By emily

Grade: A

UPDATE: If you would rather hear very similar sentiments from a famous feminist critic, go here. However, I am funnier than Katha Pollitt.

I know, I am tempted to go see the Nikki Kidman version too, but since it appears to be exactly the same movie except with different actors I encourage you to save $7 and rent the old one. It’s SO good, really funny and REALLY SCARY. It’s scary how scary it still is. It’s much more compelling than anything from the recent crop of ‘oh the horror of the suburbs’ movies. This is because the idea that a bunch of husbands, given the chance, would totally kill their wives and replace them with subservient sex’n’cleaning robots, still seems 100% probable. For women, watching this movie is still as scary as watching Jaws in a shark tank.

Housewifeliness has been a hotly contested topic lately, in my life and (ahem) the life of the culture. Last week in the reliably anxiety-making Sunday Styles section, there was an interview with the married authors of those his’n’hers essay collections about Marriage. The wife said something that haunted me for days, about how she used to resent her husband for not doing his share of the housework and childcare, but now she realizes that he’s just temperamentally better suited to working on “the more traditionally male things, cars, lawns, taking out the trash, renovating the bathroom.” She continues, “''I'm much calmer about all that now -- partly because all of our lives are much easier now, but also because I've come to realize that it's O.K. to do what I do best and care about most and let him do what he does.” I literally got the chills when I read this. I wondered if she’d come to this revelation after a long weekend away with her husband . . . dum dum DUM! (suspense theme from Stepford Wives) She didn’t mention anything about the joys of ironing, so maybe she hasn’t actually been Stepfordized. But still, I had to think long and hard about why I’d found her statement so disturbing. Could it be because I secretly sometimes have moments of feeling the same way? I live with two – um, for the sake of argument we are going to call them ‘men’- and it’s a generally acknowledged fact that if I want to live the kind of lifestyle I want (a lifestyle that entails not slipping in puddles of cat barf or accidentally drinking chunky milk), I am going to have to clean up after them as well as after myself, buy household supplies and groceries, and cook. And I guess after 30 years of feminism we/I should be over this fact, but the thing is, I am just better at all these things than they are (especially cooking), and also I . . . oh no . . . I enjoy doing these things!

I mean, I love grocery shopping! If I’m in the right mood, scrubbing the bathtub gives me moments of OCD satisfaction! And I find a joy in cooking -- the consciousness-free concentration that blocks out all other worries – that is usually only available to me in more destructive guises. Plus I like to eat the food that I cook. And to top it all off, there is nothing I’d like better than to NOT have to spend my days sitting in a cubicle. My fate seems clear. Bring on the apron! Turn on the daytime TV! Oh good, it’s Ellen! I FUCKING LOVE ELLEN!

Of course, there are a couple of obstacles to my domestic bliss. For starters, I have all of these ridiculous ambitions. Also, on a more practical note, I am not married to a rich guy, or indeed to anyone at all. I don’t know if I ever really would like to be. I have similar feelings of ambivalence about kids. While other people's kids are more than okay and are sometimes very cute and brilliant, and while I do want to spread my DNA around, I sometimes think that having a bunch of cats might ultimately be much more fulfilling and much less expensive.

So this is why The Stepford Wives retains its creepiness. The image of the elegantly dressed, stringently coiffed happy homemaker, reading an article in Woman’s Day while waiting for the brownies to come out of the oven, has not only stayed with us but has been expanded, updated. She’s become more Martha-ized, more competitive about cooking and baking and decorating and man-pleasing. Yeah, so women can have jobs now, can struggle and strive and ultimately rise to the top in a bunch of professions. But, as the media has obsessively chronicled, they then often opt to Stepford it up. Sometimes this is because they were doing something they didn’t really love, or that they used to love but have burnt out on, and so they jumped at the chance to give it up. But I would guess that more often it’s because a lot of us, both men and women, still have the underlying idea that being a domestic goddess is some sort of higher calling. I think I have to reexamine what I said a paragraph ago about being ‘better at’ housework and cooking than Henry or B. If, indeed, I am (well, let’s be real here, I clearly am) , it probably has less to do with some sort of biological predisposition and more to do with my and H and B's specific tastes and the ways that we were raised. In theory, of course, we have all been emancipated from the confines of the construct of gender and are now free to pursue any whim that strikes us. But I can’t help but suspect that I am not the only lady out there who occasionally feels shortchanged by her own desires.