When you’re inquisitive about trendy magnificence requirements, the social worth of femininity, and the fetishization of moms in American tradition, Hulu’s current actuality present The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is a wealthy, chaotic product. I watched the complete sequence 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 celebrities of the present are younger wives and moms in Utah who’ve turn into notable in a nook of the web referred to as MomTok; their on-line aspect hustles embrace performing 20-second group dances and lip-syncing to clips from previous films, the monetary success of which has helped them eclipse their husbands as earners. As an encapsulation of Twenty first-century womanhood, it’s nearly 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 capable of determine whether or not ladies ought 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 possibly can say plenty of us in MomTok look related … We’re simply going off primarily based [on] what’s trending,” Mayci (28, two youngsters) explains within the first episode. The digicam cuts to the ladies filming a video. “Mayci, I want you to twerk your ass off, as exhausting as you may,” Jen (24, two youngsters) shrieks. Jessi (31, two youngsters) feedback on the amount of Jen’s cleavage, amplified by her breastfeeding clothes. Every lady has waist-length, barrel-curled hair and enamel as white as Mentos; most put on denims and a decent Lycra high. No kids are in sight. What we’re watching isn’t the form of dreamy domesticity that conventional momfluencers put up 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 usually aren’t, like getting indignant and even in search of political energy, so long as it’s understood that no matter they’re doing is on another person’s behalf. In a graduation handle to a conservative Catholic school earlier this yr, 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 towards a few of the strictures of the Mormon Church, reside out this recommendation to a curiously literal diploma. They’re financially supporting their husbands as homemakers, due to social media. “Who’s presently, like, the breadwinner at house?” Demi (30, one youngster) asks at one level. “I feel all of us?” Mayci replies. This seems to be like progress—ladies earning money, at house, with the pliability to set their very own schedule and choose 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 acquired 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 “a variety of current productions depict existence and practices blatantly inconsistent with the teachings of the church,” seemingly in reference to a extensively publicized scandal involving one solid member that’s the least attention-grabbing a part of the sequence.) Late within the season, Demi plans a ladies’ 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—whilst a joke—to see a male dance present. He threatens to take their youngsters and divorce her. “The sort of conduct is strictly what MomTok is attempting to interrupt in our LDS religion,” Demi tells the digicam. “We’re not doing this anymore.”
However whilst they reject what they see because the suffocating confines of 1 establishment for ladies, they’re bolstering one other. The pursuit of a sure form of extremely maintained magnificence for all eight ladies on the present appears to dominate all the pieces 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 fuel administered to ease the ache of the injections appears misplaced on everybody. In a distinct episode, Jessi tells her pals 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 now warning towards self-importance); Salt Lake Metropolis has extra plastic surgeons per resident than Los Angeles.
“We wanna make it possible for 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 really shocking that [the Church doesn’t] actually care about cosmetic surgery?” The second underscores the area for interpretive stress 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 approach: as proof of a particular 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 delivery 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 needed from ladies. Those that can exude sexuality from the security of the home sphere have lengthy been capable of 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 youngsters younger, and I really like my infants to loss of life, however they screwed up my physique, and I needed to really feel sizzling once more,” she mentioned. Her co-star Demi added, “That’s simply the Utah approach!”
Ladies who don’t settle for—or can’t meet—these phrases are, tellingly, much less seen on the present, and thus much less capable of leverage their new fame. Mikayla (24, three kids), a doe-eyed, strikingly lovely lady who struggles with a continual sickness that causes pores and skin flare-ups will get sidelined; she has no major 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 kids 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 need 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 potential for a mom’s desirability and affect—and of a broader sisterhood. They’re, except the one inventory villain, Whitney (31, two kids), impossibly likable, humorous and scrappy and unserious. They consistently 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 adjusting folks’s attitudes about Mormon ladies—and making area for them to be bolder and extra outspoken than the norm. However all the ladies on the present appear to have wholly absorbed the concept that to be heard as moms in America, you first should be seen, in high-definition, expensively augmented perfection.
In her 1991 e-book, The Magnificence Fable, Naomi Wolf famous that the proliferation of sexualized photographs 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 remodeled: a bulwark of reassurance towards the flood of change.” The identical dynamics have since been amplified a thousandfold on TikTok, the place you will 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, now not can handle.” The lifelong mission of self-maintenance was, for ladies, a distraction from recognizing the issues we actually want. Now it’s essentially the most legitimate and laudable type of labor.
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