It makes a lot of sense that the lives of popular TikTok stars would serve as irresistible fodder for reality television. The combination of attention-courting, attractive-looking subjects experiencing sudden, tenuous fame, and the tensions that arise from the panopticon-like social-media showground in which they operate, tends to make for diverting drama. (The fact that these figures are already I.P. with a proven track record doesn’t hurt.) In recent years, we’ve had Netflix’s “Hype House,” which followed a gang of content-creating youth, beefing and gyrating day in and day out in a Ventura County McMansion share, and Hulu’s “The D’Amelio Show,” which charted the challenges that the influencer sisters Charli and Dixie D’Amelio faced after moving to Los Angeles to pursue new heights of social-media success.
And now we have the eight-part series “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” also on Hulu, which focusses on a clutch of Utah women who are, to a greater or lesser extent, affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and also members of what they refer to as MomTok. These young wives and mothers—all smooth, flowing hair and sculpted faces—document their everyday lives on TikTok while also sharing suggestive dance videos and healthy dollops of sponsored brand content. “MomTok is essentially a content-creator house, except for we don’t actually live together,” Mayci, a blond mother of two who is a practicing Mormon as well as a self-proclaimed “bad bitch,” tells the camera.
The series’ good-girl-gone-naughty premise is evident right from its opening credits, which feature the women dressed conservatively in matching powder-blue winter coats, but holding saucy shushing fingers to their pouty lips. It’s also bolstered by the show’s animating conflict. Back in May of 2022, the confusingly named Taylor Frankie Paul, a MomTok creator (current TikTok following: 4.4 million and counting), went live on the platform to tell viewers that she and her husband, alongside some other MomTok women and their spouses, had been participating in what she called “soft swinging”—generally defined as consensual partner-swapping stopping short of full sexual relations. Taylor, as she went on to confess, took things further when she “caught feelings” for one of the other husbands and embarked on an unsanctioned affair with him, which led to the dissolution of her marriage. Taylor’s admission led to much tabloid coverage, Reddit discussions, and an even greater public interest in MomTok. (“Did I ruin your life, or did I help your life?” Taylor asks the camera rhetorically on the show, referring to the spillover views her fellow-MomTokers received thanks to her confession, though all of them have denied participating in any swinging.) And yet this prurient curiosity also threatened the delicate equilibrium between devout Mormonism and hot-mom content that the group’s women were attempting to maintain.
“Secret Lives” opens in the wake of Taylor’s revelations, and picks up in early 2024, as the women attempt to put the fractured group back together and “get back to what MomTok was,” as Whitney, a strawberry-blond mother of two, says. Despite my love for social-media dramas, and my willingness to give their reality-TV afterlife a go, as I began watching the show, I found it forced and rehearsed, full of only mildly entertaining, semi-manufactured beefs, which seemed to follow the catfight beats familiar to any casual viewer of the “Real Housewives” franchise. Whitney and Taylor vie for leadership of MomTok, a contest that comes to a head when the former doesn’t attend the latter’s baby shower (to the gallows!); a Galentine’s party ends in a fight between Whitney and another MomToker named Demi when the former half-reveals a sensitive detail about the latter’s sex life (it appears to have something to do with a creative repurposing of Fruity Pebbles cereal); a Vegas trip with a backstage V.I.P. visit to the Chippendales show, where some of the women are more comfortable than others with oiling the male strippers’ sizable pecs, causes tension in the group; etc., etc. Still, as I kept on viewing, I found myself becoming increasingly invested—if not in the show’s plot, per se, then in what that plot revealed about the cracks that mar the upbeat façade of the MomTok project, which, it began to seem to me, are really the cracks marring the upbeat façade of a certain strain of contemporary pop feminism.
As Katy Perry recently reminded us, it’s a woman’s world and we’re lucky to be living in it. Nowadays, we are told, women can do anything and be anyone: they can lean in at corporate H.Q. while wearing stiletto heels and a blazer; they can be trad wives, merrily tethered to the stove and the crib in a demure prairie dress; they can even be clever, world-building pop-music and film stars who enjoy flaunting their bodies in skimpy clothing. (As Charli XCX recently told her friend the “Shiva Baby” actress Rachel Sennott, the latter is at the “forefront of this new kind of way to be a woman. It’s kind of this messy girl, big tits, but smart vibes.”) Ideally, they can pick and choose from each of these identities, mixing and matching at will to achieve a perfectly balanced blend of contemporary womanhood.
And yet Perry’s track was a sneered-at flop, at least partly, I think, because not many are still buying what she was trying to so vigorously sell. As I flashed back to the song’s synthetically buoyant opening verse—“Sexy, confident / So intelligent / She is heaven-sent / So soft, so strong”—it struck me that Perry has inadvertently managed to zero in on the booby trap at the core of what we might call choice feminism. (Like others, I found the singer’s belated claim that the song was meant satirically unconvincing.) With the seeming freedom to do anything and be anyone, preferably all at once, Perry’s version of a woman is eerily similar to that of the women of MomTok: sexy and confident, soft and strong, a forever sister to her fellow content creators and a shrewd businesswoman who always looks out for No. 1, a devoted mother and wife and a boss bitch, a hottie who never forgets to show an enticing slice of tum and a hint of cleavage on TikTok and a committed Mormon who always puts God first; and so on.
The nimbleness that this juggling act requires of women is exhausting, as is the insistence that the choices made as part of it are perforce empowering—a word that’s thrown around on “Secret Lives” to describe anything from promoting a sex toy on social media for “really good” money to a girl’s weekend in a Park City penthouse. It’s honestly enough to drive anyone to distraction, and the most affecting moments in “Secret Lives” are those that showcase the bleakness of this version of liberation. In one episode, some of the women bond at a med spa by getting Botox injections together. “It’s a party,” Whitney says, of the routine, explaining that when the women go in for treatment, they ask for laughing gas, since, according to Mormon scripture, they are not allowed to drink. The women—the oldest among those present is thirty, the youngest twenty-three—do seem to be having fun, bonding as they crack up after the nitrous oxide hits them. And, of course, the desire to have absolute sovereignty over one’s body is fundamentally feminist. But there is something undeniably depressing about being able to steal a moment of illicit freedom only when paralyzing one’s facial muscles to diminish wrinkles that surely haven’t even had a chance to emerge yet. In another episode, Jessi, a thirty-one-year-old MomToker who owns a hair-care brand, announces that she’s decided to get a labiaplasty, since after having two kids she needs to get a “mommy makeover.” For the MomTokers, becoming a mother is a crucial part of being a woman, but erasing any mark of that event is just as important. “I’ve gotten my boobs done three times and now I’m getting my cookie redone,” Jessi tells the camera brightly. Later she lowers her pants to show a few of the women her newly reconfigured labia—a kind of inversion of a consciousness-raising “Our Bodies, Ourselves” moment. “Once it’s, like, not swollen, it’s going to be tight,” she explains.
