What's Missing from "The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives"

Some thoughts on the deep layers and wide spectrum of Mormon patriarchy.

Before The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives was released on Hulu, people from my Mormon community were losing their minds over the trailer. The show revolves around eight Mormon and post-Mormon women who met working together on #momtok, a TikTok account that features them dancing a lot and, in their words, “breaking down the patriarchy.” The trailer draws attention to young motherhood, marriage dynamics, and qualifications for “good” Mormons, and that was enough to make someone from my high school post on Facebook, “This is the end of times.” 

I finished all eight episodes earlier this week. I felt the most depressed I have in a long time. Living across the country in Washington, DC, I’ve kind of forgotten what living in the Mormon bubble is like, and the show’s smaller details are what brought me back to that mindset. My experience in that culture was not similar to these women’s. I was not a young mother, I followed all the rules, and my group of friends was not in each other’s business the same way a reality show demands. Still, the culture felt so familiar: sugary sweets at every occasion, the temple looming over every shot, the conversations revolving around who’s doing the right thing and who needs to be doing better. Most of all, I felt it in the way the men looked at and communicated with the women. 

In the very first episode, one of the women, Taylor, is arrested for domestic violence. She’s drunk, disorderly, throwing stuff at her boyfriend. When the police come, the footage is shaky and grainy, and it’s hard to hear what she’s saying, except for one line: “You don’t own me.” 

The things people say while drunk are toss-ups. She could be revealing some deeper truth, or she could be out-of-her-mind disoriented. In this case, with the context—she’s one who’s questioning the church’s place in her life, having just gotten divorced as a 28-year-old—it’s hard not to see “you don’t own me” as the former. It’s an important line, and genius for the show producers to add it to the first episode, as it sets the tone for the following storylines that involve the women grappling with their positions in their marriage and within the church.

The thing is, the show kind of skirts those deeper questions. Instead, it focuses on the drama of #momtok, of who is mad at who, who’s “in charge” of the group, the superficial idea of sinners vs. saints. We find out one of the husbands has been cheating on his wife throughout their marriage and then never come back to it. We find out one of the women was impregnated by a 21-year-old when she was 16 and then never come back to it. We find out a 29-year-old woman is married to a 46-year-old man and then never come back to it. There’s not much interrogation from the women or the producers about the way Mormonism plays into these marriage dynamics. 

The women claim to use #momtok to “break down the patriarchy” but it’s unclear how. From what I can tell, it’s because they’re the breadwinners of their families, which pulls them away from traditional narratives of Mormon couples. But #momtok itself doesn’t seem to be commenting on the patriarchal structures Mormonism pushes—it’s just the women dancing on camera. I don’t have TikTok, so someone tell me if I’m wrong! Overall, I don’t think the stakes of the show were as clear and specific as they could have been.

The men are always present in this show, even when they’re not. The women talk about the problems in their relationships, ask their husbands for permission to do things, beg their husbands to respect them, cancel on events because their husbands don’t want them to go. When the men do show up on camera, I recognize the way they look at their wives. It’s the way so many ex-boyfriends and dates looked at me, like I was, for lack of a better term, a possession. Men would listen to me, entertain my hopes and dreams, but deep down, they expected me to do what I was taught: be a wife and mother. This look showed up most with Jen’s husband in the show, Zac—the same man who threatened Jen with divorce after she went to a Chippendales show in Las Vegas and who told her “I don’t care” when she said she found purpose and joy in #momtok. This is also the same man who was given $2500 to gamble in Vegas by his breadwinning wife. 

Part of the issue is something Mormons are infamous for: young marriages. One of the women in the show even points this out: “Everyone is getting married before their brains even develop.” We look for the traits we’re supposed to admire in our potential partners: faith, good works, kindness, family-centered morals. Mormons often date for less than a year, and just as often get married within a year of knowing each other. The median age for Mormon marriages is 22 or 23 (and many of the women in TSLOMW were married even earlier, at 18 or 19). We don’t know how to be married, only that we’re supposed to want it. And we don’t know ourselves. And so it’s easy to talk about potential spouses as caricatures, our future lives a hazy photo of man, woman, and children standing in front of a glowing white temple.

Our culture was one of sexual purity, and so conversations revolving around sex were fraught. Women were in trouble if they “gave it up” too easily, and also made fun of if they were too prudish. Our sexuality was measured by cows—yes, cows—in a weird number of ways. A girl was a “ten-cow woman” if she was extra beautiful and chaste. And then boys would say, “Why would you buy the cow if you get the milk for free?” when talking about sex before marriage. As a possession, an animal, a caricature, we were not valued by men for our thoughts and hopes and aspirations, especially if it meant we were straying from the path set out for us.

Jen ends up crying at Chippendales because Zac can’t stand the thought of her being amongst men in thongs. She calls him to say she didn’t set the activity up, she just came with her friends, she’s not planning on doing anything wild. “Can you just think of me as a human being?” she asks him. 

Me and Jake looking cute—and young—as hell. He was 24 and I was a very fresh 22.

I’m in the middle of this strange confluence of media right now. I’m producing a mini series about Tim Ballard for PodcastOne (details to come), and I’ve talked to many of the women accusing him of sexual misconduct. If you don’t know anything about these cases, I recommend this article published just the other day in The New York Times, but in short: Ballard is the founder of Operation Underground Railroad, which ran sting operations to “free” kids from human trafficking. In these operations, he had women join him in what he calls a “couples ruse”; his reasoning being that he can avoid interaction with the trafficked children if he’s with a pretend wife or girlfriend. He convinces the women that they must really pretend to be in relationships with him, because traffickers could be watching at all times. This led to him sexually assaulting and raping women who simply signed up to help save children. In these women’s stories, the Mormon patriarchal elements are up front. Ballard uses God as an excuse—and even a reason for—his sexual advances. He berates the women for refusing his advances, asking them if they want to save children or not. He sees them as bodies only, and uses them as such.

