Stepford Wives and husbands' fantasies
The original and the remake miss the point of what husbands want, and wives, too

The original 1975 version of Stepford Wives imagined a fictional northeastern town where the men had a secret: one by one, they were replacing their uppity, argumentive, frigid, human wives with dull, brainless, compliant sex goddesses who never said no and never argued.

Katherine Ross, who was a hot number in moviedom back then, played Joanna Eberhart, the heroine who uncovered the plot and tried to warn her friends. Alas, too late, they'd just been replaced, notably Tina Louise, playing Charmaine Wimperis, a tennis addict who had steadfastly refused to let her husband dig up the court and put in a pool.

Actually, most guys went to see the movie because of Tina, not Katherine. She's the one in the middle.

I have not seen the current remake of the movie (and have no plans to), but in it, Nicole Kidman plays Joanna. Unlike 1975's Joanna, who was a housewife like every other Stepford wife, Nicole-Joanna is a high-powered career woman. She's a recently-failed producer of network reality shows, a nice twist, I suppose, since the premise of the Stepford plot is how Stepford husbands replace reality with - dare I say it? - wives that look an awful lot like Hollywood actresses.

Suzanne West says that the battle among the sexes today isn't between men and women anymore. I might add that one reason is that most husbands these days whose wives work outside the home adjusted long ago and - again, dare I say it? - like the benefits of the money their wives make. It is, after all, what paid for the new home entertainment center and what floats the note for the Lexus.

No, the real battle among the sexes is between career wives and houswives, says Suzanne. The number of the latter rise every year.

The new version should have depicted career women as the authors of the robots, assigned to replace the new generation of women who are turning their backs on work beyond the hearth. The career women have declared war on stay-at-home mommies with the vengeance that the Stepford husbands applied to stereotyping their wives a quarter of a century ago. It's not clear whether the career women are driven by defensiveness or a fear that they're missing one of life's great experiences - raising their children.

Frankly, I am not sure what Suzanne is getting at (the rest of her piece is a bit unclear, shall we say), but the producers of both the '75 and '04 versions really miss the point.

In the '75 movie, the overriding theme was that husbands' fantasy is to be married to sex goddesses who are always available, always willing and most of all, always highly admiring and complimentary of their husband's, uh, prowess. Second, the robot wives never got personally sloppy (hey, they always looked like movie actresses!) and never argued with their patriarch.

Stepford was a Taliban village without the burkas or the religion.

But that's not what husbands want, American husbands, anyway. No, to be true to the real-life fantasy of both men and the career women of the movie, what the Stepford androidesses would be is Michelin chefs, child-care experts, personal secretaries and shuttle drivers for the wives' convenience, and a butler for the husband. Or maybe scratch the butler; most men aren't natural slave drivers, which may explain why the harshest overseers in slave societies and matriarchies have always been the women.

But wait, back to Suzanne! She recounts authoress Caitlin Flanagan, who,

... enraged career women with a 12,000-word polemic in the Atlantic Monthly called "How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement," accusing career women of making it on the backs of their nannies. Her critics were further enraged when they learned that she has a nanny herself, to help with twin sons. She sticks to her point nonetheless: "When a mother works, something is lost."

For the non-New York working set, substitute maids for nannies, and you get the picture. I think what husbands today really long for is a less frenetic life with a wife who's a closer friend.

Just a few thoughts.

by Donald Sensing, 6/17/2004 07:46:53 PM. Permalink |