This month, the third season of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives dropped on Hulu. Normally I wouldn’t pay attention to this, but lately my newsfeed has been full of articles about this show. Since this show is really about entertainment and scandal, the commentaries often miss the mark regarding any deeper themes that might be present regarding the relationship these women have with their ‘Mormon identity.’ However, there is one recurring theme that has caught my attention: that the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is a show about confronting ‘the patriarchy,’ presumably within the Church. And on this point, I cannot remain silent.
The women on Secret Lives of Mormon Wives claim to be ‘anti-patriarchy’ warriors. Part of this fight to ‘break the patriarchy’ is to ‘break the Mormon taboo around sex.’ And make no mistake, this is a highly sexualized show. These women hopefully wonder if they can ‘change the culture of the Church,’ including the ‘patriarchal’ ideas of chastity, and that the ‘father is the presiding authority in his family.’ Commentators at the New York Times notice that the show is, among other things, a ‘very public grappling with rigid gender roles and working outside the home ….’ It is said that the show also reflects the broader dissatisfaction that young women have with religion, who are leaving their churches in unprecedented numbers because ‘they are pushing back against their churches and disaffiliating in part because they feel like second-class citizens in their houses of worship.’
I want to argue here that the notion of ‘patriarchy’ is not a one-dimensional, one-sided concept; rather, it is multi-faceted. The term ‘patriarchy’ is most often deployed to describe something that is considered ‘socially conservative’ and perhaps even ‘right-wing.’ But this results in a confusion of terms, and therefore of concepts. Taking my cue from feminist thinker Andrea Dworkin, I argue that it is imperative that we understand that the ‘patriarchy’ can manifest itself in both ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ forms. To oversimplify, Dworkin argued that right-wing patriarchy can be defined as controlling women’s sexuality, while left-wing patriarchy can be defined as exploiting women’s sexuality. While it may not always be easy to disentangle the two, and while we might contest how each kind of patriarchy functions, my thesis here is that harmful patriarchal notions operate across the social and political spectrum. And it is clear that the women on Secret Lives, although they see themselves as escaping the traditional ‘controlling’ patriarchy, have embraced patriarchy in a different form – that of the ‘exploitative’ patriarchy, which primarily takes the form of the sexual objectification of women.
Articulating that there are various manifestations of patriarchy can, I think, also help us navigate with a little more nuance the criticism which we in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (CoJC) often receive, that we are a patriarchal church. For instance, Neylan McBaine argues that not only is the CoJC by definition a patriarchal organization, but that in the Church we are ‘swimming … entirely in the waters of patriarchy.’ Although it is not my intention in this article to engage with McBaine’s argument regarding the patriarchal structure and culture of the Church, I do want to stress that, if it is true that there are different forms of patriarchy, then we can assume that patriarchy will be found outside of the Church as well. Thus, using McBaine’s arresting analogy, we can say that society outside of the Church must have its own distinctive waters of patriarchy, in which we are all swimming as well, since we live and exist in the wider world outside of the Church. And I want to argue here that those are, among other things, the patriarchal waters of the sexual objectification of women – waters that seem to be growing deeper and stronger every day.
Thus, the analogy of ‘swimming in the waters of patriarchy’ is made more complex than perhaps McBaine had intended. It is not as simple as identifying the Church as a patriarchal culture, and outside the Church as a non-patriarchal culture (although McBaine sometimes does speak this way). Rather, it is about identifying different ‘streams’ of patriarchy that are working to drown us – whether they be from the Right or from the Left, from inside an erroneous aspect of Church culture or from the world. And, crucially, it is about distinguishing unrighteous patriarchy from righteous patriarchy. In other words, we must learn how to disentangle the gospel of Jesus Christ from the sexist practices of the world. Tragically, but predictably, the women on Secret Lives of Mormon Wives are not doing this.
Along with the ‘waters of patriarchy’ motif, another metaphor I would like to employ in thinking about the phenomena of Secret Lives is that of Lehi’s dream of the Tree of Life in 1 Nephi 8. This rich metaphor has had a profound effect on me throughout my life, as it is a story about how we can find God’s transformative and immeasurable love, but also about how we can get spiritually lost – particularly in the great and spacious building. It is a story about our agency – being active, and not passive in our relationship with God. It teaches us that there is a lot of spiritual work that we each have to do, individually, in order to get to the Tree of Life.
