Episode 34: The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dog.

And I'm Wayra Donnegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So, Adrian, today we are talking about one of the weirdest items of gendered cultural production to emerge in 2024.

A little show on Hulu that's become a breakout hit called The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.

Yep.

And we watched a lot of it yesterday.

It is the kind of show that will make you feel actively stupider, but I feel a lot smarter after talking to our guest today, Kate Kelly.

Kate Kelly is kind of a feminist woman about town.

She's an activist.

She's a human rights lawyer.

She's worked at all kinds of progressive nonprofits and political organizations.

But her origin story is that Kate Kelly came to feminism as a Mormon, a young Mormon wife, straight out of Utah, who attended Brigham Young, got married to a Mormon man at a, you know, precocious age, the whole shebang.

And early in her life, Kate founded an organization within Mormonism called Ordain Women, which advocated, as the name suggests, for the ordination of women to the Mormon priesthood.

And for that trespass, the Mormon church actually excommunicated Kate, which launched her onto her adventurous life as a feminist in D.C.

and a big advocate, among other things, for the Equal Rights Amendment.

So Kate is a really smart, funny, perceptive interlocutor of Mormonism for a non-Mormon, you know, a sinner, decadent, fallen secularist like us.

Hey, speak for yourself.

She made me see the show in a new way, and I'm really glad we got to talk to her.

Absolutely.

So, we should say a little bit more about the show.

If you have not seen it, we do dive into it like headfirst.

It is on Hulu.

It's called The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.

It's basically the real housewives with more Stanley cups filled with soda water of some kind, anyway.

Lots of soda involved.

Yeah, it's unclear.

And it follows eight women:

Jen Demi Whitney, Michaela, Macy, not spelled how you'd spell it, Jesse, not spelled how you'd spell it, Taylor, spelled how you'd spell it, and Layla.

All of whom are, by the way, absolutely impossible to tell apart.

Yeah, yeah, very hard.

Well, except for Layla, but everyone else is like, they just look absolutely identical.

They were all part of a group called Mom Talk, which I did not know existed until they said the word Mom Talk about five million times per episode.

And were involved in a soft swinging scandal,

a thing that is never fully explained, much to our chagrin.

A lot of this episode is us being like, so what is a soft swinging scandal?

What's soft?

The swinging or the scandal?

Anyway.

And it has all the things you love in a bravo show, although it's not a bravo show.

You know, women hanging out outside of fancy restaurants and having conversations about fights they're about to have.

Everyone seems to be loaded, and it's not quite clear why.

They're closeted gay husbands.

There is a sort of a scene where someone is like, how dare you steal the thunder of my husband's husband's porn addiction with eurctopic pregnancy?

And you're like, Oh, yeah, I get this.

We're in Andy Cohen land, right?

Yeah, it's a weird, strange bundle of contradictions, and I'm really glad we got to talk about it with Kate.

Write from View Us on iTunes if you get a chance.

That really helps people find the show.

Also, buy Adrian's book, The Cancel Culture Panic, which is a Ripper Around Good Time and a really fun read.

Buy it for the closeted gay husband in your life

and enjoy this unnecessarily crazy deep dive into the secret lives of Mormon wives.

Enjoy.

So Kate, tell us about the secret lives of Mormon wives.

This surprise hit show on Hulu that's getting crazy ratings and

has had every feminist journalist and gender

scholar that I know texting me with great degrees of alarm that I absolutely needed to watch it.

And thank you for being our excuse to sit down and watch this truly insane product of television.

Of course.

Thanks for having me.

Well, so maybe we can tell you where we're at.

Because

we know where each other is at because we were texting about it frantically.

I think no phrase was used more often than, I think I'm becoming dumber by the minute, or I should have COVID for this.

I didn't watch all of it, but I

quite a bit.

And one thing that I found very, very interesting is that, you know, the show very much focuses on eight Mormon or ex-Mormon women in Provo, Utah.

And they're all active or still sort of like part of the church's life.

They don't seem to be on the outside of it.

And yet, I think both Moira and I were constantly like, wait, can they do that?

Are they allowed to do that?

Because on the one hand, they sort of make a performance of rigidity, which you don't get in a show of this type normally, such as, you know, the real housewives of, you know beverly hills

yeah they literally like they they have no filter they have no rules they're just constantly like they're twerking on 20 year olds it's like completely unhinged this is a show that kind of is uh sort of coquettish almost in dealing with sort of the restrictions on these women and yet we see them do all these things and and so that's like i guess my first question is like what do you make of this kind of very strange duality where on the one hand it's they emphasize the lack of permissiveness, but then like it, it hits all the beats of a Roni reunion, you know?

I'll have to admit that I'm not an avid consumer of reality TV in any other context.

So I actually haven't seen Real Housewives, although I do know there is a Salt Lake City version.

I think my major qualification for opining on this show is that I was a Mormon wife.

And so that's really my reference point for watching the show.

So I may have a bit of a different perspective.

Though, yes, I think it's common in every religion for there to be a set of rules.

And then there's what people actually do.

I'm fascinated by this generation.

These women, you have to keep in mind, are very young.

They are in the range of 23 years old.

Many of them, it seems, did not go to college,

got married super, super, super young.

They didn't really have sort of the coming of age or the maturation period that most other folks outside of that community would have.

You know, Michaela was married when she was 16.

Jen was married when she was 18.

Layla was married when she was 19.

These are very, very, very young girls.

Although, Demi, interestingly enough, I think by my accounting, got married at 26.