It’s easy for the cultural tenets of Mormonism to at worst, breed people like Tim Ballard, and at best, breed men who are deeply conflicted in their roles as husbands and fathers. In Chelsea Homer’s Substack post “In the business of creating monsters,” she writes:

To completely ignore the influence of insulating mormon boys in a patriarchal hierarchy, devoid of women and global-majority voices, and telling them they will one day become gods is definitely short-sighted…Tim’s faith and stories of spiritual origins are integral to his life mission. Like many, he’s been shaped and emboldened by a theology that powers this state. 

I understand that a Hulu show can’t—and maybe shouldn’t—get this deep about the roots of Mormon patriarchy. There are so many layers to it, and a spectrum to it as well. I still notice it within myself even after leaving mentally, spiritually, and physically from that Mormon sphere. I’ve written here before about how I don’t trust myself with decisions, even after years of separation from the church and subsequently the men who ruled my life. I identified with the women in TSLOMW  in feeling like I need to plan life around my husband (who, for the record, was the first man who didn’t look at me like I was a cow, and has helped me unwrite many assumptions about Mormon men because of his goodness), even though he doesn’t ever ask or expect me to plan around him. I feel it with other men, too—out in public with friends, I feel a pressure to regulate their emotions, even though my friends in DC are so different than the men I knew in Utah. I still ask my therapist, who is a man, for validation of my ideas and decisions—which he refuses to give, and which is helping me heal.

I spoke with Kate Kelly the other day for the Tim Ballard podcast. For those of you who don’t know who she is, you’re in for an enormous treat. The founder of Ordain Women, Kelly is a lawyer and women’s rights activist who was excommunicated from the Mormon church for insisting that women should have a place within its leadership. She asked that women receive the priesthood—access to the power of God that only men are currently allowed to have—and that was enough to drive the church crazy. When I first heard about her, I was on my Mormon mission in Texas.

I remember being really interested in what she was saying, even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to support it. I talked with open-minded members about what she preached, and had really interesting discussions about what a difference female power and influence could make on the church’s structures. But I shoved those thoughts away because it wasn’t important to my mission at the time. 

I suggested her for the Tim Ballard podcast so she could speak to how the church’s patriarchal structures could lead Tim to such extremes. She pointed out that many people are leaving the Mormon church, and the pattern around why is actually generally somewhat gendered.

1. Men leave because of historical secrets and woes about the church they find repugnant, and 

2. Women leave because of mistreatment.

I’ve watched so many women—not just from TSLOMW, but also from the interviews with Tim Ballard’s victims, and from conversations with friends who have left the church, and from conversations with friends simply questioning the church—crying, rationalizing, wishing for something better. I’ve been one of them. 

“You don’t own me.” 

“Can you just think of me as a human being?” 

Patriarchal structures don’t disappear, of course, on the other side of Mormonism. Not long ago, I went out to dinner with my former editor and some other coworkers. It was a girls’ night; we were all unwinding after an event we’d sponsored. We sat in a back booth in a dark restaurant. The photographer from the event came to visit, and asked if he could squeeze in. I scooted over to make room, and he took a slice of pizza we’d bought with our own money without asking. 

For the next thirty minutes, he complimented my editor. I sat in between them, trying not to laugh at his obvious persistence.

“You’re so amazing,” he said, repeatedly. “I don’t know how you do it.” 

She ran a local magazine and directed the operation’s media, and she was raising a six-year-old boy. She told the story of how she went into labor during production week, how the previous editor snarked at her, said she’d never return after having the baby. But she did return—and she talked about how it was all because of clear boundaries she set with her husband from the very beginning: this would be a completely equal partnership. It had to be. 

“That’s so amazing,” the photographer said. “I don’t know how you do it. I could never do that.”

“You could,” we both said. 

He assured us it was not possible. He didn’t have it in him; didn’t have the time. 

“You have to make the time,” my editor said. We reiterated that the structures around us didn’t make motherhood and working at the same time any easier—women had to bend and stretch to make having children a viable option, and that included men’s active involvement, too. 

“You’re so amazing,” he said again. “I don’t know how you do it.”

This man does not need to have children; no one does. But he’s free to shape his life in a way women are not, and he refused to acknowledge that reality. Instead, he did what I was used to: he put women on a pedestal, called up how proud he was, and then walked away, leaving us alone to figure out how to survive in a world with little support. 

My editor knew about my Mormon past. After he left, she looked at me and sighed. “You probably thought you were leaving this when you moved to DC,” she said. “It’s not so different here.”

Maybe #momtok itself isn’t necessarily breaking down the patriarchy in specific and obvious ways, but TSLOMW itself could be onto something. Culture isn’t a thing that changes overnight, and it definitely isn’t a thing that changes if women are the only ones trying. I want men to watch this show, to examine the relationship dynamics, to look at the underlying issues beneath the TV-made drama, to break down their own roles in why this culture can be so damaging to everyone—men and women alike. Until then, the real villains, despite the show's narratives of girl vs. girl and sinners vs. saints, are stewing over their wife’s success in the next room over. 

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Did you watch the show? What did you think?

Okay, off to take a break from Mormon-related content! See you on the other side.

Abi