{"id":75547,"date":"2022-12-15T01:00:05","date_gmt":"2022-12-15T06:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=75547"},"modified":"2022-12-14T09:36:19","modified_gmt":"2022-12-14T14:36:19","slug":"qotd-from-the-stepford-wives-to-the-handmaids-tale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/12\/15\/qotd-from-the-stepford-wives-to-the-handmaids-tale\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: From <em>The Stepford Wives<\/em> to <em>The Handmaid&#8217;s Tale<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:left; padding: 0px 15px 10px 0px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a>Hey, did you know <em>The Stepford Wives<\/em> was published 50 years ago today? <em>Salon<\/em> does:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>Why feminist horror novel <strong>The Stepford Wives<\/strong> is still relevant, 50 years on<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>But before we get to the fisking (I&#8217;m running on fumes, y&#8217;all; the end of the summer is always the worst time for me), let&#8217;s pause for a moment to consider the TV show. You&#8217;d think there&#8217;d be one, right? Either that, or this is stoyak \u2014 <em>The Stepford Wives<\/em>, coming fall 2022 to Disney Plus. But it doesn&#8217;t appear to be. I googled &#8220;stepford wives tv show&#8221; and got <a href=\"https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt3858684\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">this<\/a>, which looks trashy enough, but in no way related to the book or movie. There was <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Stepford_Wives_(2004_film)\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">a remake<\/a> of the 1970s movie back in 2004, but it bombed.<\/p>\n<p>Odd, no? You&#8217;d think that shit would be chick crack \u2014 all those Strongk Confidant Wahmens digging into conspiracies and Sticking it to the Man \u2122. At least, that&#8217;s what I thought back in 2004. I thought the casting was dodgy \u2014 Kidman was too old (and too glamorous; you really need a pretty-but-not-Hollywood-pretty type) and Matthew Broderick too nebbishy. Nonetheless, I thought the premise would be strong enough to overcome it \u2014 oh, you poor, put-upon ladies! But nope.<\/p>\n<p>And then <em>The Handmaid&#8217;s Tale<\/em> happened, as my students would&#8217;ve written back in the days, and now I understand why I&#8217;m wrong. I should&#8217;ve seen it 20 years ago, but better late than never, right? Let&#8217;s all have a good laugh at the really obvious thing I missed back in 2004: Strongk, Confidant Wahmens are neither strong nor confident, nor do they want to be either. They want the thinnest veneer of the pretense of the fantasy of those things, delivered to them by a man who comes on like Chad Thundercock, but always somehow has the time to listen to her.<\/p>\n<p><em>The Handmaid&#8217;s Tale<\/em>, that&#8217;s the real chick crack. It&#8217;s highbrow bondage porn for the kind of tertiary-educated lady who thinks <em>Fifty Shades of Gray<\/em> is way too trashy to rent (except, you know, one Girls&#8217; Night with a box of white whine, as a &#8220;guilty pleasure&#8221;). It gets her all fired up for busting balls at the next partners&#8217; meeting down at the law firm. So empowering!<\/p>\n<p>In <em>The Stepford Wives<\/em>, book and original movie, the housewives are replaced by robots. The author, Ira Levin, was a guy, and I bet you could tell that just from the one-sentence plot summary. Being replaced by a robot isn&#8217;t a &#8220;feminist&#8221; fear, it&#8217;s a male fear. The worry that you&#8217;re nothing but a wallet with a criminally underserved dick attached has been pervasive among men since probably the Puritans. It&#8217;s a neat trick on Levin&#8217;s part, racking up mucho feminist street cred by selling them the #1 male neurosis of the postwar world.<\/p>\n<p>Severian, <a href=\"https:\/\/foundingquestions.wordpress.com\/2022\/08\/08\/sjws-always-project\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;SJWs Always Project&#8221;, <em>Founding Questions<\/em><\/a>, 2022-08-08.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hey, did you know The Stepford Wives was published 50 years ago today? Salon does: Why feminist horror novel The Stepford Wives is still relevant, 50 years on But before we get to the fisking (I&#8217;m running on fumes, y&#8217;all; the end of the summer is always the worst time for me), let&#8217;s pause for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,28,41],"tags":[263,987,122,139,1462,43],"class_list":["post-75547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-media","category-quotations","tag-1970s","tag-feminism","tag-movies","tag-psychology","tag-severian","tag-women"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-jEv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75547"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78644,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75547\/revisions\/78644"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}