And I found myself saying, like, oh, what happened there?

I was like, wait, that's a totally normal time to get married.

That's her second marriage.

That's what it is.

Okay.

Oh, my God.

Yes.

She had a whole nother marriage and was divorced and then got married to her now husband,

who she actually met when she was nine years old for the first time,

was married to someone else, got divorced, and then married him later at 26.

So, yes, that was her second marriage.

How old was he when she was nine years old?

When she was nine years old and they met, he was 25.

Yeah.

So that is,

in addition to their extreme

youth,

something that is conspicuous to me about these

women is that, you know, nominally the peg for the show, its justification for its existence, is that these women are massively famous on TikTok, apparently.

They are TikTok influencers.

They make a lot of videos together.

So they sort of like cross-pollinate each other's other's followings and maximize revenue that way.

And that is something that the show sort of assumes you know, right?

It strikes me that like the pitch meeting for this show is like, well, they have a lot of followers.

And if X proportion of their followers then watch the show, we will make a return on our investment making this, I have to say, incredibly cheaply produced bit of television.

And then what happened is that the show seems to have like escaped terminal velocity and gone gone beyond their inbuilt audience, right?

But they are performing for a public that is not merely Mormon, right?

Yes.

Which would make it different than I think like your experience being a Mormon wife is that like you are performing your gender as a Mormon for other Mormons, whereas these women are kind of trying to have a crossover appeal and remain Mormon at the same time.

Exactly.

That's what I find find fascinating about this new generation.

So I went to BYU, which is a school that a couple of them went to, including Macy, who played tennis at BYU, and Jen's husband just graduated from BYU.

So this is the main and only really Mormon school.

And when I was at BYU, like they talk about the honor code.

The honor code at BYU is essentially the code of conduct, and it's not like a normal honor code.

It goes into extreme detail about what you can and can't do, including hair color, including number of pairs of earrings, including can you or can you not wear sleeveless shirts or you know, shorts, or it really goes into an extended length of detail and also dictates that you can't be in the same apartment as someone of the opposite sex at certain hours.

Like, it's really quite a code of conduct.

And if you don't meet the standards of the honor code, then you're kicked out of the university.

And when I was at BYU, we just didn't do it.

Like, there was a level of naivete

that I think the internet has now breached, where kids who are doing things against the rules can talk to each other.

You know, I've been in some of these groups with kids at BYU and we're like, well, what do you, how do you pass the honor code interviews?

And they're like, we just lie.

And it's like, that literally never would have even occurred to me.

And so it's just this totally new generation, I think, that is very willing to both live in this performance of piety, but also completely flout all of the rules in a very public way.

And it's almost like a performance of imperfection.

Like the way that you hear them talk about it in interviews is like, I'm just showing that you can be this kind of Mormon, that you can drink, you can do all these other things, and you can still be Mormon.

And I find that extraordinarily interesting, especially since they have these millions and millions combined between them.

They have millions of followers on TikTok and other platforms, which obviously goes far beyond the Mormon audience.

And in fact, many Mormons wouldn't watch their show because their show, you know, shows things that are prohibited by practicing or very orthodox Mormons.

And I've also seen a lot, maybe this is just my algorithm, I've also seen a lot of response videos from Mormons.

And the response videos from Mormons are basically this isn't who we are they're very disingenuous it's a real like distancing of them because they are claiming this Mormon title

it's obviously very much like you said a part of their lived reality they go to church all their families are Mormon they live in Utah but they do not see themselves bound by the precepts in a way that previous generations did, I think.

So the women, as you say, are all part of this group called Mom Talk, a word that they seem to be contractually obligated to utter every 10 seconds in the show.

I started a drinking game.

I had to abandon the drinking game five minutes in because I was like, I don't know how much more I can take.

But the other word that comes up the most, I think, is,

how do they put it?

Soft swinging.

Oh, yes.

Yeah.

So the backstory that is being explained to you over and over again is that there was a soft swinging scandal within the group, which really seems to only involve one of them who acknowledges being part of it.

it felt to me like that arrested development joke about light treason.

I was like, What happened?

What exactly happened?

Adrian, Adrian, you say that this scandal is explained, but among the things

that the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives expects its viewership to know

is what soft swinging is, A, and then B, like what rules Mormonism applies

that these women are breaking or and then, you know, scolding each other for breaking and then breaking again in the next breath themselves.

You know, their performative transgression, their performative strictness, their performative outrage and hypocrisy, all of it is just sort of based on the assumption that you have this information.

And part of what is like morbidly fascinating to me as a decadent secular lesbian in a coastal city is that I don't don't have any of this information, right?

So it's like, is the thrum of subtext

that I am sort of like piecing together?

It's like, is that, I thought they weren't allowed to drink, but they're all drinking.

And

like, what is exactly soft swinging?

Like, did you, did you have sex with your frenemy's gay husband or not?

It's like a question I just wanted to ask over and over again.

I wasn't sure whether it was the fact that I don't know that much about Mormonism or whether it's the fact that this is how reality TV gets constructed.

Of course, I know that there's a whole separate sort of nomenclature around Mormon sexuality, but it kind of sounded to me like that Taylor Frankie Paul, who sort of is the instigator and may secret star of the show, may have originated this term and then never bothered to explain it.

And she sort of never even named who was in it.

So it's this perfect reality show thing where it's discourse about discourse.

Like she just used this word.

And basically, this is about the ripple effects of her just like having a big mouth and like kind of coming up with this word on the fly.

