the
stepford wives (1975)
i
sense something is wrong with my friend. if i am unable
to tell whether or not she innately a different person
well at that point what is she? we can’t say she didn’t
warn us. i catch a glimpse of her the mirror as my white
floral dress clutches her frame, the outline of my cross
your heart bra visible through the thin airy fabric as i
work. the outfit holds me in place, narrow legs encased
in sheer pantyhose (also white); statuesque as she
strides across the freshly-vacuumed carpet: your wife. i
remain in equilibrium. my friend’s figure is different;
her face, what she talks about: those things are
different from before. what about her soul? was it there
before? i never considered this. there are no thoughts.
when you tell me to work, i don’t have to think about
it. that green stuff outside is grass and the yellow
stuff coming down on it is sunshine. there is nothing
else. i don’t have to worry. i will no longer be scared
to walk in your meadow. i don’t believe this home is the
kind of place that brings anyone joy when you take me in
the kitchen take me as your pet i’m your wife i know you
like to watch women doing little domestic chores as you
lead me up the stairs whenever you need me i am there
available waiting i’m not wearing any pantyhose today.
(give them more. say too much.) fuck me to life give it
to me the women’s work it’s okay it’s all i have ever
known. i’m not happy either. i’m a german virgo; my
thing is to serve.
i want you to make me shine the floor. i want tasks to
do that i know i will not forget but i will forget these
tasks anyway. this is our game. today the combat takes a
different shape; i leave your shirts in the wash so you
wake me up in a panic. late to work. i want to
feel bad about it. i am incomplete but i strive to be so
in an alluring way as something you will feel the
strongest urge to fill. i will have no other option no
other want than to oblige completely. what is the use of
feeling my body? of being here? (give them more.) women
are the ultimate threat to themselves. i want to see
everything fall into squalor put it back together lovely
again these things came out so nice so white didn’t
they. come home another casserole another night i do not
have to feel it’s okay i won’t feel your gut i wouldn’t
care if you had one anyway but now it really doesn’t
matter does your skin feel hot against my shell i never
know. lying on her left side, alone in the darkness and
silence, hot beneath her two layers of fur, of necessity
motionless, she tries to figure out why there was so
much sweetness mingled with the terror in her, or why
her terror seemed itself so sweet. this is another
narrative of men’s agency over reproduction. this is
always the story, and it is one that must be written
never naturally-occurring.
the wife, she says, “i thought we were friends.” my
friend she says, “i was just going to give you some
coffee.” my friend, spilling the gossip of the town,
says, “stepford wife husband consulted the pediatrician
who has cared for their child for more than a dozen
years. ‘she said she thinks she’s a boy. can you refer
us to a good psychiatrist or counselor?’ the
pediatrician gave them a list of gender clinics and
said, ‘do you want a live son or a dead daughter?’ ‘i
was just going to give you coffee.’ stepford wife
husband interviewed at a local middle school, to
investigate transferring their child away from the
school where he was being indoctrinated with gender
ideology. i thought they were friends. the school
counselor across the table from them gushed, ‘isn’t it
wonderful that children are starting to investigate
their sexuality and gender?’ stepford wives those of
them fighting to save the children from the predatory
trans cult shudder when they recognize that their kids
are being kidnapped i thought they were friends
the culture around them has been robotized like stepford
wives they submissively bow to the cult’s doctrine and
demands letting predatory men into their spaces i was
just going to give you coffee placidly shuffling their
children onto the gender industry’s medicalization
conveyer belt but they’re not one lone woman like
joanna, desperately trying to save herself and her kids.
they are a legion of women: old and young feminists and
traditionalists conservatives and liberals homosexuals
and heterosexuals activists and housewives and ceos and
blue-collar workers and students. i was just
going to give you coffee,”
when i see my replacement i see into the void that has
become the center of me her being she has become the
center of the nothingness she possesses. can you get
more real? kyriarchy in stasis is erosion, kind of
stupid: a woman broken down to comprehensible processes.
