Revenge of the Stepford Husband

I love doing housework. Maybe it's something in the water? 

Something strange is happening to me in the city of Atlanta. I get excited by spray starch. And I can't seem to stop ironing. I'm working like a robot these days. Possibly for the rest of my life. Perhaps. Yes. Life in Atlanta is beginning to feel like life in Stepford, again. 

Do I cook as good as I look? How about a good old fashioned Stepford casserole? Nope. But, say, we got a terrific deal on the house in Atlanta. It's warm. Safe. You even "make it" in front of a log fire? Yeah. It comes with the house. It's part of the deal. 

Irrational changes of personality take some time to occur. But what is the unspeakable menace that overshadows me? Why does the wife's secretive "Women's Association" meet every night in the old house with shuttered windows? Am I doomed to be a "cuck" like all those husbands down the road in Cabbagetown?  So much for the second honeymoon. Welcome to reality. 

I asked the wife about "the Women's Association". She was "invited to join". It was "a quite an honour" she declared. Every prominent member of Stepford is a member. There is, however, one rule the wife doesn't much care for. Right now, it's strictly women only. 

I gave up on her. Why bother to ask me at all? She pretends like we make decisions together but it's always her. She asked if I wanted to move out to Stepford and I found out that she had already scouted the area; she asked me if I liked the house, and I found out that she had already made a down payment; now she's talking about the lousy Women's Association and it's quite obvious that she's already gone and joined. Why bother to ask me at all...   

How could she join something so archaic, so old fashioned? "The only way to change things is from the inside," she said. "I'm going to help do it. Pretty soon it will be the Person's Association and if it's not open to cucks in sixth months, I'll quit," she promised. 

I've been revisiting Ira Levin's 1972 novella. What a subversive, hard edged chiller. So of its time, yet ahead of its time. And then there's the 1975 film adaptation, directed by Bryan Forbes, scripted by William Goldman. An under appreciated masterpiece. People used to talk about it all the time in the 1970s and 1980s. Well, at least the adults did. What do adults talk about these days? TikTok. How times change. How times change BUT Stepford always stays the same. Stepford, after all, is where a wife (or a husband) watches the dream become a nightmare. And then see's the nightmare engulf them. That's when you realize that in Stepford, that at any moment, any second, your turn is coming, your time to die is next. 

Is the Stepford Wives a horror story or a sci-fi movie? How about an old fashioned murder caper about a guy going to elaborate lengths to dispose of his thoroughly modern wife, albeit one played out from the perspective of his victim. The murder is premeditated. The motive is feminism. The scene of the crime is Stepford. But what drove the husband to conspire with a group of men to murder his wife and replace her with a pleasure vehicle sex robot? And where did the husband meet such horrid men? Answer: behind closed doors in smoke filled rooms.

Power is the theme, but then there's the motive. Feminism and gender assertion has driven the male of the species, the good old American "provider", to engage in a conspiracy with other disatisfied males to replace their newly militant wives with robot others. Feminism is the motive for murder and moving to Stepford is not just an opportunity, but the scene of the crime. Stepford, then, is a misogynist's utopia; the perfect place for a man to kill his wife and get away with it. 

My introduction to Stepford was as a child in Liverpool when the film debuted on the BBC in the late 1970s. I recall my old man howling at the scene with the Stepford Wives weaving in-and-out of the supermarket aisles to Muzak; and the newly arrived African-American couple, who are much bigger characters in the novel, squabbling in the canned foods section. "You're next," roared the old man. 

Does it take a man to nail a man, a cock to knock a cock? The novel was written by a man. The 1975 film adaptation was directed by a man. The script for that film was written by a man. Is this what drove feminist audiences crazy when the film first came out in 1975? The film's director, Bryan Forbes, was perplexed by the reaction, more so when he got assaulted on the street in New York by a "militant libber" who had taken umbrage at the big screen adaptation. Yeah. What can I say? There's no pleasing a woman...or a man.