Adaptation note: This essay is adapted from an episode of the author’s Turkish-language podcast, originally published under the CultPost name shortly after Secrets We Keep premiered on May 15, 2025. It has been translated and edited for international readers while preserving the original argument, examples, personal observations, and critical perspective.

Spoiler warning: This essay discusses major events throughout Secrets We Keep.

The six-part Danish miniseries Secrets We Keep—originally titled Reservatet—takes place among two wealthy families in an affluent suburb north of Copenhagen. Both households employ Filipina au pairs to care for their children. Behind their elegant homes and seemingly perfect lives, the series uncovers a network of gendered, racialized, and class-based inequalities, culminating in the sexual assault and death of one of the young women.

The experiences of Angel and Ruby reveal several overlapping forms of vulnerability. Their domestic and emotional labor is exploited; they face psychological and sexual violence; and their position is shaped by language, religion, migration status, and economic dependence. For this reason, the series requires a broad sociocultural reading rather than an interpretation built around a single concept. It is at once a critique of elite family life, migrant care work, sexual violence, digital masculinity, and the myths through which Nordic societies are represented internationally.

These issues are not exclusive to Denmark. Comparable relationships exist in Turkey, where affluent households also employ migrant women—often from the Philippines, Central Asia, Africa, and elsewhere—to care for children or older family members. The parallels allow Secrets We Keep to illuminate not only the concealed inequalities of Danish society, but also a secret that Turkish society has largely declined to discuss.

The Construction of a Nordic Dream

Several years ago, while attending an academic conference in Finland, I spoke with local scholars about what is frequently celebrated in Turkey as the “Finnish education model.” They were surprised by the idealized way in which this model was discussed abroad. They explained that Finland had not deliberately marketed a flawless educational system and that presenting it in those terms would conceal the problems they themselves continued to debate. Their response stayed with me because it demonstrated how national myths can be produced not only by governments and media institutions, but also by the societies that receive and circulate them.

The same process can be seen in broader representations of the Nordic countries. Media narratives often construct an image of a region that has largely solved the problems troubling other societies. One example is the familiar figure of the “Swedish dad”: the caring, domestically involved, gender-equal father who shares childcare and household responsibilities. Such representations are understandable in a society where gender equality and paternal involvement receive significant public attention. Yet they do not mean that every Swedish father practices feminist parenting or that domestic inequality has disappeared.

What emerges is a Nordic dream. As I argued in my semiotic reading of Emily in Paris, popular culture produces myths by turning selective representations into seemingly natural truths. These myths are ideological. They offer recognizable stereotypes, encourage audiences to internalize them, and conceal whatever does not fit the image.

The existence of a Nordic myth does not mean that the region’s achievements are imaginary. Nordic countries may perform better than many others on gender equality, social welfare, and the reduction of extreme poverty. The problem begins when relative success is transformed into an image of perfection. Nordic journalists, filmmakers, and television producers often resist this temptation by focusing on inequalities within their own societies rather than simply reproducing a flattering national brand. This is both a responsible and a critically valuable approach.

In international cultural representation, the Nordic brand makes two especially powerful promises. The first is gender equality. The second is limited class hierarchy: the idea that the distance between rich and poor has been reduced through social democracy and the welfare state. In this imagined society, the poor are protected from extreme deprivation while the wealthy are prevented from accumulating unlimited privilege.

Secrets We Keep disrupts both promises. Its protected mansions reveal sharp class divisions, while its family relationships expose patriarchal violence, bullying, and sexual abuse. The series does not deny the historical importance of the Nordic welfare model. Instead, it challenges the assumption that this model has eliminated inequality—especially when class privilege intersects with migrant status, racialization, and gender.

Intersectionality Behind the Mansion Gates

The series’ critique is intersectional. Intersectionality asks us to consider how different structures of power—such as gender, class, race, and migration status—operate together rather than independently. It also reminds us that women do not occupy a single, universal social position.

This difference is visible in the four women at the center of the story. Cecilie and Katarina are affluent Danish women whose lives are protected by wealth, citizenship, and social status. Angel and Ruby are working-class Filipina migrants whose ability to remain in Denmark depends on their employment within these households. All four characters live within a gendered society, but they do not experience its pressures in the same way. For Angel and Ruby, gender inequality is intensified by economic dependence, cultural difference, and racialized migrant status.

