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This essay juxtaposes readings of three films-1975's The Stepford Wives, 1987's Fatal Attraction, and the 2004 version of The Stepford Wives-to suggest that feminist media critics' understanding of the dynamics of feminist, postfeminist, and "post-postfeminist" discourses in popular culture should include attention to the rhetorical and political implications of representations of men and masculinity. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Ten years ago, I published a book titled Prime-Time Feminism (Dow, 1996), in which I examined a variety of television representations of feminism since 1970 and argued that commercial entertainment television needs to be taken seriously as a player in cultural debates over the meaning of feminism, both in its heyday, in the 1970s, and in the "postfeminist" period that began, at least according to popular media, in the 1980s. "Postfeminist" has now become a commonsensical, taken-for-granted term in popular media, much more so than when I wrote that book, although I wouldn't claim that an academic book that only sold a few thousand copies had much to do with that. In the fall of 2004, I noticed the usage of the term "post-feminist," in a slightly altered form, in a New York Times story on ABC television's breakout hit, Desperate Housewives, which portrays the lives of four women living in an upper class suburb dealing with sexual, parental, and relational frustration. The article focused on the forty-year-old male creator of the series, Marc Cherry, and his battle to get the series made. Telling the story of the inspiration for Desperate Housewives, Cherry noted that he grew up watching actresses such as Mary Tyler Moore, Mario Thomas, and Bea Arthur (presumably references to, respectively, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, That Girl, and Maude) and he called the "desperate housewives" of his series "their daughters." He described his new show "as a post-post-feminist take. . . . The women's movement said, 'Let's get the gals out working.' Next the women realized you can't have it all. Most of the time you have to make a choice. What I'm doing is having women make the choice to live in the suburbs, but things aren't going well at all" (Weinraub, 2004).

As someone who has always maintained that television has to be understood, at least partially, in relation to other television, I appreciate Cherry's genealogical perspective, although I initially wondered at the term "post-post-feminist." That is, I wondered at the need for two "posts," as the situation he describes is a neat articulation of a classic post-feminist scenario, first and most vividly captured in the 1980s drama thirty something. Perhaps what makes Desperate Housewives "post-post" is that it is a comedy; that is, thirty something took such dilemmas very seriously-too seriously for some-whereas Desperate Housewives, in the description of its creator, is a black comedy melded with the generic characteristics of a prime-time soap opera. Indeed, the tone of Desperate Housewives owes a great deal to Ally McBeal, another comedic drama-or dramedy-that arguably is its closest ancestor in the post-post tradition of combining post-feminist themes in an hour long serial drama format with comedic overtones.

Let me take one more stab at this post-post-feminist problematic. In my view, another fine example of post-post-feminist popular culture is the recent remake of a feminist classic from the 1970s, The Stepford Wives. In the summer of 2004, an updated version of The Stepford Wives, starring Nicole Kidman, Bette Midler, and Glenn Close in central roles, was released to much fanfare. Like Desperate Housewives, it portrayed a successful career woman, played by Kidman, relocated to a suburb. Unlike the original Stepford Wives, which is properly understood as a feminist horror film that took its central issue-men's desire to control women-very seriously, the 2004 remake was decidedly comedic in tone. As one critic puts it, the 1975 film "envisions men who are willing to kill to preserve their male prerogative" (Silver, 2002, p. 63), whereas the 2004 remake, in the words of another critic, "has changed from thriller to farce, making for plenty of audience laughs, but also sacrificing the heart of the original movie" (Nuss, 2004).

The comparison of the original and the remake was a theme that occupied many reviewers, and those with feminist interests took care to note that the former contained a much more powerful critique than the latter. Yet, like Marc Cherry, these critics also jumped from the 1970s to the present day, glossing over the decade that made post-post-feminism possible, and that decade is, of course, the 1980s. Indeed, when I was watching the 2004 version of The Stepford Wives, in which it is revealed in a climactic scene that it is in fact a woman, Claire Wellington, played by Glenn Close, who has been engineering the transformation of the women of Stepford into placid domestic and sexual drones, I was struck by the similarity between her character's hysteria, as she defends her actions, to the hysteria of another well-known Glenn Close character, Alex Forrest, the deranged villain of 1987's Fatal Attraction. Both are spurned women, both are crazy, both fantasize about a life that has been denied them, and both are willing to kill to get it. I'm apparently not the only one who sees this resemblance. Perusing reactions to the 2004 film on one of my favorite websites, imdb.com, I came across a comment in which another viewer noted that as Close's Stepford Wives character "became more and more hysterical I began to expect her [to] stuff a bunny in a pan of boiling water" (Farris, 2004). This is, of course, a reference to an iconic moment from Fatal Attraction, a moment that cements Alex Forrest as truly evil, when she kills the beloved pet of her lover's child in an effort to get his attention.

