Taylor Frankie Paul and the stars of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives have survived swinging scandals and (multiple) divorces. Now they have 10 million followers and a bigger TV audience than The Kardashians.
Once merely the punchline to jokes about polyamory and pyjamas, Mormonism is having a moment — on social media at least. While its members make up just 0.212% of the world’s population, the religion’s online influencers are suddenly everywhere, flooding TikTok and Instagram.
Most — such as Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, apple-cheeked poster girl for the trad wife movement who makes her own mozzarella from scratch — project wholesome, bucolic perfectionism, with idealised, aspirational images of motherhood and home-making, and beatific submission to the patriarchy and archaic gender roles.
The latest Mormon mother to have rocketed to social media stardom, however, has brought a racier and more rebellious aspect. Taylor Frankie Paul, a petite, pretty, 30-year-old mother of three and one of the founders of MomTok — a group of young, glamorous and highly groomed Utah mothers who banded together in 2021 to make videos of their dance numbers, lip-syncing in matching crop tops — has more than five million followers across TikTok and Instagram. She is also one of the stars of a new reality show, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which, in the few weeks since it first aired in the US, has become a smash hit, overtaking even reality TV royalty, The Kardashians.
In person, Paul is tiny and telegenic, with huge brown bush-baby eyes and a frankness tailor-made for reality TV.
And in spite of marrying at 22, Paul — who favours snug athleisure and “likes a spray tan and to have my teeth very white” — is not your trad wife type. She has a five-month-old son with her boyfriend, Dakota Mortensen, a recovering addict, and a seven-year-old daughter and four-year-old son from her five-year marriage to Tate Paul — a marriage which ended in divorce after she and her husband engaged in “soft swinging” with a group of local friends.
“Soft swinging”, in case you are wondering, is “where you are intimate with other couples but you’re not fully switching partners like actual swingers”, according to Paul. Still not completely clear? Paul explains that swingers “have intercourse and whatnot, but we never went all the way and we honestly did it all together. The whole group was intimate with each other … No one was innocent. Everybody has hooked up with everyone in the situation.”
So, a sex party without actual sex, then? “Yes, what I like to call it is an inexperienced open relationship,” she says.
Anyway, it didn’t go well for the four couples involved. “We’re all divorced now, so obviously it was messy,” she says, deadpan. Paul developed feelings for one of the group, and embarked upon an affair with him. “And then it hit the internet.”
Rumours began swirling on Reddit that Paul had been unfaithful with a friend’s husband. “It just didn’t feel like it was fair … There was a lot more to the story than just I am some sort of homewrecker. So I was like, OK, well if you’re gonna do that, I’m just gonna go tell my story,” says Paul, who took to TikTok (where else?) to confirm that, “I caught feelings for a man that my husband welcomed into our house,” and that they were divorcing.
There was backlash, both online and locally, with Paul ostracised from friendship groups, the lucrative MomTok collective falling apart amid accusations of hypocrisy, and deals falling through as friends and fellow influencers sought to distance themselves from the scandal. “Everyone was freaking out because they didn’t want to be associated with that,” says Paul with a sigh, “and it made me look like the bad guy, the villain.”
Yet Paul was, and remains, defiantly unrepentant. “Yes, maybe I wasn’t proud of those actions — I hurt a lot of people and if I could go back, I’d do things differently,” she shrugs. “But at the end of the day, I felt very free.”
It’s not hard to see why reality TV executives came calling; along with her openness, drama appears to stalk Paul relentlessly. In early 2023, after a girls’ night out, she was arrested for domestic violence in the presence of a child after a drunken row with Mortensen. She pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and has been sober since February 2023. Paul describes it as “one of the worst nights ever”, but also says that, “It changed our relationship because I finally got help.”
The Family: A Proclamation to the World, one of the cornerstone texts of Mormonism, states that, “Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children,” while the church website states that women have “the greater gift and responsibility for home and children and nurturing there and in other settings”.
Alcohol, coffee, tattoos and swearing are all strongly discouraged, as is sex before marriage. Only in 2018 were Mormon female missionaries allowed to wear trousers, and even then not for attending the temple.
Part of the appeal and instant success of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which follows the group through the fallout of Paul’s “soft-swinging” bombshell and their attempts to rebuild both friendships and the lucrative MomTok brand, is the gulf between the expectations of Mormon women, from the church and wider society — to be modest, dutiful, obedient — and the “reality” of the MomTokers’ lives, which involve a lot of blow-dries, Botox and Lululemon, as well as big houses, big cars and big kitchens.
In response to the release of the show, the Mormon Church — the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to give it its full title — issued a coded statement. Headlined “When entertainment media distorts faith”, the statement criticised “a number of recent productions” that “depict lifestyles and practices blatantly inconsistent with the teachings of the Church” and “sensationalism and inaccuracies that do not fairly and fully reflect the lives of our Church members or the sacred beliefs that they hold dear”.
Paul says she was pressured, by both her family and the church, to get married straight out of high school. “We were raised to be these housewives for the men, serving their every desire,” she says. But she and her fellow MomTokers have, at least, fulfilled the expectations of the faith when it comes to early marriage and plentiful procreation.
@taylorfrankiepaul thankful for these moms #momtok
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Jessi Ngatikaura, now 32, first married at 22, divorced, remarried at 28, and has a 4-year-old son, a 2-year-old daughter and a 12-year-old stepdaughter. Demi Engemann, 30, married at 20 and had her daughter at 23. She also divorced, remarried at the age of 25, and has two stepsons, aged 19 and 16.
