Is it influencer critique, or is it misogyny?
Alert: I'm posting while angry!
I wasn’t planning on publishing anything here until I finish a bigger piece I’ve been working on for a while, but then this post — “We Need to Discuss the Ballerina Farm Diet,” by Virginia Sole-Smith and Sara Petersen — hit my inbox. I’m really pissed off about it. Writing While Pissed can often backfire, but I find it important to interrogate why I’m pissed off, and writing usually helps me do that. I also am interested to hear what you think of it. Here’s the Note I fired off earlier.
I’ve followed Virginia Sole-Smith’s work for a long time. I’ve been a paid subscriber to her newsletter. I’ve written pieces in response to her work before…
… not as some kind of takedown (nor is this piece, despite my ire. Plus, she’s got a far bigger audience than me, so no “takedown” is possible), but as what I hope is a contribution to a complex conversation about body and diet culture that she has been driving for years. I respect very much what she’s trying to do: interrogate and dismantle systems and beliefs that have been harming mostly women for decades. In that sense, we’re on the same side.
But in this latest piece Virginia and Sara are, as another writer who DM’d me put it, “just using influencers to express internalized misogyny.” The piece takes aim at the fact that Hannah Neeleman, the controversial influencer known online as Ballerina Farm, is posting about eating more protein, because eating more protein is apparently a Diet in Disguise and a signal that someone is a victim of and trapped eternally in diet culture, because according to Virginia everything — including heterosexual marriage and buying less — is “a diet.”1
(If you know nothing about Ballerina Farm, start here:)
Virginia and Sara pick apart Hannah’s Instagram stories about her ~ protein journey ~ by baselessly suggesting that she’s pivoting to bodybuilding, that her efforts are connected to religious fanaticism (they quote some biblical passage about strong arms that Hannah has said nothing about), that she’s FORCING herself to eat enough protein — it’s all an absolutely stunning display of assumptions. It’s also misguided about protein, which I simply must point out as a Protein Girlie myself:
Says Virginia:
“She was trying to eat a gram of protein for every pound of body weight. Which is an ENORMOUS goal, even for a thin person.”
It’s not, in fact. I’ll use myself as an example: I eat five or six times a day. Some of my “meals” are meal meals (a typical plated dinner), some are more like snacks (some berries and turkey or something). If Hannah weighs, say, 120 pounds, she could eat 20 grams of protein per “meal” and hit her goal. One single container of Greek yogurt has 17 grams. One of those little individual hummus packs has 10. One chicken breast can have more than 40. Most protein powders have 20 per scoop. It adds up. You don’t have to do this, but this is doable, my friends.2 3
Virginia and Sara go on to tear apart the actions of Hannah — a woman they don’t know and only see via Hannah’s curated social media — under the guise of, I don’t know, combatting diet culture or something:
“I’m thinking of Ballerina Farm and the way she always enthusiastically digs into her starchy, meaty, homemade meals.”
It’s a “performance of food enjoyment,” they say. Her enthusiasm is fake, surely. She probably spits it out! She probably only eats that one tablespoon of food and then starves herself for the rest of the day! Virginia and Sara know all this because Giada De Laurentiis once said she only eats a little ramekin of the food she cooks, so what one woman in history has done is what all women do!
Is the suggestion here that unless we can see that a woman is eating a BIG ENOUGH meal, one that PROVES TO US SHE ISN’T DIETING, she doesn’t really like eating? This plays into the suspicion and disbelief our culture has about everything women do regarding food — if you’re fat, it’s definitely because you secretly gorge yourself on cake every day and you can’t convince us otherwise; if you’re thin, it’s because you secretly never eat and you can’t convince us otherwise — and look, we made a whole Instagram about it!
Also, all women who are thin are definitely suffering:
“You know Lauren Graham was probably dieting like mad to be shot next to a younger, thinner Alexis Bledel for seven seasons. You know Shannon Doherty was ravenously eating that cheeseburger because it was her first meal in weeks.”
How is this anything but petty gossip? How is this in accordance with body acceptance movements that encourage us to not comment on other people’s bodies? How does this do anything but perpetuate the idea that women are locked into an existential crisis of comparison to and competition with one another? My god, please, go revel in some sisterhood that doesn’t involve talking shit about other women, before it’s too late! Go get a little drunk at a bar and run into another drunk girl in the bathroom who tells you she likes your purse! Visit the National Museum of Women in the Arts, there’s a new exhibition on! Watch the “My Motherboard, My Self” episode of Sex and the City, which makes me cry even thinking about it!4 Please, anything!