In different clothing, in different decades and cultural contexts, Fatal Attraction's Alex Forrest and The Stepford Wives' Claire Wellington are the same woman (and not just because they are played by the same actor). Yet one is terrifying, the other comic, one is evil, the other pathetic. And here we have the end point of this long detour through recent popular culture that leads me back to the importance of the 1980s, and Fatal Attraction, in comprehending the turn to post-post-feminism. Fatal Attraction is a crucial missing link, it is the repressed to which we must return, a disdained but wildly popular film (if judged by its near constant circulation on cable) that feminist critics could usefully understand as the nexus between the earnest hopes of the second wave, the disappointments of post-feminism, and the post-postfeminist irony of the present. In what follows, I situate Fatal Attraction in a historical trajectory between the two texts I mention above-the original Stepford Wives from 1975, and the recent Stepford Wives remake, from 2004. Reading these three texts against each other provides a window onto my specific concerns: the role of men and masculinity in the emergence of postfeminist media representations, and the elision of that role in feminist media critique. I am concerned, as always, with representational politics, with how popular texts "reflect, select, and deflect" social and political realities and gain a foothold as iconic moments in popular consciousness (Burke, 1966, p. 45).

Ultimately, the story I wish to tell here is a story about feminism and popular culture and the possibilities for meaning that it offers, and I attempt to intertwine it with a story about feminism and popular culture critics and how we manage those meanings. My concerns are thus simultaneously historical, rhetorical, and metacritical. This story begins in the 1970s, when discourses of feminism first began to emerge in popular media.

Feminism, The Stepford Wives, and Popular Culture in the 1970s

As I argued in some detail in Prime-Time Feminism, television programs such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Maude, and One Day At A Time translated liberal feminist discourse into sitcom terms, in which the situation that produced the comedy was based in the unusual premise, for the time, of young women pursuing independence and making their own way in the world after leaving home, or after divorce, or, in the case of Maude, of a four-times married older woman straining at the boundaries of traditional marriage, spouting feminist ideology from her comfortable berth in suburbia. One of the aspects of these programs that made them such ideal carriers of liberal ideology was that their male characters were fairly benign-men like Lou Grant, Mary Richards' boss on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, or Walter Findlay, Maude's husband, were characters with humorous foibles and good intentions who were capable of being enlightened, and their genuine affection for the feminist heroines of these shows made them unconvincing patriarchs. Format had a lot to do with this. Television dipped its toes in the waters of feminism through comedy, the traditional, and historically most successful, route for televising social change. Comedy is an inherently liberal genre-its ideology is grounded in the possibility of reform, of amicable agreement about what is best for a community (Burke, 1959).

In contrast, feminist-inflected film and literature of the 1970s did not operate within these constraints, and offered a more radical critique. The film text that I wish to centralize as crucial to feminist representational politics of that decade is, of course, The Stepford Wives. The original Stepford Wives from 1975 focuses on a young housewife, Joanna Eberhart, who moves from New York City to Stepford, Connecticut, with her husband and young children. Ambivalent about the move, she is soon even more so, as she discovers that the women of Stepford are devoutly and eerily domestic, seemingly solely dedicated to the cleanliness of their homes and the sexual satisfaction of their husbands. Not only that, but the men of the town have formed a secretive club, the Stepford Men's Association, which her husband, despite her protest, shortly joins. College educated, an aspiring photographer, Joanna could have leapt from the pages of The Feminine Mystique (Friedan, 1963) as a woman who wonders "is this all there is?" With a new found friend, Bobbie Markowe, who also has recently moved to Stepford, Joanna makes a fruitless effort to start a consciousness-raising group, a plot move that leads to my favorite line from the film, when Joanna says, "I'm not contemplating any Maidenform bonfires, but they could certainly use something around here." This reference to bra-burning crystallizes the second wave discourses that suffuse the film. As the narrative proceeds, Joanna and Bobbie see one of their friends join the ranks of the domestic automatons, and they become increasingly suspicious. When it happens to Bobbie, we reach the film's climactic events-Joanna discovers that Bobbie is a robot, discovers that the Men's Association is behind it, and ultimately is unable to escape a similar fate.