Both women — whom I initially struggle to tell apart, so spookily similar is their look, as is that of all the MomTokers, a not-so-subtle nod to the sister wives of the (now outlawed) Mormon practice of polygamy — are stunned when I tell them that in the UK, it’s increasingly unusual to get married in one’s twenties, and common not to get married at all. For them, “If you weren’t married by 23, you were an old maid,” says Engemann, the (very slightly) more brunette of the two.
But, she adds, “I do feel a shift. I’ve talked to quite a few people in their mid-twenties and I’ll ask, ‘So, are you married?’ And they’re like, ‘No. I’m just doing me, figuring out me.’ And I think, how refreshing. That was never, ever something that was said. So I do feel like the pendulum is swinging a little bit.”
Notions of modesty are also being roundly challenged by the Mormon mothers of MomTok, who are universally hypergroomed, with vast manes of wavy waist-length hair, plumped lips and ultrasmooth faces.
“Yeah, that’s Utah for you — we’re all about the plastic surgery, Botox, hair extensions, make-up — all of it,” says Ngatikaura, the (very slightly) fairer of the two, who has her own business: “A hair school, a hair extension company, a haircare line and a hair salon.”
In one episode, Paul arrives at a restaurant for lunch to greetings of approval about her new, surgically enhanced breasts — which her friends are invited to examine. In another, Layla Taylor, a divorced mother of two at 23, admits that she’s never had an orgasm. “Sex is just not talked about in our community,” says Paul. “There are lots of girls that are scared to talk about sex, because everything is underground and very hush-hush. But people have sex. People have affairs.”
Paul is puncturing that silence robustly: two of her most lucrative social media partnerships, she tells me, have been with vibrator brands.
And Whitney Leavitt, 31, who is seen returning to Salt Lake City after a two-month unexplained absence in Hawaii, tearfully reveals that her husband, the father of her two small children, has a longstanding porn addiction and has been sexting other women on Tinder for several years.
In many ways, it’s your average women’s book group/friendship group fodder, but, says Paul, “It’s very image-based here. There’s this idea that Mormons have to be perfect — we don’t do this, we don’t do that, we do no wrong — when in fact we also do wrong. Nobody’s perfect. And we wanted to put something out there that is real, about how we really live.”
“The Family Proclamation does say the women are the primary caretakers of the children and the men provide, but I do think that that is shifting,” observes Ngatikaura. Thanks to lucrative deals as influencers, all eight members of the MomTok collective featured in the show are the main (or in the case of single divorcees Paul and Taylor, solo) breadwinner in their household; together, the MomTokers boast a collective 11.3 million followers on TikTok.
Kate Davis, a visiting scholar in religious studies at Defiance College in Ohio, who wrote her dissertation on Mormon and evangelical female influencers, thinks Mormon women in particular are well primed for social media success, thanks to the age-old “reflexive writing tradition” of the religion. “Yes, we were raised with scripture study and journalling, so I can see that,” nods Engemann, when I put the theory to her.
“I think part of the answer is also that there is a perception that it’s a thing you can do and still be a stay-at-home parent,” says Davis. “That you can earn an income while still technically being under the label of stay-at-home mom.”
While the MomTokers may look outwardly modern and liberated, with their crop tops, leggings and hair extensions, the women’s movement of the past 50 years or so does seem to have somehow skipped Utah. And, for some, working and earning their own money has been nothing short of radical.
“Being in Utah County, growing up so conservatively in the church, you’re raised to think that being a wife and a mom is the biggest goal of all,” says Ngatikaura. “And it is. But at the same time, you can lose yourself so easily in it.
“And now we’re breaking the mould by having businesses, being entrepreneurs, having friendships and work outside that home structure. For sure there’s a shift happening.”
“I used to be more of the traditional way of thinking,” admits Engemann. “I always just want to be a mom; I always want to be in the home. And now that I’ve experienced having my thing, I have seen how it’s enhanced my ability to be better and more present when I am being a mom.
“I realise now how dependent I’ve been in relationships and how easy it’s been for me to fall back on a man and to be like, well, they’re in the role of providing and they’re in this role of leading and protecting,” she continues. “And I’ve really shifted my thinking. I don’t know what’s going to happen in my relationship — heaven forbid I get divorced again or my husband dies or something — but I want to be able to say I’m totally capable of navigating life on my own, and I’m confident in that now. I am capable, and it’s empowering,” she says.
“I do feel like there’s a time and place for patriarchal order, and we do have our different roles, and I don’t want to take anything away from the men. But it is eye-opening to see how there is a place for women in the world, and we are equal, and we are capable of being independent participants. Now, I think I always want to have my own thing. It’s just so empowering,” she says, excitedly. “I’m addicted to it.”
So, is this Mormonism’s feminist moment, fuelled by social media and reality TV? “Social pressure for equal rights in the community has been steadily building,” confirms Davis.”There is a future in which there is more gender parity.”
Paul, for her part, believes that the buttoned-up, conservative image of Mormons — and Mormonism itself — is shifting, and the MomTok collective simply reflects that. “I feel like it’s evolved, and people are evolving too. We don’t follow the rules as closely as our mothers and grandmothers did — we pick and choose what’s important to us.
“Take something as simple as coffee,” she continues. “That was such a no-no growing up for me. And when I started drinking I felt really guilty. I just had to shut off that idea, and say, it’s not that big a deal.”
Does she still consider herself a good Mormon woman? Paul laughs. “I’ve learnt lots of lessons, and I am very honest and I feel like if you believe in God and you’re doing it in front of God you might as well just own it in front of everyone else, because he’s the one that matters.
“I’m true to myself,” she concludes.”I don’t know if you call that a good Mormon, but for me, I feel good at the end of the day.”
- The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives streams on Disney+
Written by: Jane Mulkerrins
© The Times of London