Is that what, was I right to think that?

My perception of the show is that not only is it very rooted in social media, it's also designed to drive you to social media.

And so, what they want you to do is be like, what is soft swinging?

And then you go online and you look it up and you look, you read additional articles, or you look at interviews, or you, you actually have to go online to, they also don't include any backstory or very, very little backstory about about any of the women.

So, if you want to know like a timeline of their life, or like, you know, did they go to college?

Or, like, you know, there's like some very basic questions that are not answered in the show.

And I found that so absent that I really think it was by design.

Yeah, I think that's a good idea.

They want people to go online, they want people to listen to additional interviews, they want people to find, you know, stock them on TikTok and Instagram and go through all their reels to find answers.

Like, a lot of things things I found were people making like seven-part timeline videos on each girl, like all the things that they found out about them on the internet.

Well, you're supposed to go follow them on Montauk, right?

And then be another pair of eyeballs for their like vibrator spawn con.

Yes, it's all very integrated and it's meant to drive traffic on the internet.

I think another thing that people I've seen are like, oh, these girls are so dumb.

They're so ditzy.

I'm like, okay, these girls are many things, but dumb is not one of them.

They are very savvy about what they are doing.

You can see that in all the product placement.

You can see that in that they're obviously written into the contract that they cover their business launches.

You can see that in the way that they fabricate interactions in order to drive traffic.

Like they have been on the internet for a long time.

They're very young, but they've basically been on it their whole lives.

And they're some of the most successful.

Like there was a casting call for this show.

It's not that these eight just happened to be the best of friends it's like these eight are the ones who made it through the casting call to be on this show and so some of them were like i didn't know you then and it was like a year ago like they didn't know each other in such an intimate way before the show was cast and so it's a very like fabricated storyline with each of these women being put together in an intentional way because of their following and because of their internet savvy and because of their business sense so they all do things to drive traffic, to make money.

Like when you see the show, you're like, how does this 22-year-old have this huge house with this like incredible kitchen?

And she's driving, you know, Mercedes and she's da-da-da-da.

Like they're very, very wealthy girls.

And you can see that in the show.

And then they like, you know, randomly take trips to Park City and Vegas.

And that is on purpose.

And I think the entire show, as you're watching it, you're like, wait, I feel like I'm in,

I feel like I'm in the Truman show or something like, I'm now part of this world that they're creating.

And I think that was very, very intentional.

It's interesting that you bring up how much money they have because something that was interesting to me was how self-conscious they are, you know, at turns proud and defiant and at other turns like performatively vexed.

about being the breadwinners because all these women make more money than their husbands.

Oh my God.

there is like literally nothing more Mormon than this particular conundrum.

And really, I think this stems from the beginning of the church because, and something they don't really address in the show, but it's also assumed that you know, is that Mormonism stems from founders who practice polygamy.

And so, the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, had in the ballpark of 37 wives, the youngest of whom was 14 years old when he was in his late 20s and 30s.

And then Brigham Young had in the ballpark of 47.

I say in the ballpark because some of these marriages were secret.

And so, yeah, we have to keep in mind that this is the context of this religion.

And I think the thing that's so ironic about it, so you think about how did Brigham Young have 47 wives?

Like, you would have have to have been fabulously wealthy.

And like, of course, comparatively at the time, he was, started a lot of industries when they came to Utah and obviously, you know, kicked out Indigenous communities to make their community there.

But there were so many scandals at the time.

This is why I'm actually not surprised that the show is very popular.

There has been a continual, perpetual, and indefinite fascination with Mormonism in our culture that has always existed since it was founded in 1820.

At the time, it was like this total national scandal, polygamy.

And so one of Brigham Young's wives, the 19th wife, her name was Anna Eliza Young.

They got married when he was 67 and she was 24.

And she claimed that he had coerced her into marrying him by threatening financial ruin on her brother.

So basically, she did it to, she caved to him, basically to save her brother.

The point is, she filed for divorce from Brigham Young, and this became national news.

And what she claimed was neglect, cruel treatment, and desertion.

So from the beginning of Mormonism, there were these men that were put at the head of household and in charge of these women, but they did not actually provide for them.

So, this woman, Annaliza Young and others, actually had to provide for themselves in 1873.

They were just married, but like basically abandoned.

They had to like homestead themselves.

They had to find a way to work.

They had tons of children, specifically with Brigham Young.

He had hundreds of children, but the women are the ones who actually took care of the children and provided for the children and then the men were still this head of household like very deferred to but they didn't actually take care of any of the bills or any of the tasks so you see this now in the modern context where these women earn all the money make all the decisions like you see them literally giving allowance to their husbands to gamble.

They're like, okay, here's $2,500.

You can, I mean, that's a lot of money.

So obviously they have tons of cash, but they have to give money to their husbands as an allowance.

The husbands somehow

still are in control, still are seen as the head of household, still are seen as the one who makes the decisions and has the last word in everything they do for their family.

Even in the case of Jen in the show, who makes the most money and obviously is the breadwinner.

Her husband is like, okay, I'm moving for medical school now.

So we're going to drop everything and go to where I want to go, do what I want to do.

And that is very, very common in Mormonism and also a legacy.

I know so many girls who ended up paying alimony when they got divorced.

This is way more common than people think because the women actually earned more money.

And so they ended up, when they got divorced, they ended up paying alimony to the men.

That's also very common in the community.

I'm sorry, I'm like, here's some context from 1873.

No, it's perfect.

Perfect.

