Why is it exciting to watch others betray their faith and families?

Public reaction among Latter-day Saints to the latest Hulu series sensationalizing “Mormon wives” has focused on lack of representation — as it should. These featured women represent the typical Latter-day Saint woman about as well as the Kardashians represent the typical American one.
But does most of the viewing public actually believe these characters represent Latter-day Saint women? We doubt it, except for maybe those who really have learned “everything” they know about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from reality TV.
Even secular media critics acknowledge our faith is “known for the moral code its members are expected to adhere to.” People aren’t watching this series because they believe these women embody Latter-day Saint culture and values. They’re tuning in because of a kind of sordid pleasure some find in watching others flout their stated values and faith commitments.
“The series’ good-girl-gone-naughty premise is evident right from its opening credits,” writes Naomi Fry in The New Yorker, remarking on a scene where these women are dressed uniformly in matching conservative coats, “but holding saucy shushing fingers to their pouty lips.”
Whatever compunction viewers might feel in ogling spouse-swapping can be soothed away as needless scruples; the real bad guy is the “patriarchal” church ridiculously portrayed as teaching women to “be housewives for the men, serving their every desire.” Cue the handmaids-in-blue-coats scene.
As a side note, women in the church are encouraged to get as much education as they can. The General Relief Society President, Camille N. Johnson, is a lawyer.
No one needs to explain why scandal and hypocrisy draw so much attention. A quick glance backward into the history of tabloid and yellow journalism is all we need to be reminded at how profitable lurid fascination with sensational stories has always been.
It’s precisely this “morbid curiosity,” Kevin Fallon says, that prompted his own interest in “the industry’s latest attempt to exploit a niche population of a community.”
Yet that quickly turned into what he called “immediate disgust” — describing the “tone” of the series an “absolute mess.”
“I found it forced and rehearsed,” Fry also says, “full of only mildly entertaining, semi-manufactured beefs.” Fallon described the cast’s “thirst for reality-TV fame” as “radioactive” — recounting how “equally exasperated and entranced” he became each time another character “would get so giddy about bringing up a producer-fed storyline that they’d start grinning, giggling, and blushing into the camera.”
If the show itself feels forced, it’s not nearly as contrived as the media coverage surrounding it. The desperate attempts to find a feminist angle on botox-bonding seems aimed less at convincing the audience as they are about convincing the cast they aren’t being exploited as tawdry, hedonistic caricatures of suburban American excess.
In a recent article, The Sunday Times attempts to reinvent the MomTokkers as feminist pioneers within Latter-day Saint culture. The author takes for granted that the church “often works to keep women in their place,” an accusation most people believe would require some kind of evidence or experience. Incredibly, the argument appears to be that “lip-syncing to pop songs in skimpy yoga clothes” is all part of a noble push to “modernize” the church and establish “gender parity.”
The media spin around the show would have us believe that the “naughty good girls” trope is a sophisticated form of activism against an oppressive religion, that the vapid “hot-mom” vibe is really just business savvy girl-bossing, and that only prudes and control freaks care about personal restraint when marriage and children are on the line. In other words, being destructively self-serving is, when you think about it, actually virtuous.
It’s grating enough to have the word “Mormon” splashed about in the context of sex scandals. We also have to grapple with the condescending notion that we’re not allowed to conclude the obvious: that none of this is actually about the Church, its teachings or even women’s rights. It’s about self-display and monetizing sexuality and scandal, with the church being both a useful marketing ploy (to the extent its association can draw more viewers) and a convenient bad guy (whenever its teachings present obstacles to those goals).
Not everyone’s going along with the emperor’s new clothes. The New Yorker writer Naomi Fry notes that, no matter how many times the show characters toss out the word “empowering” to describe anything at all, including promoting a sex toy on social media, she couldn’t help remark on how the most “affecting moments” in the series “showcase the bleakness of this version of liberation.”
Fry quotes one of the cast as bragging about how many cosmetic procedures she’s had, right before pulling down her pants to display part of her recent “mommy makeover.”
In case it’s not already entirely obvious, no one is tuning in to any of this to witness empowered women, they’re tuning in to gawk contemptuously at a farce of sexualization and overindulgence. This is not liberating anyone — not women in the church and certainly not the women in the show.
It’s worth asking what message this is sending to women, especially young ones, about how to obtain a sense of worth and value? What if Church teachings about chastity and modesty are important precisely because they help us develop real love for ourselves and others?
Though The Times believes these “rebellious wives” are “creating a crisis” for the church, it’s more likely that church leaders’ are most concerned with those whose lives are inevitably shattered by the “liberation” of broken families and substance abuse. If you look past the “trailblazer” gloss, a depressingly familiar story emerges of broken trust, superficial commitment and children navigating a world where love is flimsy and bodies are for gratification.
If the push for the church to “modernize” is really just a push for it to endorse the sexualization and objectification of women, don’t hold your breath.
In the end, we suspect no one is really expecting the church will change its standards. Celebrating these women for discarding religious sexual ethics serves a more cynical purpose; it allows critics to believe that religious people — deep down — are really all just hypocritical. They don’t believe all that — not enough to really follow it.
The truth is we all fall short at times. For most of us, that means looking inside for ways to learn, grow and change. The real hypocrisy is pretending wrong is actually right—that forsaking inconvenient values represents “a new generation of worshippers who reject the old guard’s approach.”
There is no such spotlight for the many committed believers who quietly pursue lives of devotion and seek to realign themselves with their highest commitments, rather than public perception, when they make mistakes.
But they’re the real story — the one worth getting excited about in the end.