Matthew Rimsky (38:19)
So to switch gears a little bit, I just want to talk about the impossible and maybe contradictory nature of Ballerina Farm as a cultural commodity. You know, we had a good discussion about mystification last week and that's the primary mechanism I see at play here. Because the social and religious values as expressed in Hannah and Daniel's diy, like super fecundity lifestyle, mystify several layers of just material reality through a brand that, you know, I've said it already, I think they're ultimately engaged in a class war against poor people. So there's four levels see here. So like, first of all, just on a physical level, how impossible or unlikely is it for women in general to become grand multiparous, which is the term that's used for, you know, seven, eight or nine children to the extent that Hannah Nealman has, and not be suffering from all kinds of negative health outcomes, which she may be, but we're not seeing that. Secondly, on the interpersonal level, how contradictory is, is it to be an influencer getting paid for glorifying unpaid labor in the home while hiding the wage labor house help, and while, you know, telling women who don't have, or implying that women who, you know, don't have such means might have this lifestyle available to them. On the parenting level, what does it really look like to manage nine kids? I think you might have some thoughts about that, Julian. On the political level, and this is where I'll, I'll quote from Silvia Federici at the end. How contradictory is it for housework to be presented and performed as love? Federici argues that that's how it works in order for it to ensure that it remains unwaged. Okay, so the first part, you know, no one has that many babies and turns out like this. That's my little subtitle. And the caveat is, is that, you know, you guys know that I'm not the science person, but, but given what I've seen in my own family and the families around me and just sort of, you know, general family domestic knowledge from humanity, I'm like shocked by the idea of anyone having nine kids in 13 years. And so I wanted to dig into it. And the, you know, short form is that if we have clear information on Hannah's relatively painless births as she describes them and lack of complications, you know, she is doing something that Olympic athlete level rarity would be a good descriptor for. I think only a tiny minority of women wind up with outcomes like this. And within that minority we see, you know, friend of the Pod Bauhaus wife, Yolande Norris Clark, who after having had 11 free birth children, is now doing CrossFit every morning at 4am by her own account. Account. Now, this is part of this first contradiction. Women with off the charts genetic privilege that are selling really or representing extreme visions of women's reproductive work to other women who, if they had nine kids, would not be doing regular fashion shoots, postpartum workout reels, or making it seem like nothing had changed their ballerina physiques. So they are really performing a near impossible physicality. So across the board, women retain about 11 pounds above pre pregnancy weight at one year postpartum, 47% retain more than 10 pounds, 24% retain more than 20 pounds. And those weight gain numbers rise with multiple pregnancies and so do complications. So grand multiparity predicts twice the risk of postpartum hemorrhage, three times the risk of placenta previa. But the big one is bone density. You know, the loss can be between 1 and 9% per pregnancy and it is cumulative with elevated risk when inter pregnancy intervals are short. And they've been really short for Hana. So if you are poor, and most grand multiparous women actually are because they're from rural and religious communities with low education rates or restrictions on birth control, all of these risks go up. If you're black, lack they go up further. So Hannah's fertility mimics that of a kind of underclass, but with none of the consequences, you know, really she's, you know, not intentionally, of course, but she's glamorizing a physical life that can't really exist, you know, except for she's managing to do it. It's kind of a miracle when she delivers at home. She's glamorizing a health circumstance that's routinely dangerous for poor women. Okay, so part two, the economic model that's sort of proposed or represented by the tradwife context is also not real. And this comes from comments made by Caroline Klein, who's the assistant director of the center for Global Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University. And she's speaking to Kuer while Tradwife content promotes, sometimes explicitly, often not at all explicitly, the idea of women being wives and mothers and being in the home and leaving the breadwinning to their husbands. The most ironic thing is that the most popular trad wife influencers are actually bringing in pretty excellent incomes from their influencer work. And so some people have kind of pointed out that these tradwife influencers are making money by telling other women not to make money money, which is mind bending.