The two families belong to a powerful capitalist elite. Rasmus is presented as a leading businessman capable of using his wealth and influence to protect his family. Mike, Cecilie’s husband, comes from a less privileged background but has risen through his proximity to Rasmus and the system surrounding him. Cecilie is married to Mike; Katarina is married to Rasmus. They live in neighboring mansions, and from the outside their world appears complete and secure.

Angel and Ruby carry the concealed burden of this perfection. Angel cares for Cecilie and Mike’s son, Viggo, while Ruby works for Rasmus and Katarina and looks after their son, Oscar. Formally, they are au pairs, a role often presented through the language of cultural exchange and becoming “part of the family.” In practice, however, they perform extensive childcare, domestic, and emotional labor while remaining structurally subordinate to the people whose homes they sustain.

The violence that follows is inseparable from this hierarchy. Oscar rapes Ruby and treats her employment as evidence that she exists to satisfy him. The assault is also entangled with digital media: intimate recordings and violent material circulate among the boys through a messaging group. In this respect, the series recalls Adolescence, another production I have discussed in relation to bullying, sexual pressure, and the toxic role of digital media in adolescent masculinity. Secrets We Keep adds class and migration to this configuration, creating a multilayered account of sexual violence.

Care Work as Exploitation and Status

Employing a Filipina caregiver has become a marker of status in affluent households in several countries, including Turkey. Filipino women are often recruited partly because of their English proficiency, with parents hoping that daily contact will contribute to their children’s language development. Care labor is thus connected to cultural capital: employing an English-speaking caregiver is treated not only as a practical arrangement but also as an investment in a child’s future and a sign of class distinction.

This produces a striking contradiction. The caregiver’s emotional labor is indispensable, yet the person performing it remains socially subordinate. Her work is exploited while her presence becomes part of the household’s prestige. The family can display cosmopolitan aspirations through the very worker whose economic vulnerability makes the arrangement possible.

As a father and an actively involved parent, I have long found another dimension of this system especially disturbing. Migrant caregivers frequently leave their own children behind in order to raise or care for the children of families in wealthier countries. They do this not because they lack attachment to their children, but because migration may be the only available means of financing their education, security, and future.

The arrangement therefore contains a transnational class hierarchy. Economic inequality between Asia and Europe—or between poorer and wealthier regions more generally—reorganizes motherhood across borders. A woman’s care is transferred from her own family to another, while her separation from her children becomes the condition under which she can continue to support them. Motherhood is not simply outsourced; it is divided and alienated through economic necessity.

Angel’s story gives this structure a human face. When she applies for the position, she feels compelled to conceal the fact that she has a child because acknowledging her motherhood would jeopardize her opportunity to work in Denmark. Once Cecilie learns the truth, she experiences a crisis of conscience. Later, she dismisses Angel while offering three months’ salary and a return ticket, presenting the decision as an opportunity for Angel to reunite with her son.

Angel rejects the moral logic of this gesture. Returning home without employment would not secure her child’s future; it would remove the income on which that future depends. What appears to Cecilie as a compassionate solution is shaped by the blindness of privilege. She can imagine physical reunion as the answer because she does not have to confront the economic conditions that forced the separation in the first place.

The series explores this conflict through competing ideas of “good” and “bad” motherhood. Cecilie and Katarina question one another’s parenting, even as much of their children’s everyday care has been entrusted to women they regard as culturally and socially outside their own world. The children, however, develop genuine emotional bonds with their caregivers. Those relationships expose a fracture within the bourgeois family: care may be purchased, but attachment cannot be neatly contained by the class boundary governing the employment relationship.

Oscar’s rape of Ruby reveals the most destructive form of this entitlement. He interprets her subordinate employment as access to her body. Viggo’s relationship with Angel reveals another side of the same arrangement. He repeatedly seeks from her the affection, physical comfort, and attention he does not receive from his mother. The practices associated with motherhood—care, tenderness, reassurance, and emotional presence—shift from the biological mother to the migrant caregiver. This transfer complicates both class boundaries and conventional understandings of family.

In Secrets We Keep, motherhood is therefore not merely a biological relationship. It becomes an arena of cultural and class conflict, structured by unequal access to money, mobility, and time.

