If you happen to’re interested by fashionable magnificence requirements, the social worth of femininity, and the fetishization of moms in American tradition, Hulu’s latest actuality present The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is a wealthy, chaotic product. I watched your complete collection in a few days, gasping and Googling, shriveling inwardly each time I caught a glimpse of my haggard self within the mirror in contrast with these lustrous, bronzed, cosmetically enhanced ladies. The celebs of the present are younger wives and moms in Utah who’ve turn out to be notable in a nook of the web referred to as MomTok; their on-line facet hustles embrace performing 20-second group dances and lip-syncing to clips from outdated films, the monetary success of which has helped them eclipse their husbands as earners. As an encapsulation of Twenty first-century womanhood, it’s virtually too on the nostril: a discordant jumble of feminist beliefs, branded domesticity, and lip filler.
The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is a logical finish level for lifestyle-focused actuality tv, which has by no means fairly been in a position to resolve whether or not ladies needs to be gyrating on a pole or devoutly elevating a dozen towheaded kids. This present bravely asks: Why not each? “We’re all mothers; we’re all Mormons. I suppose you could possibly say a variety of us in MomTok look related … We’re simply going off primarily based [on] what’s trending,” Mayci (28, two children) explains within the first episode. The digicam cuts to the ladies filming a video. “Mayci, I would like you to twerk your ass off, as exhausting as you possibly can,” Jen (24, two children) shrieks. Jessi (31, two children) feedback on the amount of Jen’s cleavage, amplified by her breastfeeding clothes. Every girl has waist-length, barrel-curled hair and tooth as white as Mentos; most put on denims and a good Lycra high. No kids are in sight. What we’re watching isn’t the type of dreamy domesticity that conventional momfluencers publish on Instagram. It’s one thing extra attention-grabbing: the conflation of “motherhood” as an identification with desirability, fertility, and sexual energy.
America loves moms greater than ladies, an inclination the 2024 election has demonstrated in abundance. Moms are given license to do issues that different ladies typically aren’t, like getting offended and even looking for political energy, so long as it’s understood that no matter they’re doing is on another person’s behalf. In a graduation deal with to a conservative Catholic school earlier this 12 months, the Kansas Metropolis Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker even suggested the feminine graduates in his viewers to forgo careers altogether and concentrate on supporting their husbands as homemakers. The ladies of MomTok, whereas pushing again in opposition to a few of the strictures of the Mormon Church, live out this recommendation to a curiously literal diploma. They’re financially supporting their husbands as homemakers, due to social media. “Who’s at the moment, like, the breadwinner at house?” Demi (30, one youngster) asks at one level. “I feel all of us?” Mayci replies. This appears to be like like progress—ladies earning money, at house, with the pliability to set their very own schedule and decide their very own tasks. However underlying this portrait is a darker actuality: The one ladies who get to succeed at this type of “work” are those who look the half.
The ladies of MomTok aren’t tradwives, the smock-wearing, Aga range–warmed, calf-snuggling efficiency artists who fascinate and perplex us on social media. The Secret Lives moms flirt and assert their independence and critique the lads who attempt to management them. Some bought married as youngsters after unplanned pregnancies; a number of are divorced. (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued a assertion forward of the present’s launch noting that “various latest productions depict life and practices blatantly inconsistent with the teachings of the church,” seemingly in reference to a extensively publicized scandal involving one forged member that’s the least attention-grabbing a part of the collection.) Late within the season, Demi plans a women’ journey to Las Vegas that features VIP tickets to Chippendales, which prompts an alarming battle between the extra conventional Jen and her husband, Zac, whom she’s supported via school and is about to fund via medical college. Zac, regardless of having been given $2,500 by his spouse to gamble on the journey, is livid that she’d agree—at the same time as a joke—to see a male dance present. He threatens to take their children and divorce her. “Such a conduct is strictly what MomTok is making an attempt to interrupt in our LDS religion,” Demi tells the digicam. “We’re not doing this anymore.”
However at the same time as they reject what they see because the suffocating confines of 1 establishment for ladies, they’re bolstering one other. The pursuit of a sure type of extremely maintained magnificence for all eight ladies on the present appears to dominate every part else. In a single episode, whereas getting Botox injections, a number of of the ladies gossip, semi-scandalized, about the truth that Jessi drank alcohol from a flask at Zac’s commencement social gathering; the irony that they’re in that second excessive on laughing gasoline administered to ease the ache of the injections appears misplaced on everybody. In a distinct episode, Jessi tells her mates that she’s getting a labiaplasty, which she refers to as “a mommy makeover,” as a result of childbirth has modified the form and look of her vulva. Cosmetic surgery, Mayci explains, is tacitly sanctioned by the LDS Church (although LDS leaders right this moment warning in opposition to vainness); Salt Lake Metropolis has extra plastic surgeons per resident than Los Angeles.