Now, something I wanted to ask you about, just for our listeners who are on, you know, pins and needles as to what soft swinging is.

Guys, the explanation that seems to be given in the show is non-penetrative swinging.

And the question that I wrote down here is like, including oral question mark?

Yes.

So is that it?

Is that soft swinging?

I mean, honestly, I think you're right that Taylor kind of made up or at least popularized this term.

But again, that's also so classically Mormon.

From what I've heard, and again, this is me going down like major rabbit holes of like long interviews with these people.

Taylor has explained that they were having sex with their actual husband, but in the room with other people.

And then there was some sort of exchange, but it was unclear who participated or what those acts were.

From what I can tell, it just sounds kind of like an orgy.

Right.

And again, these are Mormon girls who grew up in Utah.

They never had sex ed.

They don't like know much of anything.

They got married when they were teenagers.

They probably never had sex with anyone else before they got married.

So I think the terms are very fluid because they also don't know anything about sex.

Like it might just be an orgy and they don't know what that is.

And so it sounded to me like they didn't really do a lot of switching partners, which is what swinging actually is.

It sounded more to me like they were just getting really drunk and like having sex in the same room and some people were watching.

But I think they created a term for it because they're like, We weren't really swinging.

You know what I mean?

I know that Taylor then, of course, ended up having an affair, which she talks about in the show, and divorcing that husband.

And she said, Actually, everyone who was involved in that soft singing, quote-unquote, scandal is now divorced.

Like every single person, every single couple who was involved is now divorced.

There is a kind of, there is a great deal of creativity around sexuality among Mormons, right?

And there's also a lot of verbal creativity, right?

There's that, is that called soaking?

Okay.

Soaking is not real.

Oh, it's not.

Okay.

I don't think soaking is real.

Okay.

When I was at BYU, again, we were much more naive, but the main thing that Mormons came up with when I was at BYU was called NICMO.

It was non-committal makeouts.

Yes.

So you would just like meet up with someone and who you didn't know and make out with them and like just walk away.

This was very scandalous at the time.

So NICMO was the thing.

Now they're saying it's soaking.

I'm like, honestly, I don't think that's real.

When you see interviews, they're like, oh, yeah, I've heard of it, but like no one has actually ever done it.

It's like rainbow parties.

Yeah.

It's like, okay, although they're an extraordinarily sexually repressed culture, you are driven to some extremes to justify what is a natural human instinct.

And so there are, like, for example, I knew of people who like went to Vegas and like, you know, did some sort of elopement situation, got married, and then ended up dissolving the marriage basically just so they could have sex.

Like, yeah, you are driven to some pretty far extremes, but penetrative sex without thrusting, which is what soaking is allegedly, seems very unlikely because you risk getting pregnant.

And that's the like number one thing that you would try to avoid.

So I don't know.

I don't buy soaking personally.

Okay.

You mentioned, Kate, there's been this popular fascination with Mormonism from the quote-unquote outside world forever, partly because I think the Mormons, with their polygamy, with their sort of like sense of sexual danger, and also with their like geographic isolation in Utah for a big part of the religion's existence, they like

have this

frisson of appeal and difference.

I think maybe especially to, you know,

straight white men.

And you mentioned when we were talking earlier about the show, it's like there's actually nothing secret about Mormon wives' lives because they're incapable of keeping a secret, right?

And it seems like there's some sense in which they are taking on a very old Mormon tradition of advertising their lifestyle out into the secular world.

And maybe the contention within within Mormonism isn't about doing that per se, but about how they're going about it.

Oh, absolutely.

Also, Utah is a very, very specific context.

There's endless fascination with this place that is essentially a theocracy.

When I was there, I think it was 94% of the state legislature is Mormon.

So it's just like an absolute total reign of state politics and a super majority in most places of Mormons or active Mormons who live there.

And so, whether or not you participate in the church, Utah is a very specific and unique place.

In some ways, great and in some ways terrible, if we're being perfectly honest.

In the terrible ways, you know, specifically to understand these girls' context, Utah is routinely judged to be the worst state in the United States for women.

It's almost always number 50 on every list, and that's everywhere from like sexual assault to participation in governance to wage gap to, you know, most of the categories.

It's also pretty routinely the place for highest per capita plastic surgery.

So that's more than LA, for example.

I mean, I believe that having looked at this show, I was like, I did not know you could do that to your lip at 21.

My God.

Yes.

So my parents lived in Provo, the city where most of these girls live.

And when girls turned 18, their parents would gift them a boob job for their birthday their 18th birthday so this is not only like permitted it's very encouraged within the culture my sister lived in lehigh utah the other day i was she's like i haven't seen the show and i was like girl it's just your neighbors basically like

and she said girls in her neighborhood have botox parties at their house So it's like a Tupperware party, but you invite all your friends over and you all get Botox at your house.

This is very common today.

So that's how pervasive plastic surgery and cosmetic enhancements are.

If you drive down I-15, which is the main highway in Utah, you're just pummeled by billboards.

LASIC surgery, microderm abrasion, plastic surgery, you know, like just every single billboard just pummels you with the desire to enhance your looks cosmetically.

And this is because the only value to women in that culture is how they look and can they reproduce.

And so these girls are very good at being valued in that culture.

Like, and if you have to get surgery, if you have to get fake hair, if you have to, you know, wear all this makeup, all these things are fine in and of themselves.

But if you're doing it because the only thing you're valued for in your culture is that,

that sets up a really, really dangerous, dangerous precedent.