There is also, notably, the imagery of water in this metaphor. Specifically, there is a river of water, which runs between the Tree of Life and the great and spacious building. As Lehi describes his dream, it becomes clear that the rod of iron – which is the Word of God – is meant to help us avoid falling into the river, which Nephi identifies as a ‘filthy’ river. Thus, the river of water in Lehi’s dream is dangerous. At one point these waters are described as ‘the depths of hell,’ but the general concept is that the river metaphor works to bring into relief the sharp distinction between the love of God and the ways of the world. Indeed, the river seems to complicate greatly how one might make the journey from the great and spacious building to the Tree of Life. It also seems to be something that has to be traversed when making the opposite journey – when some of those who eat of the Tree of Life are ashamed, decide to leave the tree, and make their way to the great and spacious building.
I want to argue here that it may be to useful to think of this filthy river as a kind of cultural immersion – a set of ideologies and practices in which we have to swim in order to normalize the wisdom of the great and spacious building, and which also, therefore, keep us from experiencing the love of God. In this way, the patriarchal waters of the sexual objectification of women operate to separate all of us – women and men alike – from the love of God. These are spiritually destructive waters. We all have to do the spiritual work to get out of them. Sadly, Secret Lives of Mormon Wives represents a significant regression in this work.
As I mentioned earlier, Dworkin made a distinction between ‘right-wing’ patriarchy and ‘left-wing’ patriarchy. My intention in channeling Dworkin’s insight here is not to get bogged down in what might count as ‘Right’ or ‘Left’ in this context, but rather to offer the suggestion that there are different ways of thinking about patriarchy than perhaps we are allowed to notice, culturally speaking. Yet, Dworkin’s distinction needs an articulation. Essentially, for Dworkin, right-wing patriarchy attempts to control women’s sexuality through allowing the only legitimate expression of it in connection with her role as a wife and mother. Female sexuality is controlled through marriage, which is a privatizing of the sexual access of women; the husband ‘owns’ the wife, and only he has access to her, sexually. By contrast, left-wing patriarchy attempts to exploit women’s sexuality by claiming to value sexual freedom, which is defined as ‘the unrestrained [sexual] use of women.’ [1] In this form of patriarchy, women are used as ‘a collective natural resource, not privatized, not owned by one man but instead by many.’ [2] This is a revolt against right-wing patriarchy, against the ‘legislating of sexuality’ – through something like, say, the law of chastity. It is leftist because it is about ‘liberation,’ and specifically, sexual liberation.
However, the problem for Dworkin is that in both kinds of patriarchies, women conform themselves to men’s priorities – they are just different priorities, held by different sets of men. Actually, for Dworkin, men across the patriarchal spectrum all share one priority, which is sexual access to women. Thus, instead of the privatized ‘wife’ of the right-wing patriarchy, we get the publicly available sexually liberated woman of the left – but the catch is that the sexually liberated woman is only allowed to chase sexual liberation according to the desires and dictates of the men around her. She is a collective sexual resource, after all - not to be owned, but to be used. Therefore, she is not really free at all.
I do think that a form of this ‘sexual liberation’ is what is being peddled in Secret Lives. Because this is a show about sex, and about the question of the sexual availability of these women. I suppose we should not be surprised, because this is a show that emerged from a swinging scandal, but it’s probably worth calling this out for what it is. Although they are ‘wives,’ and in that sense participate in the patriarchal system of marriage, they brag about their illicit sexual adventures, and create new ones as material for the show. Thus, we have the leftist patriarchal theme of the possibility of a democratized sexual access to these women, made salacious because the access is in contradistinction to the ‘Mormon identity’ which these women want to claim as part of their ‘brand.’ The show dallies around this notion of sexual availability, as it feeds off the specter of sexual scandals, in which the women are both willing participants and jealous victims.
In that sense, there is a deeply transgressive feel to this show, as other commentators have noted. But it is more than that. The transgressiveness has a kind of malevolence about it – a kind of middle finger to the Church. It is clear that this is a show meant to shock, and meant to ‘punch back’ against family, friends and Church leaders. The Church – or, at least Church culture - is constantly brought up in the show, usually as the thing to blame, or the thing to mock, and the thing against which to rebel. Whether or not these women are in any way sincere in claiming a ‘Mormon identity’ seems to me to be beside the point, and a question meant to distract the viewer from the totally obvious: that there is almost nothing here that can be squared with the teachings of Jesus.