“We wanna guarantee that we’re taking good care of our our bodies, and we’re all the time informed that our physique is a temple,” Mayci provides throughout the Botox episode. “It’s truly stunning that [the Church doesn’t] actually care about cosmetic surgery?” The second underscores the area for interpretive pressure inside a religion that discourages toxins whereas prizing magnificence in all its kinds as a mirrored image of morality and a supply of happiness. And but it’s exhausting to not learn this present one other manner: as proof of a selected on-line tradition that encourages ladies to bear kids whereas additionally requiring them to erase the seen proof of their pregnancies. The bodily toll of giving beginning is roofed up, made as inconspicuous as the kids who’ve left these identical marks. That these moms be lovely and fascinating on this realm is paramount.
In a single sense, that is what actuality tv has all the time wished from ladies. Those that can exude sexuality from the protection of the home sphere have lengthy been in a position to construct profitable companies within the course of. In 2022, a author for Bustle counted 52 separate magnificence strains launched by stars of the Actual Housewives franchise, who leveraged their fame to promote perfumes, wigs, nail polish, “firming lotion,” and false eyelashes. However the Secret Lives stars are notable for the way intricately their manufacturers are enmeshed with fertility—not the mundane actuality of day-to-day motherhood however the symbolic energy of sexual eligibility and maternal authority. On Secret Lives, Mayci is seen launching Child Mama, a line of “natal dietary supplements” for ladies. Nobody on the present appears to query the primacy of magnificence. After filming wrapped, Layla (22, two kids) revealed in a podcast interview that she’s had six separate beauty procedures over 4 months. “I had children younger, and I like my infants to dying, however they screwed up my physique, and I wished to really feel sizzling once more,” she stated. Her co-star Demi added, “That’s simply the Utah manner!”
Girls who don’t settle for—or can’t meet—these phrases are, tellingly, much less seen on the present, and thus much less in a position to leverage their new fame. Mikayla (24, three kids), a doe-eyed, strikingly lovely girl who struggles with a continual sickness that causes pores and skin flare-ups will get sidelined; she has no main storylines of her personal, and far much less display screen time than the others. This gravitation towards extra visibly perfected stars stems maybe from the aspirational ideally suited that momfluencers characterize, as Sara Petersen writes in her 2023 e-book, Momfluenced. “As moms, our on a regular basis lives are filled with gritty motherhood rawness, of youngsters refusing to put on snow pants in blizzards, or the pressure of holding again tears and curses upon stepping on one other fucking Lego.” She provides, “Why would we wish to spend our spare time consuming another person’s rawness after we’re sick and uninterested in our personal?”
The ladies of MomTok are enthralling as a result of they symbolize the opportunity of a mom’s desirability and affect—and of a broader sisterhood. They’re, apart from the one inventory villain, Whitney (31, two kids), impossibly likable, humorous and scrappy and unserious. They continually invoke their sliver of the web as a pillar of friendship and prosperity—as in “I actually need this MomTok group to outlive,” and “We have to get again to what MomTok was earlier than all this occurred.” Taylor (30, three kids) says that the group constructed its following within the hope of fixing folks’s attitudes about Mormon ladies—and making area for them to be bolder and extra outspoken than the norm. However the entire ladies on the present appear to have wholly absorbed the concept to be heard as moms in America, you first need to be seen, in high-definition, expensively augmented perfection.
In her 1991 e-book, The Magnificence Fantasy, Naomi Wolf famous that the proliferation of sexualized photos of ladies in music movies and tv and magazines towards the top of the twentieth century represented “a collective reactionary hallucination willed into being by each women and men shocked and disoriented by the rapidity with which gender relations have been reworked: a bulwark of reassurance in opposition to the flood of change.” The identical dynamics have since been amplified a thousandfold on TikTok, the place you might have exactly one second to hook somebody who’s idly scrolling. The politics of visibility are extra loaded than ever. Magnificence, as Wolf wrote a long time in the past, has absolutely taken over “the work of social coercion that myths about motherhood, domesticity, chastity, and passivity, not can handle.” The lifelong undertaking of self-maintenance was once, for ladies, a distraction from recognizing the issues we actually want. Now it’s probably the most legitimate and laudable type of labor.
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