Wives and Lives: From Polygamy to Polyamory
Nicole Walker
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There is a moment when I enter Northern Utah when I realize I’m on a different planet. Driving north from Flagstaff, the sights stay pretty much the same. The Lake Powell’s shrinks, fills, shrinks revealing bathtub rings, submerging them—although it never makes it back to the original ring. Horseshoe Bend, which was not a place one noticed while driving up Highway 89, is now a place where a photo of the Colorado river constitutes the price of admission. Further up the road, Kanab keeps trying to level up. They’ve installed a new restaurant and a new hotel as it tries to capitalize on the idea that Kanab is the cinematic center of the Four Corner’s region. I do not know whether this is confirmable. Panguitch, further north, has an adorable-looking second-hand store that I make a vow to stop by one time but I never do. My real dream to make it from Salt Lake to Flagstaff in seven hours and fifteen minutes. My current record is seven and a half.
It’s when I hit the north side of Provo that what was a half-assed development becomes a full-assed explosion. A diarrhea of development. At the point of the mountain, when one leaves Utah County for Salt Lake County, what once was an empty landscape populated only by parasailers rejoicing on the wind and prisoners wishing the wind would come for them. Traffic becomes LA-esque. Billboards promise bargain plastic surgery and, for some reason, high end blankets like Minky Couture. Another reads: Look Good Feel Good Look Good Feel Good Look Good Feel Good. You’re only as good as you look is one of the underlying messages of the dominant religion. This essay isn’t about real estate development or the end of my version Salt Lake City. But it’s a little about that. Growing up in SLC meant that I knew some polygamists. In fact, my great-grandma, Madge (Madge!), came from a polygamist family. Little Cottonwood canyon leads to the ski resorts Alta and Snowbird. On the way, one used to pass a large polygamist compound whose land which has now been sold for McMansions.
It was common to see polygamists at Reams, the discount grocery store. Women wear long dresses, hems touching the ground, hiding their white Keds. Their hair is often pulled up, into highly stylized buns, but always with a, often voluminous, look. Above the braided bun sits a pompadour wave which pushing the women’s heads forward, forcing eyes to the ground. I try to stay in touch with alien Salt Lake by occasionally dipping into the television that has exploded also full-assedly on Netflix etc.
I was recently at a Sex Trafficking conference where Rachel Jeffs who had escaped from Warren Jeffs’ polygamist ring, presented her story. I wrote about cults, Trump, and sex trafficking on my Substack. But the short wiki version is this: Rachel Jeffs, who was born to Warren Jeffs' second wife, had 47 siblings and half-siblings. Her father sexually abused her from age eight until age 16. After eighth grade, she received no more education. When she was 18, Rachel a man chosen by Warren Jeffs; the couple met for the first time on the day of their wedding. In 2014, Rachel was banished from her community and prevented from seeing her children for seven months for allegedly having sex with her husband while pregnant. Around this time, she also discovered one of her sisters had also been sexually abused by Warren Jeffs, starting at age 6.
Rachel has written a book, Breaking Free: How I Escaped Polygamy, the FLDS Cult, and My Father, Warren Jeffs (2017) and her story has been turned into a Lifetime Movie. She seems also to have spurred action for a number of women to leave their polygamist husbands. One of the shows I watched as I tried to keep track the exploding planet that is Salt Lake is watching escaping polygamy. This show does a great job making sex trafficking and polygamy a spectacle. But still, I can’t help rejoice when the women who have escaped wait by their Chevy Suburbans on a road with a vantage point. Using Walkie-Talkies, the woman confer with each other to alert the other women if a polygamist neighbor spies their activity. If they see a car head toward the leader’s household, they say, “We’ve only got half an hour!” Then, the converge on the woman-who-wants-to-leave’s house with a U-Haul. And then the women and her kids proceed to put everything they own in the U-Haul: chests-of-drawers. Kitchen tables. Forks. The escaping polygamy experts are like, “Get out now! We don’t have time to bring the blender.” But the woman keeps chucking stuff in the U-Haul like it’s a 28-foot truck instead of a 4 x 8 trailer.