From Subaltern Victims to Visible Subjects

One of the series’ greatest strengths is that it does not leave Angel and Ruby in the position of silent victims. They can be understood as subaltern figures—a term associated with Antonio Gramsci and, in postcolonial theory, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. The subaltern is not literally incapable of speech. Rather, subaltern groups are positioned outside dominant institutions of power and representation, making it difficult for their experiences to be heard on their own terms.

Angel and Ruby are not reduced to their functions as caregivers. The series represents their domestic labor, their emotional relationships with the children, their religious lives, and their use of their own languages. When Angel speaks in her own language, the moment affirms a cultural identity that cannot be absorbed entirely into the Danish household. Language reminds the viewer that she is not merely labor power but a person with a history, community, and world beyond her employer’s home.

The solidarity among the Filipina women is equally important. Their church provides both a religious community and a social network through which they support one another. One of the series’ most powerful scenes occurs at Ruby’s memorial service. When Katarina and Rasmus arrive to express their condolences, the community refuses to accept the gesture and forces them to leave. The women regard the couple as responsible for Ruby’s death and will not permit elite respectability to enter and control their collective space.

This is a powerful cinematic gesture because those who have been marginalized are no longer represented simply as passive or silent. They protect their community, establish a boundary, and enact resistance. Ruby’s death is not transformed into an easy story of empowerment, nor does solidarity erase the injustice committed against her. Nevertheless, the series gives the women individual and collective presence. It represents them as cultural, political, and classed subjects rather than as background figures in the lives of wealthy Europeans.

The Secret Turkey Also Keeps

The comparison with Turkey reveals a significant absence. Class and its media representation have long been neglected in Turkish popular culture. In an earlier discussion, I drew analogically on Carol J. Adams’s concept of the “absent referent” to think about class in advertising. A similar absence can be seen in television and cinema: domestic workers may be visually present, but the class relations organizing their labor remain outside the narrative.

Turkish series contain no shortage of mansions, villas, housekeepers, nannies, and caregivers. Yet the relationship between domestic workers and the owners of the home is rarely examined as a source of structural conflict. It is more often presented as harmonious, affectionate, and almost fairy-tale-like. Workers are grateful to the household, make the family’s life easier, and receive love or appreciation in return.

Real domestic employment is considerably more complicated. Class tension exists not only in the homes of the extremely wealthy but also in many middle-class households in Istanbul and other major cities. Migrant women care for children and older people, clean homes, and make everyday family life possible. At the same time, many confront insecure or informal employment, language barriers, uncertain legal status, and religious or cultural exclusion.

Their stories are rarely told. Instead, migrant workers may be discussed behind their backs in private messaging groups, where informal accusations label one woman dishonest, another lazy, or another unsuitable for employment. Such judgments circulate without giving the workers any meaningful opportunity to answer. Popular culture largely fails to represent either these stigmatizing practices or the women’s own perspectives.

Turkey therefore has a secret of its own: the care labor inside our homes, the invisible lives of migrant women, and the distress hidden beneath relationships on which many families depend. These women care for our children and older relatives. Their labor makes our lives possible, yet we often show little interest in hearing their histories.

If Danish creators can use a crime drama to confront the inequalities concealed inside an affluent society, Turkish media should also begin to examine these class relations. Even if such narratives remain difficult to produce on mainstream television, digital platforms could create space for the stories of domestic workers, migrant women, and caregivers. Without these representations, we will continue to overlook people with whom we share the same society while benefiting from an unjust structure we prefer not to see.

Making the Hidden Visible

Secrets We Keep is valuable because it does more than expose an individual crime. It dismantles the reassuring image of a society beyond patriarchy and class conflict. It shows how gender, racialization, migration, and wealth converge inside the home; how care can become both an intimate bond and a commodity; and how privilege protects itself through silence.

Cecilie possesses more moral awareness than Katarina and allows Ruby and Angel’s experiences to disturb her comfortable worldview. More people need this willingness to see the workers whose lives privilege usually conceals. Yet Cecilie’s response remains incomplete: her attempt to help Angel is paternalistic, and her desire to protect her own son ultimately limits her willingness to pursue justice for Ruby. The series therefore shows both the value of conscience and the limits of compassion when it remains bounded by class privilege.

Most importantly, the series makes Angel and Ruby visible. It asks viewers to recognize the women whose labor sustains affluent homes and whose sacrifices remain hidden behind the language of family, opportunity, and care. Their stories force us to confront what our own societies prefer to keep secret. Perhaps it is time to stop keeping that secret.