MomTok and the "Fleshy, Messy, and Indeterminant Stuff of Everyday Life"
A few thoughts on Hulu's The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives
“Social reproduction is the fleshy, messy, and indeterminate stuff of everyday life.”
The feminist geographer Cindi Katz argued that our entire economic system and the social relationships that undergird and sustain that (think, workers and bosses, knowledge workers and manual workers, parents and children, students and teachers!) depend on what she called the “fleshy, messy, and indeterminate stuff of life.” Think: care work. Changing diapers. Having sex. Breaking up. Teaching kids what’s right and wrong. Looking for new jobs. Sharing your crappy salary with your coworkers. Dating and getting married. Arguing and leaving things unsettled. People joining religions and leaving them. It’s fleshy. It’s messy. And it doesn’t always lead to a clear, definitive conclusion with a nice bow wrapped around it.
I’ve always been interested in the conflicts playing out at that fleshy, messy, indeterminate level of life, and how they either reproduce or alter the larger social and economic systems we live with. That stuff may look like it’s just everyday human drama, and when it’s on TV, we might say it’s trash. But personally, I love to dive in and make sense of what exactly is going on. What are people trying to take with them from the social order as they found it and what are they trying to leave behind?
I opened this Substack with a post laying out my interests and my questions, and I promised that I would not be writing about trad wives, mostly because they’re a tiny fraction of a tiny group of people resisting the new and messy contemporary family lives most of us now occupy. I want to write about the non-trads.
Enter the wives and mothers of MomTok, a group of Mormon-identifying women pushing boundaries around modesty, sexuality, and gender roles, one silly TikTok video at a time. Oh, and did you hear about the “soft swinging”? Talk about fleshy and messy! I wrote about the new unscripted show about them, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, over at Slate.
Hulu’s new unscripted series The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives picks up on the #MomTok drama soon after the swinging scandal became public. “So, Taylor,” a producer off-screen asks in a testimonial in the opening moments, “tell us how a couple of Mormon moms getting together, making TikToks, suddenly turns into this crazy swinging sex scandal?” (Russell M. Nelson, the current president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has in recent years objected to being labeled Mormon, but many members of the religion continue to self-identify as Mormons, and the show’s cast members and producers use the term often.)
The women’s increased visibility since the show premiered and became a big hit for Hulu has led to frequent judgment online, especially from onlookers close to home who object to the women’s claiming of the Mormon mantle. The show explores the central tension between the social capital the women seek through adherence to traditional Mormon standards, in a state where Mormonism is the only real path to social acceptance, and the actual capital they have at their fingertips through their global followings on TikTok. But Secret Lives has also prompted a debate about contemporary Mormonism and whether the mainstream church’s central bureaucracy and its most vocal followers can and should be able to control what it means to be Mormon.
In recent years, a slew of LDS-themed reality shows (including Bravo’s Real Housewives of Salt Lake City and TLC’s Sister Wives) and documentaries (like Netflix’s Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey and Hulu’s Mormon No More) has captured the attention of curious national audiences. These other series have typically focused either on ex-Mormons or on those who are involved in fundamentalist offshoots of the LDS church known for their contemporary practice of polygamy. Secret Lives offers a window into the sometimes messy lives of people who are active members of the mainstream church, at a time when its fundamental teachings are less and less mainstream. If it took the salacious tale of #MomTok swingers to get us here, so be it.
It is a show about a particular subculture, one I know intimately and think and write about often, as a former Mormon and a current Utah resident. But for several decades, mainstream Mormonism both reflected and projected the essence of traditional family values far beyond Mormonism, and found itself in lockstep alignment with American conservatism. But there’s a realignment underway, as Republicans lose the automatic mantle of being the family values part, as religiosity across the U.S. declines, and as Mormons themselves question and resist the old patriarchal order.
So what’s playing out in Mormonism also represents something bigger in the American conversation about the future of gender and the family, and the disconnect between traditional moralities and the material realities of most of our lives. Those debates don’t always take the shape of neat op-eds or clear and coherent speeches at feminist rallies. More often, they’re in the fleshy, messy, and indeterminate stuff of life.