On ‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,’ MomTok won’t say the A-word
Can you have true "sisterhood" when you're supposed to be a mom first?
It’s not surprising that Hulu’s reality show “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” closely follows the fertility and infertility journeys of its Mormon-ish stars. They are the influencers collectively known as MomTok: nine mostly white women between the ages of 23 and 33, many of whom had their first kid before they could legally drink.
To hear the women tell it, MomTok is about “sisterhood.” It’s for “women supporting women” and “modernizing the church.” That’s why, despite being loosely connected to the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, they’re skinny dipping, going to strip shows in Las Vegas, and throwing orgasm-themed parties. (The show exists because of the Mormon swinging drama exposed by its star, Taylor Frankie Paul.)
Going against the Mormon church’s stances makes up much of the show’s airtime, but there’s one issue that remains taboo: abortion.
In the fantasy world of MomTok, abortion doesn’t exist at all. No other issue related to sexuality is so obviously shadowbanned. Being queer comes a close second — some speculate there’s at least one lavender marriage in the cast — but it is at least acknowledged on the show, as in Taylor’s admission that she’s “kissed a lot of girls, actually,” including fellow MomToker Miranda McWhorter.
“Secret Lives” can wander into narratives about women who want to be pregnant but aren’t; it must tread carefully around women who are pregnant but don’t want to be. Mayci Neeley’s journey with IVF is televised. The camera goes into the hospital room where Whitney Leavitt delivers her third child, showing the birth behind some choice blurring. There’s a high-drama moment during a “pregnancy roulette” game, which ends with Demi Engemann in tears over her own infertility struggle.
Twenty-five-year-old Jen Affleck is the closest we get to broaching the abortion danger zone in season two, but the A-word isn’t on the table for her. The pregnancy happens with cosmically bad timing: Jen’s mustering up the courage to divorce her controlling husband, who she says has a gambling problem. Marital problems spill over into friendship problems when two of her friends believe her husband’s version of the story instead. That leaves Jen feeling deeply anxious, depressed, and alone when she finds out she’s pregnant.
“I’m not the person I want to be before bringing in another child,” she says tearfully during a confessional. Her unplanned pregnancy triggers a spiral into depression, which gets so bad that production has to cut her storyline halfway through the season, as she literally fights for her life behind the scenes. It’s hard to watch Jen’s despair without feeling like the pregnancy is a trap — she gets so close to divorcing her husband, only to stay for the sake of their next child.
She also isn’t the first cast member to face the baby-trap situation: Taylor, the one who confessed to swinging, is pregnancy-trapped in a plummeting relationship in season one, prolonging her misery as she’s expected, by both friends and family, to stay despite her partner’s cheating and lying.
The elephant in the room is that there was a solution. But for Jen and Taylor, whose unplanned pregnancies underpin much of the drama of the first two seasons, abortion isn’t even considered. With all the talk of “fighting the patriarchy” and “modernizing the church,” it’s easy to forget how deeply ingrained the abortion-is-murder argument is for women who have pretty much broken all of its other rules.
Can you have true female empowerment — the “sisterhood” MomTok is always talking about — when your entire existence is organized around men?
Birth control itself is not off-topic for the Mormon wives, and they all seem to have varying views on it. Whitney says her husband will be getting a vasectomy after the birth of their third and final child. When the rest of MomTok finds out Jen is pregnant despite her separation from her husband, one of them says disapprovingly, “It never is planned, but they don’t protect at all.”
Different attitudes toward birth control, coparenting, and childcare set up some climactic fights. Demi and Jessi Ngatikaura confront Jen about her “lies” about her husband, then Jen dishes up Demi’s own extramarital flirtation. In the penultimate episode, amid a broader fight over perceived social media slights, Demi confronts Taylor about how she treats the father of her child. She attempts to shame Taylor by bringing her son into the conversation, a move seen by the rest of the women as a step too far. Most of the drama happens between the women, but the presence of the men in their lives is always felt.
The fact that the show is organized around these conflicts reveals its true underlying tension. It’s the secret lives of Mormon wives, not women. Though many of them are no longer married, they are still tethered to men through their children. Too often, they end up siding with each other’s errant husbands — and therefore with the patriarchal church they were raised in, even if some of them are no longer active in it. That tees up the question that lives between the lines of “Secret Lives”: Can you have true female empowerment, the “sisterhood” MomTok is always talking about, when your entire womanhood is based on relationships with men?
The show doesn’t seem interested in answering that. So I’ll ask a simpler one: What does womanhood that doesn’t rely on men look like? For me, watching, the answer is easy: full bodily autonomy, the chance to have a child when you want one and to end a pregnancy when you don’t. MomTok isn’t there yet.