July Book and Movie Review

The Stepford Wives
by Gabriel

Human beings have needs.

The drive to secure food, shelter, progeny, community- these are all fundamental urges, natural and healthy. However, it’s possible for any of these urges to develop incompletely or abnormally, and become focused on an intermediate or tangential goal rather than its natural object. This happens especially when the need develops under stressful circumstances- deprivation, suppression, or simple misunderstanding can lead to such perversions of natural drives. For example, someone who grows up in poverty might be more likely than most to see a normal and healthy interest in the goods and supplies which allow safe and comfortable living (“wealth”), twisted into an unhealthy obsession with trade markers of no inherent usefulness (“money”).

Freud wrote of sexual fetishes in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality that “The situation only becomes pathological when the longing for the fetish passes beyond the point of being merely a necessary condition attached to the sexual object and actually takes the place of the normal aim, and, further, when the fetish becomes detached from a particular individual and becomes the sole sexual object.” We can broaden this to describe any misdirected urge- the miser who lives in a trailer and dines on catfood while thrilling to thoughts of his overflowing bank account has altogether missed the point of money and is not by any means living a whole and balanced life.

What of control? There is, in at least some men, a natural and healthy drive towards masterful behavior, which in many cases includes an inclination for dominance within the context of romantic interaction. When developed and expressed healthily, this leads to happy and fulfilling relationships, a stable and joyful environment for contented living and perhaps for the raising of sunny, well-adjusted children. But, like any other natural drive, a desire for control within relationships can misdevelop- especially in men who are taught that control is wrong, or who have no idea how to acquire it, or who simply are not exposed to healthy dominance and haven’t a clue what it would look like. In such men, the drive to control could become a fetish for obedience.

Enter The Stepford Wives. The men of Stepford want their women to obey them, to serve with sexual abandon, to forsake outside interests for the sake of homemaking. But the desire for obedience has become divorced from its natural goal, and has become an end in itself... in fact, the urge to control a woman has become so misdirected that it is in fact no longer associated with womanhood at all.

In this context, the novel is a masterfully-written condemnation of weak men- men who cannot inspire their women to service, and so choose to discard their women completely in favor of obedient robots. The drive to control a woman, frustrated by the inability to actually do so, is altogether supplanted by a fascination with the simple fact of obedience, regardless of who or what is obeying- Freud’s very definition of a pathological fetish.

Interestingly, one can find men little short of this condition in just a few minutes of online chatting: men who cannot inspire a woman’s service through their own force of personality, so must instead rely on the framework of Gorean interaction created by others to compel a woman’s service. If there is such a thing as a “Stepford Slave”, the term should not be used to describe the woman who is inspired to obey her owner more completely than other slaves are comfortable with, but rather for the woman who serves the wrong men for the wrong reasons: not because she finds herself made helpless by a particular man’s voice and gaze, but merely because she was told she is supposed to by the “Men’s Association”. The term “Stepford Master” might just as easily be used to describe a man who must resort to threats and accusations of “breaking the rules” or “not being a slave” in order to compel the obedience that women will not grant him willingly and joyfully.

The men of Stepford are without exception socially immature... as awkward and uncomfortable around the opposite sex as any preadolescent boy at his first school dance. They’d rather hang out in their “no girls allowed” club and watch XXX movies than spend the evening with a live female. The male lead, the husband of the main character, is given opportunity after opportunity to express to his wife what he’d like differently from her, and lets them all pass by- except one, where his wishes come out as whining and resentment rather than as confident command or even mature conversation. There’s only one man in the entire town with any bearing of command, and he’s the misogynist behind the whole plan. But we’re not given to see any other men in the book, anyone from outside the town to confirm the pattern or break it, so message if any becomes secondary to a well-told story. The book is written in such a way that we can probably assume that the author is censuring only a particular kind of man, the Stepford man, rather than reading him as tarring the entire gender with the same brush.

The movie at the theaters has no such subtlety- it is a retelling of the Stepford story by rabid feminists who are also lousy filmmakers. In the film, all men are blundering buffoons and all women are ultracompetent- even the mastermind character “Diz”, the novel’s one dominant male, is replaced by Mike... a robot... and the creation of a woman. The message of the movie is that the rightful place of the properly-enlightened male is trotting along loyally at his mistress’s heel... and that any woman who might feel saddened by the loss of traditional gender roles must be a raving psychotic. The novel’s creepy males-victorious ending is replaced by a feminist triumph, followed by a denouement which allows Ms. Kidman to gloat wittily while Mr. Broderick nods and smiles supportively. And all of this after an hour and a half of the most ludicrous internal inconsistencies- one imagines that each scene was written by a different committee, none of whom had read the book or any of the rest of the screenplay.

Do yourself a favor and find a copy of the 1975 film instead; while it definitely has a dated style, that style includes fidelity to the author’s work and a careful craftsmanship which is glaringly absent from the agenda-as-farce masquerading as a movie in the theaters today. Or, better yet, pick up a copy of the original novel, and appreciate Ira Levin’s excellent storytelling in its original medium.

Gabriel is the owner of the Gor on Earth website and mailing list, and is a former columnist for The Gorean Voice.