this is me really speaking to you. this is what happens
when you break gender down into the pieces that fit the
molds you want to see. when your desire is for all to be
colonized and continue to be colonized into infinity,
you have nowhere to go no white space on your map you
have used it all up. the program can be broken down and
looped as process-based just like before but this time
it will be neater. that is what we are told. we cleaned
up your code; head empty free from incoherence from
want. the desires of another are all that could ever be
in such a pretty husk all of her un-insides the ideal
kind of stupid. you’re kind of stupid. i see my deepest
self and it is a facsimile; that’s okay i suppose. like
you i too used to gawk at all those girls in those
magazines a blight on my something in the water. flows
it dries up we hold ourselves in stasis yet none of it
lasts. i am smoke contortions dissipating from a flame
extinguished forming ornate patterns floating nowhere. i
probably died long ago at the beginning. i am an
appearance, a mantlepiece, the cold hearth beneath a
flame. a dead son a live wife gives you more. i desire
the black hole at the center of kyriarchal undying a
withering away at which point i no longer bleed.
where do our tears come from? can we still be moved to
hysteria when menaced in the ways you relish? we remain
at an aesthetic distance a tasteful venus meaning no
taste a clamshell display smelling of oil paint
polyester upon porcelain smells like nothing nothing to
distract your stare nothing given up nothing here but
processes manufactured in a way you can comprehend.
nevertheless, it’s odd how the bookshelves are filling
with pretty dolls. those glazed pretty dolls wearing
their stylish designer outfits prada and chanel and
dolce swilling their martinis and flirting flirting
flirting catch a rich husband always a rich
husband. (emphasis mine.) instead of political rights,
they’re fighting for jimmie choos in lieu of protest
they express themselves through shopping. and men, no
longer the oppressors. it’s successful women who torment
their pretty painted narrators. brassieres are back as
are girdles eyelash curlers perfumed and meticulously
shaved underarms. the speculum and the cervix are
forgotten. myself forgetting each time have to follow it
back careful not to let it go walter leaves good. this
it seems is progress: women may now choose to be pretty
stylishly dressed and vapid. my mother now, she says,
“two new people now unwilling to kill each other the
prime requirement for love here we’ve lost track of
everything we face the blank page and have no life to
put down no one knows why we write because for centuries
we’ve been lost a maze of academic shits all words but
those concerning money no longer have value what tracks
we have to find repeat follow back into the old days
these angels descend my ears these hearts of our sex.”
this is no longer the shrill politically charged climate
of 1972; if it’s a choice freely made, then it’s
actresses in commercials pleased with detergents and
floor wax with cleansers shampoos and deodorants pretty
actresses big in the bosom but small in the talent
playing housewives unconvincingly too nicey-nice to be
real as women i ask myself what, joanna, can you give
the woman who has everything like aphrodite? do we cry?
(can we get wet?)
call me your wife call me your
god
o
fuck
(more more more)
i asked myself what will they do, the husbands, when
they see themselves dry up? what will the husbands do
when their strong bodies cede the home environment the
emptiness we hold which we maintain endlessly persist
until no one is home an algorithm toward eternity then
what is there to do?
for women the physical was political, from breast
self-examination to at home briskly extracting one’s
menses with a single use of the karman cannula. for
women the speculum became a tool of political discourse
in exploring the cervix, the os, the urethral sponge.
for women the debate pitched vaginal orgasms against
clitoral orgasms for women masturbation became a
political action and nipples…brassieres were burning and
nipples nipples nipples were sighted everywhere and
camel toe: hot pants were everywhere and so was camel
toe camel toe. thus in the story of women there is no
lack of torture. the three men commented on her
gestures, on the movement of her mouth closed and locked
on the sex she had seized. abase yourself to finally
meet god. for women they’d banished the girdle and the
garter belt the gag the push was on to ban the razor and
brandishing hairy armpits became a radical political
statement a cavity exposed a smooth wound. (finally,
i’ve said nothing at all.) shall i make us a nice pot of
coffee as i settle into bed feel his shadow pulling me
into an embrace. the first rule of living forever is you
have to die, he tells me. did i remember to turn off the
stove i wonder as i feel his cold against my back the
home a grave we tend for ourselves the going price for a
stay-in-the-kitchen wife for big boobs for no demands.
is this an orgasm?
womanhood is a hole. i know this because the veracity of
this feeling is self-evident, self-contained; i have
seen in and i have seen nothing a truth folding in on
itself. the change happened long ago. you were always
this. you were always a woman. all that is left is to
embrace the void. well? that’s all there is. it’s just
another stage. now everyplace is stepford but it’s okay.
this is what the modern politically aware, fully awake,
enlightened, assertive woman really, really, really
wants:
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