And by dangerous, one of the other things that Utah has the highest of per capita is eating disorders.

Oh, this is very, very common.

It's kind of become a cottage industry to have like treatment centers for eating disorders in Utah.

There's tons of them.

And they've developed this expertise because it's so common in the community.

My God.

Something very strange about the experience of watching this show is that, first of all, nothing happens, right?

It's like we went roller skating.

Yeah, the conflict, such as there is, is incredibly low stakes, but it's also somewhat hard to follow the conflict, at least for me, or to discern the stakes of the conflict, because none of these women can make any emotional expression with their faces.

Their faces have, you know, the kind of standard, uncanny uniformity.

of Botox and of injectables.

So they all look exactly the same.

It's very, very difficult to tell them apart.

But also none of them can frown

or raise their eyebrows in surprise.

So they've always got these blank expressions, right?

It strikes me as like, like maybe an unintended side effect of all the plastic surgery is that they're not capable of expressing rage just on a physiological level.

But like, what's more desired in such an extreme patriarchy than a woman who cannot express discontent?

Yeah.

I mean, that really is the platonic ideal of a woman in that culture is someone who can do nothing but smile.

And they don't really touch on it, but prescription drug abuse is another big problem in the state.

A lot of times people won't do illegal drugs, but they will abuse prescription drugs, particularly these Mormon moms.

And so it's this outsourcing of emotion, whether you physically can not frown.

or you're so hopped up on prescription drugs that you can't feel emotions.

And so, I don't know, I find the conflict hard to follow because, like, also like, they'll have these manufactured conflicts and they'll just be like, but I love you.

Like, or she's my best friend.

Or, you know, like they try to resolve the conflict real time.

And that's very Mormon.

Like, that's, I find the show to actually be so authentic in so many ways because the Mormons say, call it contention, and contention is of the devil.

That's like the number one thing that you're not supposed to have.

And so fighting with anyone or having a conflict with anyone would be very short-lived, no matter how dire or serious it is, because you just, you know, it's the opposite of a New Yorker.

You're, you're never going to yell at anyone.

You're never going to like, you know, have a beef with someone publicly.

Everything in these girls' trainings is to not have this type of conflict.

And so when they do have it, it's like, okay, then we all made up in the same hour.

You know, like that actually is very authentically Mormon.

Yeah, I thought it was funny.

I called it in my notes the real housewives of making subtext text because like they literally, I think, I think Michaela says like, can't wait for your confrontation with Whitney later.

Right.

And like, just because the producer said that to you doesn't mean you have to say it to a camera.

Like these are very savvy media operators and very savvy media manipulators, except in that one way.

They seem to be like holding a grudge seems to be genuinely difficult for them.

Like, like, like the, the kind of deep soulful hatred, you know, we have family and my family, we're thick as thieves, right?

Like they can't, they don't seem to be able to do that.

And like, it's, it's actually kind of charming the way like the show can't get going because they're kind of refusing to have these like deep-seated kind of fights.

One thing I wanted to ask about the the kind of role of emotions

that, you know, our rebel kind of tailor.

In some way, the whole scandal is about the fact that she was too enthusiastically participating in making the men around her feel good right like it's ultimately like the sweetest form of of of rebellion you could possibly have right she then tattled that's one thing but like but it's very clear right like she in some way it's not that she pushed back against the patriarchy if anything she like acceded to a particular version of the patriarchy right and the other thing that it made me think of was there's something here that i think you're driving at that i found very interesting where on the one hand, this is a new generation.

These women talk in ways that you say you know people didn't used to, they act in ways that would have been unimaginable.

At the same time, they are clearly using some very old templates, as you're also pointing out.

I think that's fascinating.

And one thing I thought about, I've only been to Provo once, I gotta say, I drove through Utah County, and the other thing I know about it is that a bunch of MLMs are headquartered there, right?

And so, the way these women, sort of in this chipper way, in this kind of like slightly step 4ian, to be quite honest, way, kind of promote a particular lifestyle, brand.

I'm like, on the one hand, like, yes, the ways social media suffuses their world is clearly new, but the things they've fallen back on and the fact that they can do it kind of from a domestic setting strikes me as a very, very canny evolution of the way their moms might have gotten rich and might have sustained their deadbeat husbands.

Is that accurate?

Like, is there a through line here, or am I just those are two facts I know about Provo, Utah?

Well, I think it's a really important context to understand what good salespeople Mormons are.

And this transcends genders and locations.

I mean, when you think about it, the missionary program of the church is literally to export the religion.

I'm a former missionary myself.

I served a mission in Barcelona, Spain when I was much, much younger.

In another life, I was a Mormon missionary.

And the thing that you learn, you learn two things.

One is how to sell things that are very hard to sell

for example an american religion to spaniards and the other thing that you learn is that the only people who are on your side are your people so you build like a super high tolerance to rejection and that's what the experience is intended to do

And so you see these girls like doing things, you're like, man, I probably wouldn't do that publicly or say that publicly or what it is.

But they've really been inoculated to understand that their closed community is the only community that will ever be there for them.

And that's all you'll ever need.

And so I think they have a super high tolerance for rejection.

And that's also obviously something that the internet teaches you.

If you're

millions of followers on the internet, you're very primed to be able to withstand rejection.

So I think, yeah, the MLM piece means that they're also very, very good at selling things and getting people beneath them in their downline.

And this is just like absolutely rife in the culture.

You'll notice all of them have their little businesses that they're starting.

I'm selling gummies, I'm selling hair, I'm selling, you know, they have these businesses and they get people under them.

