on coercion

tradwives, trannies & acceptable risk

This week I binged a documentary miniseries called Prisoner of the Prophet, about human rights violations within the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (aka the FLDS). It’s an excellent documentary, but I would caution that it’s not for the faint of heart— the stories and photos included in each episode tell a nauseating story of the FLDS’s sexual exploitation via spiritual abuse. Many of its victims were/are children. Take that as a broad content warning for both the documentary and this essay.

If you are not already aware, the FLDS church is a polygamist mormon sect which practices child marriage. Warren Jeffs, the head of FLDS and bearer of the title “prophet”, has 87 wives. Most of them are many decades younger than himself, some of whom he married (and impregnated) as young as 14 years old. Warren Jeffs is effectively a real-life Snidely Whiplash, an absolute caricature of patriarchy’s worst abuses— a man of great wealth and clout who regularly convinces his followers (many of whom were born into the church and have never known a life outside of it) to debase themselves and either ignore or participate in his crimes through the implicit threat that if they don’t, they will lose everything— their homes, their relationships, their sense of meaning and purpose. His photo might as well be in the dictionary next to the entry for “coercion.” He is known for his command that mormon women “keep sweet,” i.e. at all times, be agreeable and keep a pleasant face on, no matter how sickened you are by the practices your community tells you must confer great spiritual honor.

Briell wanders the grounds of the abandoned “house in hiding” where she was held captive for about 2 years as punishment for rejecting Warren Jeffs’ sexual advances.

Pardon my phrasing, but everyone interviewed in this documentary is a stone cold badass. Briell, who acts as the centerpiece with her story of leaving the church after a lifetime of manipulation and abuse, now works a hundred yards from her old commune at a center that helps FLDS members escape the church. She comes off as shy and chagrined as she tells us the gory details of her upbringing, but she faces her trauma every day in order to save others from the horrors she endured. Her bravery and perseverance cannot be understated. The doc also features interviews with the former attorneys general of Utah and Arizona, who investigated the FLDS and eventually helped jail Warren Jeffs, as well as clips of Julia Lalich, a cult expert who shows up in just about every documentary of this kind. There’s also testimonials from a handful of fellow-apostate men, those who support Briell as a friend and share their own stories of awakening to the reality that what was happening around them was unconscionable.

Within the first ten minutes of the show, one of these men admits that when he finally spoke out against the church’s abuse of children, it resulted in immediate change. He says that this was not a moral victory, but rather showed him how complicit he had been in creating and maintaining the environment he abhorred. Briell, too, speaks of how she and Jeffs’ many other wives took a tact of go-along-to-get-along, carried by their mutual unwillingness to refuse, even as they watched children exploited by the man they all had been chosen to marry (and when there were more than enough of them to beat the man to death with their bare hands when he trapped them in a room with him alone, should they have felt so inclined). All of these apostates were viciously mistreated by an overwhelmingly powerful cultural institution the likes of which most of us will never know, and yet they still harbor guilt for their lack of resistance. If it is difficult to admit to your own victimization, then it is exponentially more difficult to admit to the shame of allowing others to be victimized at the same time. Would that we all were so honest.

---

The docu focuses hard on Warren Jeffs as a specific villain that made the FLDS the monster that it is, but let’s be clear: mainstream, non-polygamist mormonism isn’t all that great, either. There has been a lot of commentary recently around Hannah Neeleman, a mormon tradwife (a term foisted on her by the internet, which she rejects) who spends her days cooking and cleaning and tending farm chores for and with her eight children, on a giant ranch set in a beautiful parcel of land in Utah. She and her millionaire husband run social media accounts under the name Ballerina Farm because Hannah Neeleman used to be a professional ballerina, a life which she left behind in favor of what we have dubbed the “traditional” lifestyle of a rustic homemaker.

Attention on the Neeleman’s has led to myriad conversation about whether she really “chose” any of this, as a woman trying to carve out a life under the thumb of patriarchal capitalism. I mostly understand this in marxist-feminist terms: in the same way that men’s labor is exploited in the workplace by their bosses, women’s labor is exploited through the domestic sphere. Because men tend to earn more and have more job stability, marriage carries an implicit-or-explicit relief from the pressure of capitalist self-sufficiency, hence why marriage remains popular even though it is so widely criticized and bemoaned. This also means that as women’s financial agency has increased, the obligation to marry has lessened somewhat, but not as much as we may have hoped. It remains that maintaining economic self-sufficiency is fucking exhausting and mostly leaves your livelihood up to the whims of fate. In this way, marriage remains an economic contract as much as it ever was: for many women, the path of least resistance towards basic stability and comfort is still to become housewives. Adding in the pressures of family and faith, it becomes harder and harder to say that one has any “choice” when rejecting “tradition” can carry dire consequences.