An essential part of this theme of sexual liberation is the highly sexualized portrayal of these women. These women have a ‘hyper-sexualized’ aesthetic. They have breast augmentations, botox, filler, plastic surgery, etc., with abnormally full lips and unusually symmetrical faces. The plastic surgery also extends to their genitals, part of a ‘mommy makeover’ which includes a labiaplasty procedure. Long beautiful hair extensions cascade down to tummy tucks and gluteal augmentations.
And here is where another patriarchal aspect of the show must be noted: that of female sexual objectification. To make something – or someone – into an object is to deny that thing – or that person - a subjectivity. Thus, we can make a distinction between a subject and an object – between a who and a what. Philosophers have also taken this concept further, to posit a distinction between a thinking subject and an unthinking object. Tragically, patriarchal or ‘masculinist’ thinking has often made this into a gendered distinction, to assign to the male the role of thinking subject, and to the female that of the unthinking object. The gendered nature of this distinction has its roots in philosophical dualism, which posits the radical separation of the mind from the body. Ancient Greek thinkers such as Plato developed this dualist theory, whereby the male was associated with the mind, and the female was associated with the body.
Be that as it may, when ‘unthinking object’ is contrasted with ‘thinking subject,’ it’s not hard to see that objectifying someone obscures their subjectivity. And this is no more evident than in female sexual objectification, where the sexuality of the female subsumes the other parts of her identity. To sexually objectify the female is to deny her a thinking nature – it is to refuse to intellectualize her, and instead, to infantilize her. Secret Lives of Mormon Wives does precisely this: it works to sexualize and infantilize these women. They are not portrayed as intellectual beings; instead, they fixate on and obsess over their bodies. This obsession with the body leads to a materialism which seems to truncate the development of an ‘inner life.’ They do not think great thoughts; rather, they engage in petty ‘mean girl’ drama, spending their time on gossip and rumor. More importantly, they are not portrayed as spiritual beings. Again, they insist on retaining a self-proclaimed ‘Mormon identity,’ but they claim it in an immature, sexually transgressive space, with the effect that the spiritual is subsumed by the sexual. Thus, there is not a ‘come to Jesus’ moment in this show. Sure, crosses are displayed over cosmetically enhanced breasts, but the breasts are the point of the display, not the cross.
So far, I have argued that Secret Lives of Mormon Wives does not ‘break’ the patriarchy. Far from it: this show leans into the patriarchal themes of the sexual use and sexual objectification of women. I have also problematized the claims that these women make regarding a ‘Mormon identity,’ in that they contradictorily affirm this identity while purposely promoting ideologies and practices that are quite opposed to gospel teachings. In this way, there is a sense in which they are unrecognizable to us as members of the CoJC as ‘one of us.’
Yet, at the same time, there is also something recognizable here – something depressingly familiar. And that is the cultural waters in which these women are swimming. They are swimming in the waters of a perfectionistic beauty culture, which is the backdrop against which their sexual objectification occurs. These waters are familiar to us because we are all swimming in these waters as well. There’s no question that these waters have seeped into our Church culture, and have yielded bitter fruit for quite some time. That is why, notwithstanding the severe criticisms I have made of Secret Lives, I do not think that we as members of the CoJC can ignore entirely what is happening here.
I have just argued that we in the Church are swimming in the waters of a perfectionistic beauty culture. I have also connected this perfectionistic beauty culture to the female sexual objectification that occurs in Secret Lives. Now, while I think we might have good reasons to want to maintain a distinction between a perfectionistic beauty culture and a culture of female sexual objectification, I also think that the two are, frankly, deeply intertwined. In other words, while perhaps we might want to conceptually separate these waters, one flows very easily into the other, so that they are often found together. At any rate, we also need to articulate that the waters of a perfectionistic beauty culture, like the waters of sexual objectification, are patriarchal waters as well. And perhaps here is where we can take McBaine’s point, but in perhaps a different way than she intended, that in our Church culture, we are swimming in these waters of patriarchy. And these are not harmless waters.
To be clear, I think the patriarchal waters of a perfectionist beauty culture are, indeed, worldly waters. I do not think that they are in alignment with the gospel of Jesus Christ. But because we exist in the wider world, we find ourselves constantly in these waters, and it can be incredibly hard to avoid being swept away by them. And indeed, we have become swept away by them, to the point that our Church culture has become an example to the outside world of an incredibly high, incredibly demanding standard of female beauty.