In addition to Joanna's specific references to bra burning and to "messing around with women's lib" in her former life in New York, the film alludes to second wave critiques of the politics of marriage, of housework, of consumerism (the housewives of Stepford are obsessed with finding the most effective household products), of men's insensitivity to women's aspirations, of the stifling isolation of suburban life.1 Its heroine has prototypical feminist characteristics-chief among them that she simply wants more than her role seems to allow-as an L.A. Times review of the film put it, she "expresses perfectly the sentiments and predicament of many well-educated young wives who . . . want a sense of identity and accomplishment of their own" (Thomas, 1975, IV, 15). Moreover, The Stepford Wives indicates the possibilities of feminist solidarity in Joanna and Bobbie's relationship, as well as in their effort to raise the consciousnesses of their robotic neighbors rather than simply dismissing them. In more than one sense, Joanna and Bobbie are the filmic counterparts to Mary Richards and Rhoda Morgenstern from The Mary Tyler Moore Show-two young women, bonded by friendship, trying to live out their nascent feminism in challenging situations. Yet their fates were quite different, which points again to the difference between a sitcom and a horror movie.

All popular critics at the time saw The Stepford Wives as having a relationship to second wave feminism. The New York Times, for instance, did a story on a screening of the film that was attended by Betty Friedan and other feminists, reporting that Friedan called it "a ripoff of the women's movement," while novelist Gael Greene countered with "I loved it-those men were like a lot of men I've known in my life. . . . They really do want a wife who is a robot" (Klemesrud, 1975, p. 29). Several critics disagreed with this assessment, however, and it was a refrain in critical reaction that the movie failed as a feminist tract, and that one of the reasons it failed was because of the lack of motivation for the male characters who commit the horror of killing their wives so that they can turn them into robots. Newsweek accused the film of saying "some ugly and unsupported things about what kind of women men really want," (Zimmerman, 1975, p. 70), while Pauline Kael (1975) of The New Yorker claimed that The Stepford Wives "hits men below the belt" (p. 111) and unfairly blamed men for women's own weaknesses. In a screed that seemed as much directed at feminism in general as at the film in particular, Kael wrote that "as long as [women] can blame the barrenness of their lives on men, they don't need to change. They can play at being victims instead, and they can do it under the guise of liberation" (p. 111). Writing for The Village Voice, even feminist film critic Molly Haskell (1975) termed The Stepford Wives "a comical slander of men in general and of the Connecticut branch of the breed in particular" (p. 66). These reviewers have a point: second wave feminists spent a fair amount of time trying to explain what motivated patriarchy, but the closest The Stepford Wives comes is in a scene at the end, when Joanna, whose doom is clear, asks the mastermind behind the Men's Association why they do it, and he replies, "because we can."

I should note that, as an explanation for both this film and for patriarchy, that explanation works for me; in fact, I find it both elegant and eloquent. But the point I wish to make is that these reviewers focus, if unknowingly, on a crucial difference between television representations of feminism in the 1970s and representations in film and literature, and that difference is rooted in the representation of men and masculinity. The popularity of the liberal, comic visions of feminism that TV gave us in the 1970s was crucially related to their liberal, comic visions of men. The Stepford Wives has less in common with 1970s television than with the popular feminist literature of the decade that Lisa Hogeland ably explores in her 1998 book, Feminism and Its Fictions. In a chapter of her book that is simply titled "Men," Hogeland discusses reviewers' reactions to feminist novels of the 1970s, and these reactions are strikingly similar to critics' responses to The Stepford Wives. The title of a previous version of Hogeland's chapter, when portions of it were published as an article in American Literary History, was '"Men Can't Be That Bad'" (1994) an actual quotation from an aggrieved reviewer of the 1977 feminist novel The Women's Room that seems to me a succinct summation of the reaction I want to explore here.

