It makes lots of sense that the lives of fashionable TikTok stars would function irresistible fodder for actuality tv. The mixture of attention-courting, attractive-looking topics experiencing sudden, tenuous fame, and the tensions that come up from the panopticon-like social-media showground through 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 time out 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 shifting to Los Angeles to pursue new heights of social-media success.
And now we’ve the eight-part collection “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” additionally on Hulu, which focusses on a clutch of Utah girls who’re, to a better or lesser extent, affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and likewise members of what they check with as MomTok. These younger wives and moms—all easy, 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 basically a content-creator home, aside from we don’t really reside collectively,” Mayci, a blond mom of two who’s a working towards Mormon in addition to a self-proclaimed “dangerous bitch,” tells the digital camera.
The collection’ good-girl-gone-naughty premise is clear proper from its opening credit, which function 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 Might of 2022, the confusingly named Taylor Frankie Paul, a MomTok creator (present TikTok following: 4.4 million and counting), went reside on the platform to inform viewers that she and her husband, alongside another MomTok girls and their spouses, had been collaborating in what she referred to as “mushy swinging”—typically 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 an excellent better public curiosity in MomTok. (“Did I spoil 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 due to her confession, although all of them have denied collaborating 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 girls have 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 to 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, filled with solely mildly entertaining, semi-manufactured beefs, which appeared to observe 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 get together ends in a combat between Whitney and one other MomToker named Demi when the previous half-reveals a delicate element concerning the latter’s intercourse life (it seems to have one thing to do with a inventive repurposing of Fruity Pebbles cereal); a Vegas journey with a backstage V.I.P. go to to the Chippendales present, the place a few of the girls are extra snug than others with oiling the male strippers’ sizable pecs, causes pressure within the group; and many others., and many others. Nonetheless, as I stored on viewing, I discovered myself changing into more and more invested—if not within the present’s plot, per se, then in what that plot revealed concerning 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 residing in it. These days, we’re informed, girls can do something and be anybody: they’ll lean in at company H.Q. whereas carrying 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 take pleasure in 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 lady, large tits, however good vibes.”) Ideally, they’ll choose and select from every of those identities, mixing and matching at will to attain a wonderfully balanced mix of latest womanhood.
And but Perry’s monitor was a sneered-at flop, no less than partly, I feel, as a result of not many are nonetheless shopping for what she was attempting to so vigorously promote. As I flashed again to the tune’s synthetically buoyant opening verse—“Attractive, assured / So clever / She is heaven-sent / So mushy, 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 alternative feminism. (Like others, I discovered the singer’s belated declare that the tune was meant satirically unconvincing.) With the seeming freedom to do something and be anybody, ideally , Perry’s model of a girl is eerily just like that of the ladies of MomTok: attractive and assured, mushy and robust, a perpetually sister to her fellow content material creators and a shrewd businesswoman who at all times seems to be out for No. 1, a loyal mom and spouse and a boss bitch, a hottie who by no means forgets to indicate 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 probably the most affecting moments in “Secret Lives” are people who showcase the bleakness of this model of liberation. In a single episode, a few of the girls 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, based on 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 will to have absolute sovereignty over one’s physique is basically 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 tissue to decrease wrinkles that certainly 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, publicizes that she’s determined to get a labiaplasty, since after having two children she must get a “mommy makeover.” For the MomTokers, changing 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 indicate just a few 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.