If you took to the internet to declare you “knew” I used to starve myself for weeks and that’s why I ate a hamburger with gusto — not because, you know, hamburgers are good — I’d be seeing you in court and in hell. Once again, I’m very sorry to tell you this, but some people really do find it easier to be thinner, and that’s pretty much their natural state. I encourage you to just get over that, not because you’re foolish for letting it bother you, but because I want you to be free.
Sara also takes aim at exercise in general:
“I’m one of those people who (bitchily!)5 cringes over couples working out together. I just feel like there’s so much danger of mansplaining happening.”
I don’t even know what to say about the suggestion here, which seems to be that in exercise contexts men are always jerks and women are always meek. I guess I’ll just tell you that recently I was telling my husband how the right way to hit your glutes instead of your quads during split squats is to think “escalator, not elevator,” which I saw on the Instagram of a woman trainer who has built herself a fitness empire. I explained it and demonstrated it. Now he knows. Because I mansplained it to him. 💁🏻♀️
Here’s another reason I’m pissed, since I’ve got to be honest: I feel called out, because I eat a lot of protein, partly because protein helps me be strong, but also because protein helps me stay leaner than I used to be. Wanting to stay leaner is something Virginia seems to think is not worth the ostensible torture, is stupid, is shallow, is evident of self-harm, etc., and even though I don’t agree that’s all necessarily true for me or anyone, it’s uncomfortable to feel that someone who is a major player in the health and wellness space of which I’m trying to be part is taking aim at something I also do. I feel called out for doing something “wrong.”
But that’s my damage, and no one else is responsible for that. I have to direct my emotions only at what is the actual problem, and it’s this: So much of what’s going on in the anti-diet/body positive/whatever spaces seems to be less about healing ourselves from within and more about calling other people out. So many women in these spaces are scrutinizing, policing, judging, and shaming other women. People with big platforms could be talking about how to break free from harmful attitudes around bodies but are instead using them to tee-hee about how ridiculous other women are. They could be directing their emotions at the actual problems, too, but because our body culture problems are so big, it’s easier to just take aim at the influencers. It’s not helping any of us, though. It’s making things worse. It’s making us mean. We need to recalibrate.
I’m sure Virginia and Sara feel they are “calling out” celebrity culture, and the toxicity of Hollywood, and diet culture. But there is a way to attack the systems and larger forces that can harm women (and everyone) without going after individuals. Ballerina Farm is not the problem. We don’t even know that she has a problem. I think the woman’s just Built Different™ and so life is better for her than it is for me and aw shucks, that sucks, but what am I gonna do? Gossip about her body and eating habits because it makes me feel better about my comparatively less hot body and face? Haven’t we all learned that that … doesn’t work? I guess if it gets you more reads, clicks, and subscribers, then it does work for your bottom line. But to treat another woman this way, even someone who you think is just some asshole influencer, in a culture that already treats women so terribly — does it work for your soul?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If you allow everything in your life to be tainted by the toxic sludge of diet culture, if everything you do and see and think about is akin to a diet … it’s kind of like you’re letting diet culture rule your whole life.
You know what pisses me off? When people who admittedly don’t like to exercise lead others to believe that a way of eating that’s tremendously beneficial for building strength is ENORMOUS and CRAZY and might as well be IMPOSSIBLE. Couldn’t be me! I believe in women’s ability to eat and train for growth without inadvertently harming themselves :)
Sometimes I wonder if people think it’s not doable because they’re not eating enough in general, so when they do have a meal they think they have to have 100 grams of protein at once. This is why I’m a big fan of basically eating all day, like a little pygmy shrew.
When Miranda tries on bras and the kindly lady helps her and gives her a hug … stop! My mascara!
Well, I’m glad you admitted it’s bitchy, I guess.
Great points. There’s so much overcorrecting for diet/beauty culture & we’re quick to forget that food & beauty exist outside of their cooptation too!!
Thanks for this. I had to unsubscribe from Burnt Toast because it got to be just TOO MUCH. I felt like I was being ignorant by disagreeing with some of her takes. Now I feel less alone!