Hogeland (1998) argues that reviewers' reactions to 1970s feminist novels such as Alix Kates Shulman's Burning Questions and Marilyn French's The Women's Room are "sites of contestation for the nature and meaning of feminism," and that many reviewers made the implicit argument that feminist fiction "could only be credible insofar as it critiqued women and not men, only insofar as it upheld a prefeminist understanding of women's oppression as personal and not political and participated in anti-feminist victim blaming" (p. 85). The crucial point here, it seems to me, is that reviewers decry the shallow or undeveloped characterization of men as a flaw that presents sexism or patriarchy as insufficiently motivated-as this logic goes, we should be able to figure out why Walter Eberhart wants to turn his wife into a robot in The Stepford Wives, and the film doesn't tell us, therefore it is a bad film. What is lost here is that patriarchy is presented as a system in The Stepford Wives, not as a battle between individual men and individual women, and understanding it as a system means that many different men with many different wives can arrive at the same solution-replacing their wives with robots-from a variety of different motives. The commitment of the film to avoiding personal motives is perfectly demonstrated by the presence of the Stepford Men's Association as the embodiment of institutionalized patriarchy. Men, as a group, oppress women, as a group, because they can, because it benefits them. This, in my reading, is what makes The Stepford Wives a political film, in a way that many others are not. It eschews personal motivations. Yet this is precisely what reviewers dislike about it. Returning to Pauline Kael's (1975) review of The Stepford Wives, we can see a perfect example of this logic at work. Noting that the film's argument "has no validity," Kael continues with

As a statement-a text for our times-with the slave-wives parading somnabulistically in the aisles of the Stepford supermarket, stacking canned goods in their carts, it's really a crock. If women turn into replicas of the women in commercials, they do it to themselves. Even if the whole pop culture weighs on them-pushing them in that direction-if they go that way, they're the ones letting it happen. (p. 112)

Kael's refusal to lay the blame anywhere but at women's feet is a key example of what Hogeland (1998) terms the depoliticization of feminism in reactions to feminist popular culture, a move that transforms feminism's political claims into "a vision of feminism as women's self-improvement" (p. 101). If men are not to blame, then women must shoulder the burden.

Postfeminism, Fatal Attraction, and Popular Culture in the 1980s

This move toward assigning women responsibility for their fate under patriarchy was a necessary precursor for the emergence of postfeminism in the 1980s, a double-sided media ideology that interprets life after feminism in two interrelated ways, as I argued in Prime-Time Feminism. First, postfeminist media posits that feminism is over, has done its work, and "media accounts often assume that opportunity for women has exploded, thus confirming the belief that feminism has triumphed, at least in the public sphere. Basic opportunity is taken for granted, and success beyond that is a result of individual inititative" (Dow, 1996, p. 87). At the same time, however, postfeminist media was also deeply concerned with feminism's fallout, which was generally interpreted as the negative consequences resulting from women working outside the home. As Marc Cherry's summary of feminism that I quoted at the beginning of this essay indicates, mass media's version of 1970s feminism was that it sent women into the workplace to find their self-worth. Thus, examples of feminist fallout that received extensive treatment in 1980s media include the ticking biological clock, infertility woes, and the shortage of marriageable men for women who put off marriage and motherhood to pursue their careers, as well as the second shift and toxic daycare endured by women who were combining motherhood and work for wages. These issues were most often framed in terms of what has been called "postfeminist choiceoisie" (Probyn, 1990, p. 151), meaning that the problems contemporary women faced were the outcome of their "choices" and not the result of the fact that "women operate within a sex/gender system that limits acceptable choices" (Dow, 1996, p. 96). Of course, this turn to individualism is overdetermined, helped in no small part by the rise of Reaganism.

Yet, a crucial factor that facilitates the popular notion of postfeminist choice is the shifting portrayal of men in postfeminist media, and in hindsight, I consider the lack of analysis of the role of men and masculinity to be a glaring omission in my own past work on postfeminism. That is, like many feminist media critics, I succumbed to the postfeminist media-created premise that understanding feminist representation in 1980s media entailed a focus on women almost exclusively, hence my past analyses of 1980s television are all about female characters and their ideological facets. But if we begin to think about the depiction of men in 1980s postfeminist popular culture, it becomes clear how crucial they are to promoting the idea that women's problems are their own responsibility. Popular postfeminist family television, a category that I examine in Prime-Time Feminism, provides a wealth of examples. This category of programming, dominated by sitcom, gave rise to the "superwoman" character type in shows such as The Cosby Show (1984-92), Family Ties (1982-89), and Growing Pains (1985-92), which all featured married women with children who also had a professional career and yet seemed to effortlessly combine the two (Lotz, 2001). Clair Huxtable of Cosby was a lawyer, Elyse Keaton of Family Ties was an architect, and Maggie Seaver of Growing Pains was a journalist. All had multiple children, and all had husbands who also had professional careers, yet the narratives of these shows seldom, if ever, featured work/family conflicts.