And they're super successful at doing that.

And part of that is because the culture they were raised in.

And I really want to touch on the part you talked about about them succeeding at the patriarchy because this for me really gets at the core of not only the secret lives of Mormon wives, but also all of these other Mormon women that are mommy bloggers or influencers that are sort of performing in the trad wife space.

So, this is Ballerina Farm.

This is Nora Smith, Mora's White Whale, friend of the show, Ballerina Farm.

Nora Smith is the the one who makes like animal correctors from scratch, also, Mormons, both of them.

Yeah, yes, almost all super, super successful mommy vloggers are Mormons.

Um, they may not be super upfront about it in their messaging.

Like, um, Nora Smith actually doesn't talk about being Mormon in her videos or like any of her content, but you just have to like know that separately that she's Mormon.

And you wouldn't guess it because she's wearing sleeveless clothing in a lot of the videos, which is forbidden.

And so, a lot lot of these women are

honing in on this super specific skill that they learn in the community and turning it into a business model that allows them to stay at home and perform femininity.

So, if you're at home, you can have a job.

If you're not at home, you can't have a job.

So, even when I was studying for the LSAT in Provo, Utah, planning on going to law school, I was in a class of hundreds of people.

I was one of six women studying to go to law school.

So it's very, very uncommon even now for women to have a career outside the home.

So these women have to be creative so that they can have these careers, but also be still in the home.

And that's why there's this like intersection of women influencers who are Mormon, because they have to be creative in the space.

And the last thing I'll say about this point is these women have to make up for the fact that they are actually very successful career women by over or hyper performing their other feminine roles.

So they have to be very pretty.

They have to, you know, have their children.

They have to talk about their children.

They have to pretend that they're centering their children in their identities, even though they very clearly aren't.

And you never hear them talk about their kids on the show.

And if you do see them with their kids in the show, the kids are just like running wild and they never hold them or talk to them or talk about them.

It's very clearly not their primary identity, even though the show has the word wives in it.

But they have to hyperperform that in order to make up for the other sin of having a career.

And I'll give an example from my life.

My mom was an attorney.

This was even for her generation, even less common.

She was, you know, very, very looked down on in the community because she had a job outside the home.

And in order to hyper perform, to make up for the fact that she was the lawyer, my mom would sew our clothes.

She did quilting.

She became like an expert in quilting.

She was very into scrapbooking.

She like really, really excelled at these hyper-feminine crafts in order to prove to people that she wasn't a bad person for being a lawyer.

Almost like a gender debt that has to be paid, right?

Like you have to make up in scrapbooking what you have spent in being a attorney.

Exactly.

That's exactly it.

That is literally what's happening.

And so these women are very successful, are incredibly ambitious.

Like, and we can talk about this later in the show, but I think that's part of the reason a lot of them have ended up with gay men is because these gay men will allow them to have this path in life, whereas actual straight men, Mormon men, would not allow them to have this much much autonomy.

And so I think that they're hyper-performing a lot of this in order to make up for what they know is ambition.

I think that's so fascinating.

You're kind of in the show, you're watching two economies of prestige, right?

One is the influencer one, whereas about clicks, they all mention how many TikTok followers they have, how many views they get, et cetera, et cetera.

That's how they make their money.

But then, as you say, it's the community that matters.

And there is this kind of prestige that counts more, right?

And you have to balance these two.

Like, one way, one form of prestige is how you make your money, the other is kind of what you need to live, it seems to me.

Like, there are two places where this seemed very obvious to me in the first two episodes.

There's a conversation that Taylor has with her mom, Leanne, right?

So, Taylor has a new boyfriend.

I think his name is Dakota.

Also, the names, the incredibly Mormon names.

This is a man named Dakota.

Sorry, go on.

I know.

I was like, why is this not a

lady?

But yeah.

10 out of 10.

No notes.

Yeah.

So what had happened, apparently, is that Taylor had asked on TikTok whether she should date Dakota.

Now, her mom comments on the TikTok saying, you shouldn't do that.

And then her mom is like, you disregard my TikTok comment.

And it's this really interesting way.

Like, I could see myself having the conversation with my mother being like, why are you putting this shit on TikTok?

But that's not the problem.

The mother went through TikTok, but then she's like, you performed disobedience when I very clearly told you on that social media site not to do it.

I was like, oh, there's something interesting about like parental authority and social media running into each other in really interesting ways.

And then the other thing was one of these moments when Taylor sort of almost blows up the entire premise of the show because she's like, you know, when the soft swinging scandal breaks, everyone was using it for clout.

And then she asks, did I ruin your life or did I help your life?

Right.

Like, and of course the answer is both, right?

And so like the way these two kind of economies of prestige and of standing and esteem both run parallel, but also are interlaced at every point because, like, it's just the social media age.

It strikes me as so fascinating.

It also gave them like a foil to cast themselves against.

Like, I wasn't part of that.

They're very clear, like, who was and wasn't.

They make a point of saying there are saints and there are sinners in the group.

Those are like the two sort of teams they create within the group because there's eight of them.

And so you have to try to distinguish them somehow, even though they literally all look exactly the same.

They literally buy their hair from the same place.

Like, this isn't a mystery why they all look the same.

But they form these categories.

And I think Taylor is kind of the foil.

So they're like, okay, none of us did that thing that she did.

So they can say, like, okay, we're not like her.

We're like the good mom talkers.

And then they also form in this group these like saints and sinners.

