The Contending’s Megan McLachlan believes The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is as hopeful as it is feminist.
I have a confession: I have never watched a Housewives show. I never felt the need to, and as much as I’d like to start now, it feels too late. I’ve missed too many iconic pop culture moments in real time.
So with Hulu’s launch of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, I knew I wanted to jump on this train as it was leaving the station. After all, it’s a post-Emmys lull. Time for swinging sex scandals and #MomTok drama. Break out the Poppi soda! (Note: For a brief time, I thought #MomTok was “Montauk” and was confused).
I wasn’t sure what to make of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives at first. Is it George Cukor’s The Women for Gen Z? (It wasn’t until Taylor’s verbally abusive baby daddy Dakota showed up that I realized this show does have men in it.)
No. It’s more like The Stepford Wives. Rows and rows of houses that look exactly the same. Women that look EXACTLY the same (I thought Taylor and Jen Affleck were the same person for an episode). B-roll footage of Whitney’s neighborhood made me want to crawl up the walls, with snow-covered mountains hugging the community like a creepy religious uncle. There’s nowhere to go. It’s like you’re living in a snow globe. And that’s how women like Taylor feel—or felt—in their marriages. It’s probably what spurred her to cause the major “scandal” of the series: revealing that she and her ex-husband were swingers within the religious community.
The show is reminiscent of a Twilight Zone episode in the way it depicts this “perfect” life (well, “perfect” to J.D. Vance). Like Palm Springs in Don’t Worry Darling, Utah Mormonism plays host to an experiment in traditional gender roles. Women like Layla get married when they’re 17 and crank out kids before they’re able to legally drink (which they don’t do anyway because they don’t believe in it — thus, the soda).
But just as Mentos makes soda explode — and the Stepford Wives discover that one robot wife — the special element that completely alters the chemistry of this community is social media and TikTok. On #MomTok, the women can express themselves in ways they can’t in their religious community. They can be seen as more than mothers. And the money they make from it has made them the muthafuckin’ breadwinners of their families.
In one of the most powerful moments of the series, Whitney visits her mother and sister, seeking permission to market vibrators on her social media account. Whitney recalls reading a verse as a young girl that described sex as comparable to “murder” and reveals she didn’t have the “sex talk” before she got married to her husband.
“My wedding night should have come from a horror movie,” she says. “That was a horrible, horrible night. It was a conversation that we never had.”
She tells her mother that she would like to market the vibrators to empower women and dismantle the shame around needing tools to enjoy intimacy.
“I’m not sure how I feel about that,” says her mother. “I think when you’re seeking pleasure, it can just get out of hand.”
“You should have taught me how to have a baby,” counters Whitney.
“Obviously, you figured it out.”
It’s a chilling, devastating moment in a series that shouldn’t go so deep. Whitney admits this new generation is changing the way they do things and even pities her mother who was raised in a time when Mormon women didn’t talk about sex.
Despite all the unnecessary-but-wholly-necessary drama, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is an incredibly hopeful and fiercely feminist reality series. It feels like an alternate universe of another Hulu series, The Handmaid’s Tale. It proves that even when you keep women under puritanical thumbs, they’ll still find ways to resist.
The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is streaming on Hulu.