What makes this believable? The presence of sensitive, nurturing, postfeminist men. Consider this: these women are married to, respectively, an obstetrician, a public television station manager, and a psychotherapist. What perfect occupations to demonstrate their progressiveness! We assume that obstetricians like not only women, but children, given that they spend their working lives with the former and are dedicated to producing healthy specimens of the latter. Working for public television is even better than regularly watching it as a symbol of liberalism. And a therapist? What better partner for a working mother-he can understand both you and the children. Indeed, both the therapist and the obstetrician practice in offices adjoining their homes, and are thus even more available to the children than are their wives. Any problems these women have really must be their own fault, because these men are depicted as truly supportive of the feminist project.2

In contrast, the dark side of postfeminism was often featured in the popular professional serial dramas of the 1980s, such as Hill Street Blues (1981-87), L.A. Law (1986-94) and St. Elsewhere (1982-88), (which focused on a police station, a law firm, and a hospital, respectively), as well as in the drama thirty something (1987-91), which focused on a group of friends and their relationship and career struggles (see Heide, 1995). These programs all featured women in their thirties in powerful professional roles who were often coded as "feminist" through their career focus, single status, and their traditionally masculine occupations. At the same time, they were often portrayed as characters with evident anxieties related to being taken seriously at their jobs, to their lack of satisfying personal lives, and to their desire for children, reinforcing the postfeminist "conflict between careerism and personal health and happiness" (Dow, 1996, p. 98). Yet, these shows were also populated by a healthy number of sensitive new age guys (SNAGS, for short), often the love interests of postfeminist female characters, who not only love and respect these alpha women for who they are, but are deferent to and supportive of their ambitions. In much of 1980s popular television, men had learned the lessons of feminism; it was women who found them difficult.3

Given this context, is it so surprising that women's enemy in postfeminist popular culture so often became not men, but other women? Susan Douglas (1994) has detailed this beautifully in Where the Girls Are, arguing that the "catfight" motif that began in media coverage of the ERA battle continued in 1980s television and film, in which women's worst enemy, if not their own neuroses, was often other women, engaged in what she calls "the Battle of the Titans . . . between the traditional wife and mom and the feminist bitch from hell" (p. 242). This archetypal postfeminist conflict is nowhere as beautifully illustrated as in Fatal Attraction, released in 1987. This film is the iconic representation of postfeminist dynamics not only because it demonstrates such a clear departure from the theme of feminist solidarity that suffused both television and film treatments of women in the 1970s, but because its protagonist, Dan Gallagher, played by Michael Douglas, is such an ideal specimen of postfeminist masculinity. Indeed, as I argue below, despite Susan Faludi's labeling of Fatal Attraction as a central "backlash" text in her 1991 book, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, the film can be equally as fruitfully read as a central postfeminist text, a reading facilitated by a focus on the main character's enactment of postfeminist masculinity.4

Fatal Attraction focuses on Dan Gallagher, a New York City lawyer in his thirties, who has been happily married for nine years to his stay-athome wife, Beth. They have one child, a daughter named Ellen. One weekend when his wife and child are out of town, Dan has a fling with a woman, Alex Forrest, whom he has met through work. Alex is a glamorous, aggressive, successful career woman. Once the weekend of passion is over, however, Alex refuses to let go, threatening to kill herself, calling Dan at home and at work, and eventually revealing that she is pregnant with Dan's child, expects to have the child, and expects Dan to be part of its life. Dan finally tells Beth about the affair, after Alex has broken into his home and boiled their child's pet rabbit in a pot on the stove, and Beth throws him out. This move escalates rather than ends Alex's terrorism, and she kidnaps the daughter, Ellen, for a day (although she returns her without harm). While searching for her missing daughter, Beth is injured in a car accident. Now crazy with rage, Dan goes to Alex's home and threatens to kill her, stopping before he actually does so, and returns home. That night, Alex sneaks into Dan and Bern's house, trapping Beth in the bathroom with a large butcher knife as Beth prepares for a bath and Dan is downstairs. Finally hearing their struggle, Dan comes upstairs and attacks Alex, eventually drowning her in the tub full of water. Yet, she is not dead, and rises terrifying from the water, only to be shot through the heart by Beth Gallagher, who has found the family gun. The film ends as the police leave, Dan and Beth embrace, and the closing shot is of an idyllic family photo of them and their child.

