The Mormon TikTok Mothers Are All of Us

It makes a variety of sense that the lives of well-liked TikTok stars would function irresistible fodder for actuality tv. The mix of attention-courting, attractive-looking topics experiencing sudden, tenuous fame, and the tensions that come up from the panopticon-like social-media showground during which they function, tends to make for diverting drama. (The truth that these figures are already I.P. with a confirmed monitor report doesn’t damage.) Lately, we’ve had Netflix’s “Hype Home,” which adopted a gang of content-creating youth, beefing and gyrating day in and day trip in a Ventura County McMansion share, and Hulu’s “The D’Amelio Present,” which charted the challenges that the influencer sisters Charli and Dixie D’Amelio confronted after transferring to Los Angeles to pursue new heights of social-media success.

And now we’ve got the eight-part sequence “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” additionally on Hulu, which focusses on a clutch of Utah ladies who’re, to a larger or lesser extent, affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and likewise members of what they consult with as MomTok. These younger wives and moms—all clean, flowing hair and sculpted faces—doc their on a regular basis lives on TikTok whereas additionally sharing suggestive dance movies and wholesome dollops of sponsored model content material. “MomTok is actually a content-creator home, apart from we don’t truly dwell collectively,” Mayci, a blond mom of two who’s a practising Mormon in addition to a self-proclaimed “dangerous bitch,” tells the digital camera.

The sequence’ good-girl-gone-naughty premise is clear proper from its opening credit, which characteristic the ladies dressed conservatively in matching powder-blue winter coats, however holding saucy shushing fingers to their pouty lips. It’s additionally bolstered by the present’s animating battle. Again in Could of 2022, the confusingly named Taylor Frankie Paul, a MomTok creator (present TikTok following: 4.4 million and counting), went dwell on the platform to inform viewers that she and her husband, alongside another MomTok ladies and their spouses, had been taking part in what she referred to as “tender swinging”—usually outlined as consensual partner-swapping stopping wanting full sexual relations. Taylor, as she went on to admit, took issues additional when she “caught emotions” for one of many different husbands and launched into an unsanctioned affair with him, which led to the dissolution of her marriage. Taylor’s admission led to a lot tabloid protection, Reddit discussions, and a good larger public curiosity in MomTok. (“Did I break your life, or did I assist your life?” Taylor asks the digital camera rhetorically on the present, referring to the spillover views her fellow-MomTokers acquired because of her confession, although all of them have denied taking part in any swinging.) And but this prurient curiosity additionally threatened the fragile equilibrium between religious Mormonism and hot-mom content material that the group’s ladies had been trying to keep up.

“Secret Lives” opens within the wake of Taylor’s revelations, and picks up in early 2024, as the ladies try and put the fractured group again collectively and “get again to what MomTok was,” as Whitney, a strawberry-blond mom of two, says. Regardless of my love for social-media dramas, and my willingness to present their reality-TV afterlife a go, as I started watching the present, I discovered it pressured and rehearsed, stuffed with solely mildly entertaining, semi-manufactured beefs, which appeared to comply with the catfight beats acquainted to any informal viewer of the “Actual Housewives” franchise. Whitney and Taylor vie for management of MomTok, a contest that involves a head when the previous doesn’t attend the latter’s child bathe (to the gallows!); a Galentine’s social gathering ends in a struggle between Whitney and one other MomToker named Demi when the previous half-reveals a delicate element in regards to the latter’s intercourse life (it seems to have one thing to do with a artistic repurposing of Fruity Pebbles cereal); a Vegas journey with a backstage V.I.P. go to to the Chippendales present, the place among the ladies are extra snug than others with oiling the male strippers’ sizable pecs, causes pressure within the group; and so forth., and so forth. Nonetheless, as I stored on viewing, I discovered myself turning into more and more invested—if not within the present’s plot, per se, then in what that plot revealed in regards to the cracks that mar the upbeat façade of the MomTok venture, which, it started to look to me, are actually the cracks marring the upbeat façade of a sure pressure of latest pop feminism.

As Katy Perry lately reminded us, it’s a girl’s world and we’re fortunate to be dwelling in it. These days, we’re informed, ladies can do something and be anybody: they’ll lean in at company H.Q. whereas sporting stiletto heels and a blazer; they are often trad wives, merrily tethered to the range and the crib in a demure prairie costume; they’ll even be intelligent, world-building pop-music and movie stars who get pleasure from flaunting their our bodies in skimpy clothes. (As Charli XCX lately informed her good friend the “Shiva Child” actress Rachel Sennott, the latter is on the “forefront of this new type of solution to be a girl. It’s type of this messy woman, large tits, however good vibes.”) Ideally, they’ll choose and select from every of those identities, mixing and matching at will to realize a superbly balanced mix of latest womanhood.

And but Perry’s monitor was a sneered-at flop, at the least partly, I feel, as a result of not many are nonetheless shopping for what she was making an attempt to so vigorously promote. As I flashed again to the track’s synthetically buoyant opening verse—“Horny, assured / So clever / She is heaven-sent / So tender, so robust”—it struck me that Perry has inadvertently managed to zero in on the booby lure on the core of what we’d name selection feminism. (Like others, I discovered the singer’s belated declare that the track was meant satirically unconvincing.) With the seeming freedom to do something and be anybody, ideally , Perry’s model of a girl is eerily much like that of the ladies of MomTok: attractive and assured, tender and robust, a ceaselessly sister to her fellow content material creators and a shrewd businesswoman who at all times appears to be like out for No. 1, a faithful mom and spouse and a boss bitch, a hottie who by no means forgets to point out an attractive slice of tum and a touch of cleavage on TikTok and a dedicated Mormon who at all times places God first; and so forth.

The nimbleness that this juggling act requires of ladies is exhausting, as is the insistence that the alternatives made as a part of it are perforce empowering—a phrase that’s thrown round on “Secret Lives” to explain something from selling a intercourse toy on social media for “actually good” cash to a woman’s weekend in a Park Metropolis penthouse. It’s truthfully sufficient to drive anybody to distraction, and essentially the most affecting moments in “Secret Lives” are people who showcase the bleakness of this model of liberation. In a single episode, among the ladies bond at a med spa by getting Botox injections collectively. “It’s a celebration,” Whitney says, of the routine, explaining that when the ladies go in for remedy, they ask for laughing fuel, since, in line with Mormon scripture, they aren’t allowed to drink. The ladies—the oldest amongst these current is thirty, the youngest twenty-three—do appear to be having enjoyable, bonding as they crack up after the nitrous oxide hits them. And, after all, the need to have absolute sovereignty over one’s physique is essentially feminist. However there’s something undeniably miserable about with the ability to steal a second of illicit freedom solely when paralyzing one’s facial muscle mass to decrease wrinkles that absolutely haven’t even had an opportunity to emerge but. In one other episode, Jessi, a thirty-one-year-old MomToker who owns a hair-care model, pronounces that she’s determined to get a labiaplasty, since after having two children she must get a “mommy makeover.” For the MomTokers, turning into a mom is a vital a part of being a girl, however erasing any mark of that occasion is simply as vital. “I’ve gotten my boobs finished thrice and now I’m getting my cookie redone,” Jessi tells the digital camera brightly. Later she lowers her pants to point out a couple of of the ladies her newly reconfigured labia—a type of inversion of a consciousness-raising “Our Our bodies, Ourselves” second. “As soon as it’s, like, not swollen, it’s going to be tight,” she explains.