And the things that make them sinners are so hilarious because they all kind of wear these like, according to Mormon, slutty outfits.

They all kind of like, you know, dance in provocative ways.

They all went to Vegas together.

They all, you know, to some degree, like, drink or don't drink.

But at the end of the day, the things that make them sinners and divide the group between the sinners and the saints is the girls who got divorced.

And I think that's a very important commentary on the more liberated girls, the girls who don't buy into everything, the girls who don't pretend to wear under, you know, Mormon garments, the girls who don't perform these specific acts or make themselves temple worthy.

They talk about that in the show, which means you're permitted to go to the Mormon temples and not everyone is.

The girls who are more liberated are the ones who are, it's not subtle.

They're literally dubbed the sinners of the show.

Yeah, tell me a little bit about the Mormon approach to divorce, because this is a really fascinating thing, right?

Like they, a lot of them have been divorced.

One of them gets divorced over the course of the show.

You can see some other divorces coming from a mile away

that I think might be a part of season two.

Season two.

And yet how common it is seems maybe a little contradictory to the kinds of lives that they are trying to perform, right?

Yeah, I think the thing that's so, I mean, Mormons get divorced just like everyone else does.

You know, it's like 50% or more.

That's across all religions, all demographics.

Divorce is the most common outcome of a marriage in this this country.

But I think the thing that's fascinating to me is how young they're getting divorced.

Most women I know, I'm 44, most women in my age group that are, I, you know, I basically everyone I know still in the community is a Mormon feminist.

I don't know anyone who's not divorced, period.

Like there was a woman who was making a documentary about Mormon feminists at one point.

She'd been filming us all for years.

And she never finished the film.

And I said, why did you not finish the film?

And she said, everyone got divorced.

And I had been following their families this whole time.

And so then literally every single person I'd been profiling got divorced.

And I was like, well, maybe that's the happy ending.

You know, like, maybe that's, you know, we all liberated ourselves from these extremely patriarchal men, but that's not the story she wanted to tell.

So I say that to say it is common in the community, but it is very frowned upon for obvious reasons.

Mormons believe in eternal marriage.

So that's the whole point of the temple ceremony.

So you get married in a temple.

Those are those big, very flashy, white castle-looking buildings.

And this is different than a church.

Yeah.

So a temple is not a church.

A church is just like a, you know, could be in a strip mall, could be like a sort of low-key building in your neighborhood.

That's where you go for your weekly services.

A temple is a special place where only certain people can go.

There are requirements to be temple worthy.

One of them is that you pay a full tithe.

So if you do not tithe 10% of your net worth, which is checked against your tax records each year in an interview with your ecclesiastical leader, if you do not do that, then you are not temple worthy and you cannot go.

There are other things, obviously, you can't have sex outside your marriage, you can't drink, you can't smoke, like you have to meet all the community standards in order to be temple worthy.

But you are only going to get married in the temple if you are worthy.

And so, that reflects an eternal marriage, which they think extends beyond the grave and that you would be in this heterosexual marriage for eternity, which like, yeah, doesn't exactly sound like heaven to a lot of women.

So, but I say that to say like divorce is extremely frowned upon, even if it is common, because that's really central to the cosmology of the entire project.

And like, even like, I have a friend who got divorced and got remarried to another man, but her family still invites her ex to all of their holidays because he's her true eternal husband and they didn't get a temple divorce.

And so literally the family to this day still treats her ex-husband, who she's been legally divorced from as her husband and invites him to family events.

And so that's how extreme divorce is treated in the community.

Wow.

So we got to talk about the gay husbands.

What's with the gay husbands?

I mean,

sorry, not to make this about things that I care about, but I think, well, first of all, they were not hot Mormon gays, but still, you know, Adrian and I were watching different episodes last night at the same time, and I made a remark about the gay husbands.

And he was like, Wait, which husband is gay?

And I was like, The gay one.

I was like, Wait a second, you'll see.

And then he got there and he did.

Oh, yeah.

And you're like, Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

So, okay, I feel like this is also so

Mormon.

We're like the campiest people on planet Earth.

We have pageants, we have, you know, road shows, we are extremely committed to musical theater, more so than any community I've ever known.

Every single kid learns how to play the piano.

Like it's, it's a very, very campy culture.

When I was at BYU, someone was visiting and they're like, man, it's so like, I didn't know that, you know, Mormons were so welcoming of gay people.

And I'm like, what do you mean?

And they're like, I mean, look around, there's so many gay guys.

Like, and I was like, no, they're, at least they don't know that they're gay.

You know what I mean?

Like, it's just an extremely gay culture.

I'm one of five siblings, and at least three of the five are outqueers in my family.

So it's like a high percentage gay, but also like totally unbeknownst to the people themselves.

So these gay husbands that you're seeing, it's pretty likely that they don't know they're gay.

Mormons call being gay inside the community, they call it same-sex attracted.

And so basically there's no such thing as being gay.

You have what they call a trial or a problem.

And the problem is that you're same-sex attracted.

So the person who comes across as the most gay in the show is Whitney's husband, Connor.

And there's a scandal where He's like looking at an app, but it's like a little bit unclear.

Like, is the app actually Tinder or is the app grinder?

You know what I mean?

But either way, he is real gay and doesn't know it.

Also has a porn addiction.

Well, okay, that is like a whole

kind, you know?

Exactly.

Well, she did say several times he's confused, which is a euphemism for he's confused about his sexuality.

So that's like basically Mormon admitting that he's struggling with same-sex attraction.