In addition to the reviews at the time of the film's release, Fatal Attraction has, predictably, been the focus of much critical scholarly work, and most, if not all, of that work has focused on its gender politics. Journalist Susan Faludi (1991), as I mentioned above, perhaps gave this interpretation its biggest boost, highlighting Fatal Attraction'1 s crucial role in Hollywood's demonization of feminism in her chapter titled "Fatal and Fetal Visions: The Backlash in the Movies" (p. 112). To give you some idea of the thrust of the scholarship on Fatal Attraction, here are a few article titles: "The Allure of the Predatory Woman in Fatal Attraction" (Davis, 1992), "Fatal Liaisons and Dangerous Attraction: The Destruction of Feminist Voices" (Joshel, 1992), "Fatal Attraction: The Sinister Side of Women's Conflict about Career and Family" (Bromley & Hewitt, 1992), and, finally, "Patriarchal Politics in Fatal Attraction" (Babener, 1992). Although this scholarship varies in quality and insight, it all basically concurs in terms of its evaluation of the film as a paean to the traditional family and as a warning about the excesses of feminism. Moreover, this kind of reading is almost always centered primarily on analysis of the film's female characters. Not inconsequentially, interviews with the director and with Michael Douglas around the time of the film's release and subsequent success only add strength to this focus. Director Adrian Lyne, for instance, was quoted as saying that

You hear feminists talk, and the last ten, twenty years you hear women talk about fucking men rather than being fucked, to be crass about it. It's kind of unattractive, however liberated and emancipated it is. It kind of fights the whole wife role, the whole childbearing role. Sure you got your career and your success, but you are not fulfilled as a woman, (quoted in Faludi, 1991, p. 121)

It is the easy read and the right read to see Fatal Attraction as a film that juxtaposes a single, ambitious, sexually aggressive, working woman with a married, supportive, nurturing, stay-at-home mother and does so in such a way as to vilify the former and to make the latter a heroine who battles to save her family from the invading monster that the sex-starved, relationship-starved, baby-starved Alex Forrest represents. This is the archetypal postfeminist duel to the death, neatly encapsulating the dichotomies that postfeminist media fed upon in the 1980s: femininity versus feminism, careerism versus motherhood, equality versus difference, selfishness versus sacrifice. My point is not that the dominant reading is wrong, but that our understanding of its rhetorical dynamics could be more complete. That is, when feminist critics buy into the notion that postfeminism really is all about women, their "choices" and their conflicts, they often neglect to consider how the shifting portrayal of postfeminist men, most specifically of Dan Gallagher, makes this situation possible.

I recently watched the commentary by the film's producers and directors on the 10th Anniversary edition DVD of Fatal Attraction, and a recurring theme in their discussion of casting was their motivation to cast someone in the role of Dan Gallagher, the male lead, who could successfully construct the character as an "everyman," as someone so sympathetic and ordinary that the audience could envision this chain of events as happening to any one of them. Thus, the plotline must develop not as the outcome of Dan's nefarious motives, his reckless, sexist disregard for his home and family, but as the result of one poor choice that anyone could make, but that, unfortunately, involves the wrong woman.

Dan Gallagher is an everyman if you believe that, by the mid-80s, every man was a sensitive new age guy, in short, an icon of postfeminist masculinity. Unlike the men in feminist films of the 70s, Dan is a fleshed out character, a man with vulnerabilities and sentiment, who plays with his child and finds his wife sexy. Despite the fact that his wife does not work outside the home, his is a postfeminist family life, and Beth Gallagher is no frustrated pre-feminist housewife, a Ia The Stepford Wives. Dan discusses family matters with Beth and is influenced by her judgment, he plays with his child, he likes opera-Madame Butterfly, no less. Moreover, he has psychological self-awareness about his relationship to his own inexpressive father, whom he is clearly trying not to emulate as a parent, and he cries at his wife's hospital bedside after her car accident. This is no alpha male, and he is shown as clumsy in a variety of small moments when he trips on a phone cord, cannot open an umbrella, or gets cream cheese on his face eating a bagel, not to mention when his pants tangle around his legs as he attempts to carry Alex to the bed during their first tryst. He does not command the attention of waiters in a restaurant, he is powerless to resist his child's plea for a pet rabbit, and he is rueful, but not angry, when his child invades the marital bed on a night when he clearly thought he might get lucky.