Except that Neeleman’s consequences were and are not that dire, in either direction. It’s difficult to learn in much detail about her background when her dickhead husband won’t shut up and let her speak for herself, but we know she was a skilled enough ballerina to go to Julliard on scholarship and pretty enough to make up the rest of her tuition with beauty pageant winnings. She wanted to live in New York and keep dancing, and we’re all very sad that she deferred to her husband’s aspirations instead, but let’s be real here— they were both raised mormon, and I doubt that his values were much of a secret or a surprise when they got married. I can’t really know, of course, but in the absence of knowing, we all wind up projecting whatever we want instead of facing the ambivalence that must result from not-knowing.

The Times, 2024

Dancers are not well-paid— in New York, the average salary for a professional ballerina is around $50,000, which is below the nationwide median income and basically nothing when you live in New York, but is still about three times more than I have ever made in any year of my adult life. It’s not hard to imagine Ms. Neeleman doing some calculations: if she had to give up her career and become a baby factory in order to access incredible wealth, the respect of her own community, and a lifestyle she considers “god’s calling”— well, considering the options on the table, maybe she felt that was simply a good trade. If that is the case, I don’t blame her one bit, but I also don’t pity her. Pity is its own disrespect, and when I am obligated to fill in the blanks about a woman’s motivations, I prefer to assume that she means what she says about her values and desires, and is not a helpless idiot buffeted about by the riptides of culture.

She is not Briell, effectively held at gunpoint in one of Warren Jeffs’ “houses in hiding” compounds, being overdosed with seroquel on the daily to keep her compliant— Ms. Neeleman is simply a rich woman in the public eye who has made the decision to live in a way that we don’t respect. We are not supposed to care about finances or social approval or god more than, I don’t know, the spirit of following your dreams or something, and so we observers struggle to imagine that she has much agency at all, because, I mean, why wouldn’t she want to run her own ten-million-follower instagram account!? We still cannot quite admit that conservative women like Abby Shapiro and her ilk have a point when they express that capitalist self-sufficiency is a dogshit aspiration and that many women find that trying to girlboss your way through life, even if possible, isn’t all that desirable.

---

It’s difficult not to draw further comparisons between these women and my own experience of cultural “coercion” backed up by spiritual abuse and the implicit threat of economic precarity. Before I started art school at 19, I made a decision: I wanted to make art at the highest quality I could, and it would be worth it to go to school for that rather than anything else, even if it meant I only got to make things in a shitty little apartment in between shifts bagging groceries for the rest of my life. I braced myself for the worst-case scenario and decided ahead of time that it would be survivable, if only because I thought the alternative— remaining in my childhood home while I went to the local university and slogged through an architecture degree, or whatever else I could feasibly pursue that was actually lucrative and still adjacent to my passions— would not be.

I had a similar conversation with myself when I started testosterone two years later: if I do this, if I transition, that path-of-least-resistance I had been offered so insistently by my family’s conservative culture (hang out at Johnson County or the nearest evangelical church until I find a decently-likeable doctor or lawyer to marry, and then have him fund my livelihood) would become impossible. Depending on how my transition went, I could be locked out of stable or “respectable” work forever, qualifications be damned, and my dating pool would drastically shrink. I would give up on pursuing the dream that my family would ever like me or respect my choices (they already didn’t, but back then I still had hopes that maybe I could somehow become someone that they would respect). In leaving the church, I also gave up the hope that if only I could get to heaven, maybe the creator would be understanding enough that my eternal bliss could entail having the body I couldn’t have on earth.

Part of what made my leaving inevitable was that the church did not offer me much to begin with, but what I gave up still left empty spaces in me that, over a decade later, have never been filled. I was right about everything that could go badly, and I also did not find any kind of “queer community” that was willing or able to replace the things I had lost in order to become the man I desperately wanted to be. Life has been hard, and my inability to make decent money or find sustainable relationships with caring people has made it exponentially harder. That’s the problem with following your dreams— nobody can promise you that it’s going to turn out better, you just have to decide that it is better once you’re already there. I’m genuinely proud that I rejected the obligation towards being cis, being straight, being “normal,” whatever— not because it was the objectively correct thing to do, but because it lets me retroactively justify the fact that I knowingly cranked up the difficulty settings on my own life, even though I had no confidence that this choice would be “worth it” by some standard or another. It’s one of the only things about me that I am proud of, and it may not have been a choice anyway— while writing this, my boyfriend joked that I would have made a terrible christian housewife, and he’s absolutely right. It’s unclear how relatively-difficult it is to abdicate a restrictive role when you were never really suited to it in the first place.