So, yes, I mean, not to speculate over people we don't know, but I guess that's the entire point of reality TV.

I also think Macy's husband is gay and doesn't know it.

This is probably true of several of them.

And I say this to say because

women who are as assertive and powerful as these girls are are often not going to want to be constricted by the type of Mormon man who, you know, would not let them go to

Vegas, would not let them have a business, would not let them, you know, even if they make the money, I'm using the words let them very intentionally because that is the case.

Like if your husband says no, you can't do it.

And so these women don't want to be with someone like that because they want to do it.

And so I think these types of people are very attracted to each other.

And in some ways, it can be liberating for them in the same way that, like, many of these polygamous wives of Brigham Young were like, okay, well, I'm just going to like homestead on my own, you know, or do my own thing.

So, yes, I think that these women are probably attracted to gay men.

Mormons have a term called mixed orientation marriage.

So they may consider themselves to be in a mixed orientation marriage, or at some point they may discover that they are in a mixed orientation marriage.

This does not mean in the community that you have to get divorced, ironically.

And even sometimes if they knew they were gay before they got married, they may have been encouraged to marry a woman in order to heal themselves of same-sex attraction.

So I don't know these people.

I don't know what their backstories are, but I do know that this is very common in the community.

And when I saw them on screen, I was immediately like, that is the case.

They are in a mixed orientation marriage.

Whitney is is getting the villain edit and seems to not have any idea, but she's my favorite because I want more of these.

Oh my God.

I want more of these women to unleash their evil and their unbridled ambition.

And I really find it beautiful that their gay husbands can stand behind them and support them in their evil pursuits.

And dance with them.

Yeah.

She has a lot of TikToks dancing with her husband.

I'll just say that.

Yeah.

So it's very funny how anxious everyone is to make sure to imply that the soft swinging scandal that they A can't shut up about, B, that they can't provide any details about was

not same sex, right?

Because you hear like a bunch of mom talkers in a swinger's club.

You're like, oh, I mean, like your mind might run to like, oh, maybe these women got busy with each other.

There seems to be like a lot of like work done by these women on camera.

And now, obviously, like, this is reality TV.

So maybe this is the producer doing this, but maybe it's also them just not shutting up about it seemingly wanting to be very clear that they were like not soaking whatever they were doing uh each other's husbands and not each other meanwhile i have a great hermeneutics of suspicion when it comes to reality tv but like these women are touching each other a lot they are all over each other constantly and as i mean as housewives all across bravo do and as i think people who consume a lot of plastic surgery do are just just constantly complimenting each other's boobs and butts.

And you're saying, Yeah, right.

This is plastic.

I'm like, Yeah, it's just kind of amazing that it never comes up.

Here we are, just friends showing each other our labia, as friends do.

Yeah.

Again, so gay, but like, how do you not know you're gay?

But I'll tell you, as someone who was Mormon and was married to a man for a decade and came out as gay very relatively recently myself, it honestly, because of the extreme conditioning, you don't ever even consider it.

Like, I was never like pining away.

Like, I had a best friend in college.

This best friend, we like shared a car, shared a house, shared finances.

Like, people would joke about it, like, oh man, you guys are peas in a pod.

And we would say out loud, we don't kiss because if we did, we would never need men.

And

even that, I never

considered that I was gay.

Never.

Like, it did not occur to me.

It was so off the table that I wasn't even like, you know, how gay men are like, I was tortured since I was three, and I always knew I was gay, and blah, blah, blah, blah.

That was not my story.

It did not occur to me.

And I think also in these like very close societies, women have these super close relationships in order to escape the extreme version of patriarchy.

Like, even within Mormonism, in the Sunday,

you know, sort of agenda, there is a women-only group.

It's called the Relief Society.

And there's like all kinds of jokes like, oh, we're getting relief from the men.

And so in Relief Society, it's always the best meeting.

It's always women bonding.

It's always like, you know, the time we get to be super close to each other.

And so these women obviously they're now being perceived by the outside world, but they don't see it as gay.

They just see it as like getting along with each other and forming this sisterhood that's so close.

So I don't think that they know that they're gay.

I think there are some of them that like, I just want like a 15-year reunion from now where like everyone is gay and out, everyone is divorced, everyone is like, you know, done their like incredible thing because I think that's probably going to be the case.

Like, I think Whitney and Macy are in love, obviously.

This is why Macy gives her so much like leeway.

And Macy just has like a super gay vibe in like the best way possible and is going over the top to forgive Whitney and like be the one who always goes to her, be the one to say like, I'm your friend no matter what.

So anyways, those two have a very gay vibe to me.

And I hope someday that's true.

And in 15 years, they can come out and be lesbians.

That might be a great hope to end on.

I love this beautiful vision for the Mormon wives of the future.

Mormon, like two Mormon wives in one house.

You know, you don't need, you don't need the gay husband, maybe in the end.

Oh, no, no.

He does the gardening.

He stops by once a week to do the garden.

You can co-parent with him.

You know,

you've got your children.

You've achieved the lesbian dream.

You had like a dedicated sperm donor who's still in their lives and lived the lesbian dream.

Yeah, and he can be on Tinder all he wants.

Or anything.

Grinder, even.

Grinder, even, yeah.

Okay, Kelly, thank you for walking us through the wild, wacky world of Mormon gender politics as seen through this truly ridiculous show.

There's nobody I would have rather talked about this with.

So thank you so much for coming on Inbed with the Right, and we'll see you next time.

In Bed with the Right, we'd like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our producer is Katie Lau.