that you're selling is that you're not actually doing the thing that I'm watching you doing.

And when we left off, we were talking about the most famous Mormon influencer on the scene today. Ballerina Farm, where do we begin? All my male listeners are getting like a nosebleed. Ballerina Farm is the username for a Mormon woman named Hannah Nealman, whose follower count on Instagram currently sits at 10 million.

She was raised in the LDS and was a tremendously talented ballerina who got into and graduated from Juilliard. And she's cited over and over that she was the first undergrad in modern history to be pregnant while still at Juilliard. Because while there, she got married to fellow Mormon Daniel Nealman in 2011, the year before she graduated.

So both the Nealmans grew up in big, devout Utah Mormon families. Hannah was one of nine, Daniel was one of 10. They got engaged after only three weeks. And while Hannah was still in college, she also started competing in beauty pageants. She started with Miss New York and then re-entered the space after getting married and having kids. Because Hannah does not stay a ballerina.

After graduation, Hannah and Daniel moved to England for a semester at Cambridge, then Utah, so Daniel could finish his degree at Brigham Young University, and then to Brazil, where Daniel worked as the director of his father's security company for a few years. Because it must be said, financially, these are incredibly privileged people. Daniel's father founded JetBlue, dude. They've got money.

And he's so Mormon that he worked on Mitt Romney's failed presidential campaign in 2012. But Daniel's dream is to move back to Utah and live on a farm. And they finally do so in 2017, buying the eponymous Ballerina Farm in 2018. By the time they moved on to the 328-acre farm, they had four kids.

And when they moved onto the farm, Hannah Nealman's online brand as a Mormon wife was well-established, but significantly less successful. Hannah started her social media journey as a mom influencer on a blog called We Took the Train in early 2013, shortly after the birth of her first child, Henry, and her college graduation.

And it's interesting that she intersects with a completely different era of successful Mormon online influencers. Because in the 2000s into the early 2010s, Mormon mommy blogs were a thing. The Mormon mommy blogger pipeline was popular for as long as blogs were popular. And mommy bloggers in general have always enjoyed massive success and usually adapt to new social media platforms pretty easily.

I'd recommend Sarah Peterson's book, Momfluenced, for more on this topic. Because mommy blogging was popular from the very dawn of social media, but it was very different than the trad wife content that we see today. There was a lot more emphasis on writing over visuals, and the writing tended to be more confessional. Writer Catherine Gieser Morton has been covering this space for a long time.

I'm quoting here from a New York Times column called Did Moms Exist Before Social Media? from 2020, where she mentions how Mormon women entering the mommy blog space changed it.

Early successful Mormon or ex-Mormon mommy bloggers included Heather Armstrong of Doocy, Amber Fillerup Davis, and Love Taza, a.k.a. Naomi Davis. Around this same time, successful family bloggers like Shay Carl and his family become really popular on YouTube in the late aughts into the early 2010s.

In fact, Carl's child Brock was considered to be the first Truman baby, as in the Truman Show, as in a child whose life was documented from moment one to a massive social media audience. Scary! This hyper-vulnerable mommy blog stuff is considered pretty old school now.

At the time, Mormon mommy bloggers were a part of the coined blogger knackle community, with personalities like Stephanie Nielsen of the NeNe Dialogues and C. Jane Kendrick of C. Jane Enjoy It serving as early examples for their crossover appeal outside of the religion. There was even an award system developed for successful blogger knuckle publications called the Niblets.

This went from 2005 to 2017. And bloggers who were particularly good at spreading Mormon values online got a trophy. And I I don't know if you feel the same way, but I was really surprised because I thought of Mormon culture as so conservative in its gender roles that actively encouraging women to speak at all would be a non-starter. But that's not true at all.

If talks given by Mormon leaders during the early blogging era are to be believed, These blogs, blogs, etc., were viewed to be an extension of the Mormon mission and a way to get the word out. I'm pulling this from an LDS news post from 2007.