Though the exploitation levels are high, so is the solidarity between the women. Occasionally, a man will come along to act as lookout, or might, if things get really bad, physically intervene, but basically, the women are the communicators, the drivers, the defenders, and the sustainers. They help the women who have escaped to find housing, social services, schools for their kids and jobs. It’s not easy to leave. Sometimes, as in Jeffs’ case, the Priesthood, married males who make and enforce rules, find ways to force the woman’s kids to stay. Moms and sisters plead with the women not to leave. Sometimes, even when women leave, they return after a year or two. Without schooling, development of social networks, or the subtle clues one gains from living in the bigger world, it’s hard to adjust to the demands of modern society. Some women might find it easier to just have a kid every year, do the dishes, and keep their heads down.
But there are quite a number of Mormon women who are NOT keeping their heads down—unless it’s in the lap of one of their swinging women friend’s husbands. These women have unbraided their hair, let-go their buns, and have left their highly styled locks rivulet around their shoulders. There are several TV Series that go behind the scenes of contemporary Mormon polygamy, but the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is mind-blowing. Like I grew up in this town? The backstory of the show is that a group of women from the Church of Latter-Day Saints (which is term member of the Church prefer) started a Momtok group where they wore tight-fitting clothes and danced in synchronicity. Perhaps they also gave mom tips. But also. Wife-swapping. A whole different kind of polygamy. The show focuses on the after-effects of Taylor Frankie Paul’s exposing the "soft-swinging" scandal on TikTok. She felt she was being unfairly portrayed as a home-wrecker after rumors spread, and she wanted to tell her side of the story, explaining that it was a mutual activity where she caught feelings for another man, leading to her divorce and feeling it wasn't fair to only focus on her, as others were involved too. She felt compelled to share the full, complicated truth, including that other people in the MomTok group were also involved in similar activities, making it a shared situation, not just her fault. Most of the women are in their early twenties, although one is nineteen, and another is thirty. They all have kids—three or so. Not the exorbitant number 47. Over a series of episodes, the “good” Mormons separate from the “bad” Mormons who don’t quite admit to partaking in the swinging, but who focused on developing their own autonomous lives, separate from the teachings of the Church.
In my favorite episode, Whitney Leavitt explains to the women of Momtok, who vow to be friends forever no matter what, that she’s been offered $20,000 to promote a dildo on Tiktok. The women talk enthusiastically about dildos, vibrators, and The Rabbit. I cringe because I’m not Mormon, I was raised in a cloud of Mormons, so talk of dildos and such makes me squeamish. Whitney asks her parents what they think about her supporting a dildo manufacturing company. Her parents do not approve but she does it anyway. I can only watch so many episodes. I get distracted by their plastic surgery and boob jobs and hair extensions. Pretty girls in high school avoided me—I was known for being “easy” which I write about in my book How to Plant a Billion Trees. They talk like Valley Girls and the main mode of conversation is “oh my god, can you believe what Taylor did?” They remind me of the Adobe building at the Point-of-the-Mountain, the 17-roomed McMansions that dot the once open-space of Draper where you could ride horses and swim in the Little Cottonwood river. But there is no going back to a more bucolic Salt Lake City. And, although these women annoy the heck out of me, I am impressed, maybe in awe, of their willingness to tell their stories, to own their sexuality, to stick together through gossip, TikTok, and unequal sponsorship offers.
Polygamy is the paradigm of the patriarchy. Polyamory is the paradigm of the people. Maybe now that it looks like Salt Lake will get a legislative seat that represents the liberal views of people who live in the cool and vibrant part of the state, the people will vote appropriately. Warren Jeffs is in prison. Buses have replaced many cars on the road up to Alta and Snowbird, protecting the watershed and the larger environment. Women are on TV talking about their sex lives. Progress sucks sometimes. Sometimes, it’s the next best thing to coming home.
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NICOLE WALKER is the author of Processed Meat: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster, The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet; and Sustainability: A Love Story and A Survival Guide for Life in the Ruins. Her previous books include Where the Tiny Things Are, Egg, Micrograms, Quench Your Thirst with Salt, and This Noisy Egg. Her work has been published in Orion, Boston Review, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Normal School, and other places. She curated, with Rebecca Campbell, 7 Artists, 7 Rings—an Artist’s Game of Telephone for the Huffington Post. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she has also been noted in multiple editions of Best American Essays. She’s nonfiction editor at DIAGRAM and Professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona.
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