Speaking of that child, I also see powerful postfeminist implications in the fact that Dan and Beth's daughter looks and acts like a little boy-indeed, there is a discussion thread on imdb.com about this. Ellen has very short hair, always wears trousers and t-shirts, plays with cards and rabbits, has a teddy bear rather than a doll, and, in one telling scene, rehearses her part, in Puritan costume, for her role as a male character in a school production of The Courtship of Miles Standish. She plays with her mother's lipstick in one scene, but not to imitate her mother; rather, she puts it on like war paint. There is never a mention made in the film of Ellen's deeply tomboyish behavior, and Dan and Beth both seem fine with it, yet another indication of the film's postfeminist attitude through which these parents have absorbed the feminist lesson that girls should not be disciplined into traditional gendered behavior.

Dan's sexual politics, excepting the fact that he cheats on his wife, are also postfeminist, leading Alex, at one point, to lament that "all the good ones are married." He is not aggressive with Alex, and has to be invited to have sex with her. He is not insensitive to her after their initial tryst, leaving her a kind note, and when she slits her wrists to keep him from leaving after they have sex again the following day, he takes care of her, bandages her wrists, and puts her to bed. When Alex comes to his office to apologize, he is kind to her again and wishes her well after he makes clear that he cannot continue to have a relationship with her. He expresses his angst and regret over the affair to his best male friend (importantly, he has a best friend with whom he is shown interacting, while neither of the women does). Even after Alex has driven him to his limits by trashing his car, boiling the bunny, and kidnapping his child, Dan cannot bring himself to kill her, and pulls himself back after almost choking her to death. My point is this: it's not just the contrast with Beth that makes Alex so scary-which is the interpretation we are most often given-but the contrast with Dan. In fact, after Dan leaves her apartment, he goes to the police, taking the legalistic, non-violent approach to the problem he faces. Only when Alex invades his home and attacks his wife can he bring himself to violence again by drowning her in the bath. Even then, as we know, he fails to finish the job, and Alex has to be killed by Beth.

One way to interpret this is as a masculinity narrative in which Dan eventually proves his manhood through violence; such a reading would enable the film to be placed in the tradition of 1980s films that Susan Jeffords (1994) analyzes in Hardbodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. On the other hand, Dan is not the ultimate hero-that honor goes to Beth, thus it could be argued that it is a narrative of failed masculinity, and that the battle falls to the women because Dan proves ineffectual (see HaIa, 1992). Both of these readings have credence, but I also think they do not recognize the complexity of postfeminist masculinity in Fatal Attraction. Dan doesn't get to be the hero because he is the prize. Contrary to the frequent interpretation of feminist scholars with regard to this film, I would argue that the traditional family is not the prize; rather, the postfeminist man is the prize. Dan has already gotten his family back-even though he revealed the affair to Beth and she initially threw him out, by the film's final sequence, she has forgiven him, he is back in their cozy suburban home, has put their child to bed, and is making Beth a cup of tea as she runs a bath. In these latter two actions, he again proves his postfeminist credentials.

Thus, Dan doesn't have to vanquish Alex in order to save his family life; instead, it is Beth and Alex who have to battle over who gets Dan. An emphasis on the family in this film merely mystifies this stark realization. If postfeminism is all about choice, then one of the most crucial decisions a woman can make is to choose the right man, and narratives such as Fatal Attraction naturalize this claim. And here we arrive at the import of the title for this essay: if patriarchy, as Gayle Rubin (1975/1984) has persuasively argued, is about the "traffic in women" then postfeminism is about the traffic in men. The analogy is not perfect by any means: as constructed by media, patriarchy is a buyer's market, and postfeminism is the opposite. Patriarchy is institutionalized and systemic in a variety of ways, whereas postfeminism is an attempt, reminiscent of the reactions of reviewers of feminist fiction and film in the 1970s, to take the political and make it personal, to deny that feminism has a social and political claim to make, asserting instead that woman's fate is entirely in her own hands. This illusion of agency is a seductive one, especially when the women who lose, who make bad choices, who fail to enter the market at the right time or in the right way, are terrifying and crazy, like Alex Forrest, and are made even more so by their contrast with the fantasy figure of the postfeminist male, brought to life as Dan Gallagher.