Like Hannah Neeleman, I too would like to be an inspiring beacon to others, only my message is that “coercion” is a strong word when most of our cultural norms are upheld not by the threat of being ground into the gutter, but by everyone agreeing to not rock the boat. People like me— whose blissful aspirations rankle the public’s sense of decorum— are always going to exist, and we deserve a life of honor and agency as much as anyone else does. More than all that, I want to demonstrate with my life that the promise of capitalist patriarchy— that you will have a stable, satisfying time on earth if only you do as you’re told and follow your right path— is often a total lie. Every husband is one injury or layoff away from failing his breadwinning telos, a short decade of dissatisfaction away from resenting his role so much that he takes it out on his wife and children or succumbs to addiction— any number of complications can decimate your savings and your community no matter how much you yourself try to fly straight, so like, why bother?

The social contract has failed to live up to its promises for multiple generations, now, and obedience cannot save you. If we’re all rolling the dice on fulfillment and agency anyway, you might as well misbehave in whatever way brings you joy or uplifts your conscience. I would like to say that someone will be there to catch you, but I can’t— at most, you will probably be no worse off than me. I can’t even promise that acting out will change things for the better— though I am queer and trans and miraculously found a wonderful man who loves me as I am and has more to offer than money, my inability to do wage labor without losing my mind has relegated me to the predictable role of trying (and failing) to keep house for someone who can move just a little more smoothly through the world than I can. No matter what path you choose, you will inevitably be left to stave off regret by trying to make the most of it. That, at least, we all have in common.

---

When more and more people reject the obligation to do as they’re told— be a good worker, be a good wife— it diminishes the power of these obligations, opening everyone up to a greater variety of ways to live (or at least that’s the hope, anyway). But it can be a lot to ask, and what counts as “a lot to ask” is always relative. I’ve written before about my frustration with the idea of men undergoing a kind of universal patriarchal brainwashing, but obviously some guys really do care quite a lot about being manly men and frankly, if mormonism is coercive towards desperate people, then so is the manosphere. If modern feminists are going to ask rich tradwives and douchebag misogynists to recognize what is so obviously wrong with their ideologies, we should at least be consistent about how much agency we think anyone has to reject their culture, kick up a fuss among their closest relations, and completely reorder what they believe gives their lives value. Again, it’s unclear what are the comparative stakes and level-of-necessary-courage when it comes to charting a different path— is it easier, or harder, to blow off what is expected of you when you are a fucking millionaire? I don’t know. I can’t really judge the choices of people who live in a world that is totally alien to me— but I can be disappointed when those with the means to improve the world for others besides themselves consistently fail to do so.

We should perhaps stop bending over backwards to feel feminist solidarity with people who will never under any circumstances reciprocate, and whose sympathetic attempts to grasp at personal stability and comfort are held aloft on an ideological current of disdain for their fellow humans. Mormons believe that people like me (and probably you, too) go to hell, a little detail about the Neeleman’s lifestyle that is casually overlooked by everyone who wants to feel sorry for her and is quietly downplayed by whoever she pays to handle her social media presence. This interviewer did not bother to ask what the wages are for the workers in the Neelemans’ warehouse, although I doubt she would have gotten a straight answer even if she had. When it comes to reading commentary on this interview, I have to be honest— I am sick to death of watching progressives fall all over themselves to do apologetics for rich folks who would still have more wealth and comfort than most of us will ever see even if they met an Andrew Carnegie level of public investment.

The worst thing that Hannah Neeleman would face if she hadn’t married Mr. JetBlue is to simply live like all the rest of us, which is genuinely pretty rough, but might actually put her within spitting distance of solidarity with people who share plebeian problems. There are more than a few women whose lives have been genuinely ruined by patriarchy, who are not millionaires, and who could use this kind of attention and revenue directed at their struggles— you’re just not going to find them served up on a silver platter for easy engagement through your instagram feed or a profile in the Times. They do not have social media managers or aspirational homes in the countryside, and they are not advertising a lifestyle. To find and help the people who are overlooked, you have to actually look for them.

To put an end to the coercive power of patriarchy and capitalism would require us to create a society where escape is not only possible, but easy. Where anyone can leave their shitty spouse or their abusive family or their manipulative church and still land somewhere with their feet on solid ground— enough money to get by, a comfortable space to call your own, a community of people who at least appreciate your company and respect your values even if they don’t share your cultural background. We cannot tell people— mormons, queers, or the average person— that it gets better while failing to build for them any better options or demonstrate that we value their contributions, whatever they might be. It is precisely people like the Neelemans— the wealthy who prioritize only their own escape into solitary luxury & local public approval— that have made social welfare & infrastructure-building a political non-starter. These people do not want to create heaven on earth if it must extend beyond the boundaries of their own property lines. That part is not coerced, nor is it impossible to resist, nor is it essential to any christian doctrine— it is a choice.