Women know their place
Rachel Johnson says that — irony, irony — a new version of The Stepford Wives is being released at a time when women are once again baking cherry pies and standing by their men 0 ver the next few weeks, I predict, the weekend supplements will be frothing with halter-neck frocks and widebrimmed floppy hats, all in a sweet palette of sugared-almond colours. It's not the start to the so-called `Season', though it will look very like it. It's the start of something else. The Stepford Wives are back.
To celebrate the remake, all the crunchiest spokespersons of the gender movements will be invited on Start the Week to debate the notion of domestic perfectionism. And, of course, there will be interviews with the belle du jour, Nicole Kidman, who is playing the plum role of photographer and libber Joanna Eberhart, who moves to Stepford, Connecticut, from New York.
When she gets there. remember, Joanna discovers she has upped sticks to The Town That Time Forgot. All the other women she meets glide around supermarkets in full maquillage. They wax floors by night and wear white gloves by day to prune the roses. And they're openly in love with their vacuum cleaners.
They are serene, fulfilled and much too busy scrubbing to kvetch with the new kid on the block, because they are not real women (do keep up) but animatronic fembots, of course, controlled by the Men's Association of Stepford. The menfolk have been so insulted by their wives' stroppy determination to pursue interests outside the home that they have traded in their lifetime partners for robots, programmed to be fulfilled by housework and marital sex and at least two cup-sizes bigger than they were before.
With Christopher Walken joining Nicole as arch-baddie, the 2004 remake of the 1975 movie of the Ira Levin parable about men's fears of feminism should be a smash.
But isn't it ironic? At the time of its first release, women were in the middle of burning their bras, examining their cervixes and defiantly plaiting their leg hairs. Their attitude to home cooking was, 'Make it yourself, I'm late for group.' Housework was a political issue. As Pat Mainardi wrote for Redstocking magazine in 1970. women have been 'brainwashed' into doing it without complaint for generations, for some reason. 'It's probably too many years of seeing television women in ecstasy over their shiny waxed floors or breaking down over their dirty shirt collars. Men have no such conditioning. They recognise the essential fact of housework right from the very beginning. Which is that it stinks.'
The movie's director, Bryan Forbes, remains perplexed by the reaction to the film, given what the book was really about. 'I have always felt that, far from being antiwomen, it is the Stepford men who are held up to ridicule, and anyway, in the last analysis, Levin wrote it as a savage comment on a media-driven society which values the pursuit of youth and beauty above all else.'
Still, the term Stepford Wives has done sturdy service for the past 30 years as shorthand for a certain kind of housewifely devotion to detail, not as a critique of male sexism or pursuit of youth and beauty, etc. — a misunderstanding that has persisted for much too long to correct now. Whenever Martha Stewart advocates baking a new sort of cupcake for every month of the year, or Nigella uses the term Domestic Goddess, they are ribbed for being Stepford Wives. The Evening Standard recently ran a feature entitled `Top Ten Stepford Wives'.
There was Betsy Duncan Smith, for being her hubby's secretary. There was Kylie, of course, who has eschewed Lurex hotpants for rubber gloves: 'I get my Marigolds on and have a frenzy,' Kylie claims. And then there was Catherine Zeta Jones, because she is 'a perfect hostess who cries every time her husband Michael Douglas's name is mentioned'.
In 2004, the irony (I repeat) is all too obvious. No director has to fake up a suburban fantasyland where nasty husbands surgically replace their real wives, because women have done it without male intervention at all. In the US, 8.3 million women a year undergo operations for cosmetic surgery, and something called `Stepford Spouse Syndrome' (big boobs, higher foreheads, plumper lips) has been identified.
'It will still make a great thriller. But the real chiller is that the evil husbands in the original did not need to murder,' noted Maureen Dowd of the New York Times in her column. 'They just needed to wait. In the long interval between the two movies, women have turned themselves into Stepford Wives. They can no longer wince at their mates, because they have frozen their faces with Botox.'
As for marital sex — well, there's no need for compliant animatronic wives if we would all just knuckle down and follow hot tips from Laura Doyle, bestselling author of Surrendered Wives, A Practical Guide to Finding Intimacy, Passion and Peace with Your Man. A quick dip inside reveals chapter headings as echtly Stepfordian as 'Receive Graciously', 'Abandon the Myth of Equality' and `Say Yes to Sex'.
Laura Schlessinger, the author of The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands, is yet another harpy telling uppity women to say yes to sex. In her handbook for husband-pleasing, we arc told to prepare dinner, care for our children without complaint, greet our husbands with a kiss, and engage in sexual intimacy with gusto and on demand. Apparently, behaviour that deviates from this norm 'tears down' a husband's 'necessary sense of strength'.
So everything the Men's Association ever wanted has been handed to today's males on a polished silver salver, right down to housework, which has been helpfully reclaimed by the media as a recreational leisure activity for women (cf. housework columns in Vogue, national newspapers and the radical-chic popularity of homey books by Rita Konig et al.).
In the 30 years between the movies, the need for husbands to reprogramme us wives has been removed. The media's celebration of youth and beauty, the surrendered-wives movement, and the glamorisation of housework has done it for them, most efficiently. But here's the difference. In 1975, the wives are pushing their trolleys around a gleaming supermarket in killer high-heels and false eyelashes, repeating 'I'll die if I don't find that recipe, I'll die if I don't find that recipe' in breathy voices, before going home to make a pot-roast. The 2004 model, I would argue, is also a pneumatic unlined creature, but she is also trying to create perfect kids as well as have a perfect home and great sex. If she's American, she lives in the sort of competitive New Jersey or Long Island suburb where the kids do so many activities Ihat the town has imposed a Family Free Time Day once a year. (About as spontaneous, in my book, as an annual Fellate Your Husband Day.) But let's face it. Nobody in the Men's Association of life is going to kick either type out of bed for dropping crumbs. Which no Stepford Wife ever does.
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