[PREVIEW] Episode 576: The Wife Economy

Brace Belden (0:00)

Absolutely, and you know, later on in this conversation, we're going to talk a little bit about the difference, or try to tease out maybe what the differences are between the tradwife and the housewife as these sort of feminine archetypes, I guess, because I do think there's something there. They're related, but very different, and kind of different approaches towards, let's say, monetization and liberation. But I want to talk about the Mormon of it all first, because I don't want to get around that before we get into reality TV, because what you said about Mormons being weird is so, first of all, so true. Mormons are so weird and so American in a way that even other, even strands of American Protestantism aren't, there's something so, so American about Mormonism, and a lot of it has to do with the emphasis on small business ownership and enterprise, as well as the sort of more esoteric elements. But what you said about them being conservative in a different way, they're not conservative, but they are conservative, but in a different way than you would think of Baptists, right?

Or evangelicals, or whatever. This is not American evangelical Christianity, or nobody is doing any tongue rituals, or covering up in a way that is because the devil is going to get you, or something like there's no fire and brimstone conservative.

Bridget Read (1:45)

Although they do have their special underwear.

Brace Belden (1:47)

Of course, of course. So we cannot discount the special underwear. Any time you talk about Mormons, you got to bring that up.

Bridget Read (1:52)

We cannot.

Brace Belden (1:53)

But do you know what I'm saying? There is something very...

I feel like evangelical Christians, kind of, especially the ladies, they will kind of like, they'll have one shoulder out, one leg out, and they kind of tease it, oh, but I'm conservative or something. Mormons are very different. And I think their approach to all of that is very different. Can we talk about this for a little bit?

Bridget Read (2:17)

Yeah. And Mormons have, of course, there is now a pretty wide range of Mormons too, of course, right? So you have more what you could call fundamentalist Mormons, who observe the special underwear, which is very real, which comes from the church, and which is they literally release it every year. And for women, there's different sizes of strap and all this stuff. And it is quite controlling. But then you have all the way to these Mormon influencers that we're talking about. They certainly do not wear the underwear in public. And I know for when I interviewed some of these women, I was like, oh, you're clearly not wearing underwear because you're wearing garments that can't support any kind of underwear.

Which is of course what the new shows are about is New Mormons.

But I would say Mormonism is interesting because what I meant by it's not so straightforward conservative is Mormonism at its core is a deeply and explicitly patriarchal religion. The man is the head of the household. The cosmology of the Mormon faith, the Church of Latter-day Saints, is that men are the heads of the household, women provide for the family and the household, and they grow their families as big as possible so that they can literally ascend and live in heaven forever. So it's very serious and literal. They don't think they're going to like, their spirits will ascend to heaven. It's like, no, you're going to go, you're going to wake up in your coffin, and you're going to rise up and go live on these other planets. Much of what is chronicled in the Book of Mormon, the lyrics are actually really helpful in understanding the Mormon religion.

So, and then in that ascension, the faith is metered out in an incredibly, metered out in an incredibly top-down structure that is very, very highly controlled by a group of apostles, that's like a tiny group of men, then there's a bigger group of men, and then goes all the way down to your church and your ward or whatever. And then in your ward, you are having to really perform as a good Mormon, to keep your name in the books, to keep being able to do these rituals you have to do. And these are, again, the Mormons that actually adhere the most to the religion. But in that aspect, Mormonism is not necessarily culturally conservative as much as it is like controlling to me. Like it's a much more like high control organization than it is, I don't know, a more kind of explicitly conservative or like past focused religion. It's actually quite focused on the future, which is why there are, and we can get into this too, why Mormons and tech have always gone together in a way that I think more other types of conservative religions do not, right? Like Mormons have actually always been part of the American tech world in a way that I think is really under examine. And so that actually is a huge part of why Mormon women became influencers is they were literally more online than their counterparts. Like more people in Utah in the early 2000s got online faster than in other parts of the country because Mormons are so into the internet. You know, the University of Utah was part of ARPANET in the 60s. So they literally built the internet along with Silicon Valley and other parts of California. We just don't talk about it as much, but they are very into hardwiring the future. Then now they're into the cloud. And there are Mormon tech evangelists who really believe that the way they will ascend to heaven is through the cloud. So all of that-