Somehow, this has happened, even as we have the precious gift of the gospel in our lives, which provides the only true anti-dote to a perfectionistic culture of beauty and of sexual objectification. In fact, somehow, we have managed to give a cultural message about physical beauty that has been packaged in a theological context. A recent article in Cosmopolitan magazine, which tries to deconstruct the ‘Utah look’ - defined as ‘a beauty standard that strives for “perfect” conformity to conventional beauty standards’ – argues that it comes from a theological preoccupation with perfection: ‘Perfection is a core value in the LDS Church. The Book of Mormon commands followers to “be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect.’ [3] Although, of course, Cosmopolitan magazine should not be used as a go-to source for our doctrine, I found this to a be a rather dispiritingly accurate summary of a widespread erroneous theological interpretation, and others in the pages of SquareTwo have written about this as well.
Yet, ‘these things ought not to be’ (James 3:10). Here is where we must free ourselves from our errors, and work to disentangle the gospel of Jesus Christ in its purity from these worldly waters. As members of the CoJC, we must use the gospel to help us do the hard work of examining these deeply ingrained cultural assumptions and practices regarding female beauty and sexuality that are so harmful to our spirituality. Part of maturing spiritually is learning how to discern what is true, and what is false; what is good, and what is harmful; what is real, and what is an illusion. Or, to use our previous analogy, we need to learn how to come to the Tree of Life, and navigate away from the ideologies of the great and spacious building.
But make no mistake, this is difficult work. It is the difficult work of trying to recognize what is front of very our eyes, trying to recognize that we are, indeed, immersed in certain ideas. Because we women - whether in the Church or outside of it - are inculcated at birth with the idea that ‘women should be beautiful.’ Indeed, in Dworkin’s words, ‘women must be beautiful and Woman is Beauty.’ If you are not beautiful, you are not a very good woman; or, at least, you aren’t very good at being a woman. This simple yet piercing concept then works to define the relationship which a woman will have with her body – that thing we were supposed to be so happy to get in the pre-existence – for the rest of her life. As Dworkin argues, standards of beauty prescribe a woman’s ‘mobility, spontaneity, posture, gait, the uses to which she can put her body. They define precisely the dimensions of her physical freedom. And of course, the relationship between physical freedom and psychological development, intellectual and creative potential is an umbilical one.’ [4]
Cultural standards of beauty thus come to operate like fundamental truths for women – precepts that we must live by if we are to be accepted, and acceptable not only to our larger society, but also to ourselves. Thus, the woman often becomes her harshest critic when it comes to her own body, and thus her own embodiment. She then lives in hatred of herself, not because she has done anything wrong, but because she is, as she is, just wrong. She is never, never, allowed to feel comfortable in her own skin. Thus, we have a multi-billion dollar beauty industry to keep up with all the self-hatred.
Speaking from personal experience, I don’t remember an exact time when I first started to question the cultural indoctrination of impossible beauty standards and female objectification. By the time I hit puberty I was taller than most other girls, had a larger frame, and more muscular legs. That was enough to definitively put me outside of the acceptable range of what was considered beautiful. I grew up during the 80’s, when the wafer-thin girl who had an eating disorder was the standard of beauty. I remember consistent messages of disapproval of my appearance, from a range of actors. When I was in high school, I was teased relentlessly about my body. Jokes about my body even made it into the ‘Senior Predictions,’ where it was predicted that after high school I would start a successful dairy business, because my ‘calves are bigger than everyone else’s.’ My friends wondered aloud behind my back if I would ever get married. When I was in college, I was eating ice cream along the waterfront in Boston, and a stranger came up to me and told me I shouldn’t be eating ice cream. When I was working as an investment banker on Wall Street in the 90’s, I was walking on a sidewalk with a friend and someone drove past and shouted, ‘I’ll take the fat one.’ And on and on.
Yet, one memory stands out to me in particular. When I was still in high school, I remember pondering on the concept that when you exercise your muscles, this makes them bigger. I always had quite muscular legs, which I hated. I wondered aloud to a friend whether I could get an operation in which my muscles were somehow cut out of my legs. I knew this really couldn’t happen, and I expressed disappointment at this. I was rather surprised when this friend, in all seriousness, agreed with me – that it was, indeed, disappointing that there was no way to get my muscles cut out of my legs.