Indeed, there has been a simultaneous seduction going on of feminist critics, who, like me, have failed to appreciate the ways that representations of postfeminist women require particular representations of postfeminist men. The traffic in postfeminist men is what makes the postfeminist fantasy work. It falls apart without them. Do we need Judith Butler (1990), again, to remind us that you cannot alter definitions or expectations for one gender without affecting the other? The postfeminist fantasy-that feminism did its work in eliminating barriers to equality, massively expanded women's "choices," and gave them the tools they need to solve any problems that come their way-depends on the possibility of postfeminist men as the most crucial of those tools (forgive the pun). Indeed, if one major impact of Fatal Attraction, as reported in much popular media reaction to it, was to discipline men against cheating on their wives, we can see this effect as functioning in support of postfeminism. If Beth can retain Dan, the postfeminist family fantasy can continue.

Conclusion: The New Stepford Wives and Post-Postfeminism

Let me return, at this point, to post-postfeminism, to come full circle from The Stepford Wives of 1975 through Fatal Attraction to The Stepford >Wives of 2004. If you had to believe in patriarchy to find the 1975 Stepford Wives believable, then you had to believe in the possibility of postfeminist men to find Fatal Attraction believable. But there is a difference between postfeminism and postpatriarchy, and the 2004 Stepford Wives demonstrates it well. Joanna Eberhart, played by Nicole Kidman in the remake, is a successful television executive who has a nervous breakdown, and moves to Stepford to recover and find a different life with her husband and children. Moving to Stepford was his idea, but it was for her benefit. Her career was making her crazy, and apparently the same was true for many of the other women of Stepford, who have turned into fantasy housewives after leaving high-powered careers. So far, so good, right? It's just an update configured to reflect changes in women's lives since the 1970s. Yet the exaggeration of the characters makes the premise-that men still want docile, sexually pliant wives-comic and unbelievable. Joanna is such a caricature of a bitchy career woman, and her husband such a complete milquetoast, that it is hard to sympathize with either one. When she is transformed into a fembot, it's hard to feel badly about it. In contrast, in the 1975 version of The Stepford Wives, Joanna and Bobbie were tremendously likable, making their transformation into robots a horrifying loss.

And the 2004 Stepford Wives has a big reveal that the original does not: the entire scheme has been engineered by a woman, not a man. Thus, its context is not just post-(post)feminism, it is post-patriarchy. Or, to read it another way, patriarchy is female. The men of Stepford are being manipulated by Claire Wellington (Glenn Close), the town's wfoer-housewife who was once a successful geneticist. After catching her husband cheating on her (with her research assistant, no less) she killed him and turned him into an alpha male robot that she then uses to convince the men of Stepford of the merits of traditional gender roles (presumably, her failure to enact a traditional role in her marriage is what allowed her husband to go astray). This all comes to light in the film's somewhat ridiculous finale, when we discover that, in collusion with Walter, Joanna faked her transformation in order to expose the sinister plot. Crucially, for a comedy, it turns out that the women were not killed and replaced (as in the original 1975 film), but were merely implanted with a chip in their brains that was used to control them. Walter reverses the process, making him, importantly, not a villain but a hero. All's well that ends well, although the motivations that created Stepford in the first place, and the problems that that landed Joanna in it, have hardly been addressed.

The sleight of hand of post-postfeminism, then, is its disregard of the need to take any of these issues seriously-men's desire to control their wives, women's collusion in pushing other women toward regressive roles, the profound difficulties of combining career ambition and motherhood, not to mention the distorted expectations for women's bodies that come to life in the perfect physiques of the Stepford wives (who come complete with programming that increases their breast size at the push of a button). In this 2004 film, feminist (and even postfeminist) earnestness has been replaced by post-postfeminist irony (a dynamic that I believe is central to Desperate Housewives as well).

In Prime-Time Feminism, I lamented the ways in which television entertainment, and popular media generally, implied that feminism was all about women and their "choices," while giving little attention to the changes that feminism requires from men and from the culture at large. Taking a second look, I think I overlooked many of the ways in which popular culture was indeed providing new, postfeminist visions of men, although often for the purpose, as I argue here, of making the need for continued feminist critique of patriarchy ever more suspect. That is, Fatal Attraction's Dan Gallagher may be a "good man," but the function of his progressiveness is to make the film's message about "good" and "bad" women, and their "choices," ever more compelling, thus setting the stage for, almost twenty years later, a post-postfeminist vision in which the patriarchal villain is a woman. As a central text constituting the 1980s cultural milieu that made "postfeminism" a popular term, Fatal Attraction is worth returning to, if only for its elegant illustration of the complex dynamic created by the interaction of visions of masculinity and femininity that continues to make postfeminist-and post-postfeminist-discourses both pervasive and persuasive.