The very first movie to truly disturb me, keep me awake at night wanting to turn on the lamp and jumping at every noise, was Stepford Wives.
For a lot of people it’s The Wizard of Oz with the flying monkeys. But for me it was Stepford Wives.
Being only about 10, you couldn’t have called me a feminist. However around that same time I did get into trouble for dismembering my Barbie dolls, leaving pieces of their bodies all over the house and in one dramatic incident trying unsuccessfully to stuff them down the bathtub drain.
Stepford Wives was released in 1975, to a fairly indifferent audience and one Academy Award nomination for best science fiction film.
Over the years there have been sequels, a butchered remake with Nicole Kidman and television spin offs. It acquired a cult designation and earned a place in popular culture.
When I was ten though, it was just terrifying.
A talented photographer moves with her family to an upscale community where the women are systematically murdered by their husbands and replaced with physically perfect androids who wear pearls to the grocery store, love to clean house, speak only when spoken to and are generally regarded as ideal companions.
It was chillingly impactful. If I close my eyes I can still see that final scene, where Katherine Ross is confronted with the truth and her own Stepford replacement, and therefore becomes the next victim.
Anyone who thinks that’s a lot of horror film for someone in Grade Four should consider that cinematic choices for girls in the 1970’s were pretty much limited to Disney - Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, blah, vomit, blah, vomit, blah. These movies of course were and continue to be equally disturbing in their own ways.
They’ve been niggling at me for days now - these Stepford memories - buzzing around my head like mosquitoes and begging the question: why think about this now?
Surely it wasn’t brought on by the pyjama pants I routinely put on to run into Save On, or the employment of my five sure-fire magazine approved methods of getting red wine stains on upholstery.
It was the sex dolls found at Manning Park.
Related: False report of dead body leads police to sex dolls at Manning Park
Last week The Spotlight reported that RCMP investigating a tip about a dead body discovered three, life like sex mannequins dumped in the brush.
As an aside, such a story is nothing less than newspaper gold. Every once and awhile the journalistic Gods open their hearts and deliver you a lead that is so fantastic it gives meaning to the words: You can’t make this stuff up.
The interview with police and subsequent research proved very educational.
Call me naive - I’d no idea that sex dolls had evolved to the point of being proper fake women with moving limbs and faces and something approximating skin.
Google sex mannequins if you like, but do it carefully.
Apparently there is even a bar somewhere in BC where patrons can go to “hire” mannequins for sex.
While understanding that these dolls are not actually women, somehow the very fact of them is one of the largest affronts to female power I’ve ever considered.
Women are routinely and effectively dehumanized by men who see them only as a collections of individual “parts” - legs, breasts, buttocks and so on.
But how much worse is it to create a woman out of polyurethane for sexual purposes?
Seriously, if someone is going to pay for sex can’t he at least choose a person - a real person who has a brain and a point of view and feelings, to say nothing of a grocery bill?
Welcome to 1975, and the future.