Although nothing changed at that precise moment, I reflect back on that event now as perhaps a time when a seed had been planted – a seed of realizing not only the misogyny inherent in our cultural understanding of female beauty, but also the actual violence. Thus, decades later, when I first started reading Dworkin, I was able to identify immediately with her argument that women are culturally indoctrinated to romanticize pain and violence when it comes to achieving beauty, and this is taught to us when we are young: ‘The adolescent experience of the “pain of being a woman” casts the feminine psyche into a masochistic mold and forces the adolescent to conform to a self-image which bases itself on mutilation of the body, pain happily suffered, and restricted physical mobility.’ [5] Of course, we see this mutilation of the female body, the ‘pain happily suffered’ for beauty, throughout Secret Lives; indeed, it is a significant theme of the show.
Somehow, when I was in my early 20’s, I started the difficult work of confronting the waters of perfectionism and objectification in which I was swimming. I had to find a way to be comfortable in my own skin, and a way to value my body, despite the cultural messages around me. And I found very quickly that this was, first and foremost, a holy and a spiritual work. I started to search intently for God, for God’s love, understanding intuitively that this was the only thing that could pull me out of these toxic cultural waters. In terms of Lehi’s dream, I worked my way through a lot of ‘dark and dreary wastelands,’ and held onto the rod of iron with greater purpose and intent. I was active in seeking God, not passive. Slowly, eventually, I learned that the only things that mattered were what God thought of me, and what I thought of myself. Cultural beauty standards come and go, and they are always in flux; but God’s love is always there – it is constant. The fruit of the Tree of Life is indeed most desirable to the soul.
When I felt of God’s love, I spiritually understood that, because of Christ’s Atonement, I was enough: a daughter of infinite worth, loved infinitely. There was no need to chase ‘physical perfection.’ This realization made me an immeasurably better daughter, sister, friend, scholar, missionary, and eventually, wife and mother. No longer did I have to obsess over everything that was wrong with my body; instead, I could inhabit in my body without self-loathing. This made it possible for me to develop my mind, my character, and my inner life. In other words, having rejected objectification, I could focus on my subjectivity, my self-actualization.
Thus, given my life experiences, the demands of our current perfectionistic beauty culture – the focus on botox, fillers, facelifts, plastic surgery, breast and butt augmentations, etc. - do not make spiritual sense to me. These demands may very well be connected to a misunderstood theological emphasis on perfection, with the flip side being a place of fear of never being ‘good enough.’ And I worry that these procedures - which women are starting to get at younger ages, and repeat throughout their lives – are starting to take on a kind of sacramental function for many people. These are ‘sacraments’ that offer the ‘redemption’ of the sin of physical imperfection, and women seem to regularly and ritualistically participate in them with great devotion. But, of course, the pursuit of a perfectionistic objectification of our physical form here on earth has really nothing to do with our salvation. Not only that, but such a pursuit will sooner or later hollow out our spirituality, subsuming it beneath our carnal pursuits.
In other words, these waters of a perfectionistic beauty culture, if we continue to immerse ourselves in them, will keep us from feeling God’s love. Instead, they will work to normalize the ideologies of the great and spacious building. And the irony is that it is in that building, we will never be good enough.
Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, in some ways, seems to be coming from this place of fear: fear of not being beautiful enough, or sexy enough, or successful enough, or famous enough. But the fear is never addressed spiritually, because it’s not that kind of show. Instead, the physical is pursued in lieu of the spiritual. That is, the pursuit of physical perfection is proposed as the solution to what is ultimately a spiritual problem. As a result, instead of fighting the patriarchy as they claim, these women very much swim in its waters, leaning into their own sexual self-objectification.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. If we learn anything from Lehi’s dream, it is the transformative power of the love of God. The pull of the great and spacious building can feel very real, but it has no foundation. The Tree of Life, by contrast, is grounded. It is firm. It is stable. It is enough. God’s love is enough. My prayer is that somehow, one day, these women will leave the great and spacious building, and search for Jesus. We will wait by the Tree for them.
NOTES:
[1] Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin, edited by Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder, South Pasadena, California: Semiotext(e), 2019, p. 155. [Back to manuscript].
[2] Last Days at Hot Slit, p. 155. [Back to manuscript].
[3] Malach, H., Why You Can’t Tell the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives Cast Apart, Cosmopolitan, November 2025; [Back to manuscript].
[4] Last Days at Hot Slit, p. 56. [Back to manuscript].
[5] Last Days at Hot Slit, p. 59. [Back to manuscript].
Full Citation for this Article: Hamilton-Bleakley, Holly (2025) "‘Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ and the Patriarchy of the Great and Spacious Building," SquareTwo, Vol. 18 No. 3 (Fall 2025), http://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleBleakleySLOMW.html, accessed <give access date>.
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