A Big Weekend for the Swinging Mormon Moms of TikTok

Over Memorial Day weekend, you might have heard the eerie echo of a tabernacle choir or the haunting cries of a baby named Ashtyn over your killer party playlist. A certain corner of TikTok, one that guides the aesthetic and liturgical tastes of millennial and Gen Z Mormons in elite suburbs of the Utah Valley, was exploding into the national consciousness.

Taylor Frankie Paul, a certain smokin’ hot Mormon mommy in Draper, Utah who has become a major TikTok influencer, started posting videos in the last few weeks about moving out of her dream house with her perfect Mormon husband Tate Taylor and beginning a new chapter as a single mom.

This, of course, shattered the image of domestic bliss and physical/emotional fitness she had cultivated on her page. What would happen to the kids Indy and Ocean? And her marble kitchen island?

Paul had previously explained that she and her husband were “soft swingers,” which they defined as basically having an open relationship with no extramarital penetration. “Soft swinging” among Mormons is part of a longer tradition of justifiable skirting of church chastity rules, including “soaking” or “docking,” which entails consensual sexual penetration without thrusting. This is further elucidated in this thread on the Subreddit MomTokGossip.

So far, so good.

Then, in a livestream which is no longer fully available but excerpted by Pop Crush, Paul went on to explain that she had gone too far in “hooking up” with a friend, a man married to a woman who was “swinging” with Paul’s own husband Tate. She also alluded to the involvement of another couple in their tight-knit community who was now allegedly getting a divorce in the fallout of the incident.

Part of the livestream has been reposted by the TikTok account taylorpauldivorcetea:

Redditors on MomTokGossip and ExMormon have been piecing the rest of the story together, alleging that the other couple involved is McKenna and Brayden Rowley, another picture-perfect penetration-curious pair of young zealots. The improbable names Miranda McWhorter and Camille Munday were also thrown into the mix.

This TikTok is useful in identifying the main players (plus the dancing from the hot moms is really good):

This one’s good too.

Meanwhile, various other tangentially aggrieved parties are pissed as hell and making content. One implicated couple, Selver and Victoria Zalic, spoke their piece, but seem a bit miffed to not be included more in the hoopla.

I’ve long been fascinated with the seemingly thriving community of Mormon swingers in Salt Lake City (or, as avowed NON-SWINGER Whitney Rose pronounces it on The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, “swing-GERS”). I was raised secular in the Midwest, but I spent 2019-2021 in Utah right as TikTok was gaining traction, and I grew obsessed with many of these contoured, bikini-wearing, Chanel-toting LDS girlies — people like Rachel Parcell and pretty much anyone who is part of the Hawaiian Mormon contingent. So I can understand why the quotidian follies of a group of Utahns are now capturing national attention. But as the evidence continues to pile up, I’m afraid we’ll need at least another 4 days off to crack this particular case.

Is that one of Joseph Smith’s many child brides I hear whispering to me from the beyond to look inward instead? No, that’s just LDS supergroup Imagine Dragons still playing on my “BBQ Tunes” playlist. And they’re right — this whole thing is “radioactive.”