They never stop, these Stepford wives;/The work like robots all their lives. That little ditty is said by Joanna, the protagonist in Ira Levin’s 1972 novel, The Stepford Wives. She said it to herself while watching a neighbouring woman through a window, as the other mechanically polishes one of her husband’s athletic trophies. It’s a tell: we are soon to learn that the neighbour is — and most of the other women in Stepford are — really a robot controlled by their husbands. Which, we know now, is the perfect MAGA wife: a sexbot that can cook and do the cleaning. But I get ahead of myself.

Before Margaret Atwood’s dystopian The Handmaid’s Tale that predicted a Talibangelist theocracy that repressed women, and before Christina Dalcher’s Vox  that took misogyny a step further, there was Levin’s novel about a patriarchal future that today reads — and appears in its somewhat dated 1975 film version — like a prequel to MAGA’s (and Trump’s) deeply misogynist Project 2025, which includes in its platform proposals to eliminate women’s rights and any reproductive or sexual freedom, basically turning them into sexual serfs and second-class citizens. That’s the MAGA manosphere’s goal, at least until the SpaceNazi Musk can manufacture sexbots to replace women.*

Because I recently re-read the book and re-watched both movies, I wanted to express what I thought about them and how they relate to the toxic misogynist masculinity on the rise among modern, psychologically-fragile rightwing males.

WTF, the cognoscenti ask, is the “manosphere” except a diaphanous cover to hide repressed homosexual feelings and a passion for violence (especially toward women)? It’s hard not to see the followers of this desperate ideology as losers and incels hoping to get laid but afraid to express their gay feelings, so they instead show their inadequacies and insecurity through aggression and bitterness towards women. But let’s not digress too far.**

The setting in the book and the two subsequent films is a white-picket, white-face — and culturally sterile — suburban community. It’s as much a caricature of the American Dream as the town in the musical, The Music Man. Stepford’s menfolk feel threatened by the rising feminism and women’s liberation in the world outside their town (feminism was a widespread social and cultural movement in the 1960s and 1970s). The men want to turn back the clock to a time where (they imagined) women were perfectly coiffed and dressed, docile, subservient, maids and willing sex toys who spent their daytime doing housework and serving the men’s needs. So they replace the women with realistic androids programmed to fulfill their fantasies.

It’s a dark satire with a light touch of scifi, of course, but based in large part on the reality of male fear of women’s competence, independence, sexuality, and strength. While it doesn’t mention erectile dysfunction, the story is clearly an allegory for it. Although androids were science fiction in the 1970s, they were the sort of obedient servants insecure men crave. That’s the same message being sent today by MAGA males, And MAGA misogyny is growing.***

Toxic masculinity

Rising in parallel with MAGA has been the manosphere: the toxic myth of the alpha male personified by the homophobic, racist, accused sex trafficker and rapist, and online groomer, Andrew Tate. Tate also ran an online private group that promoted violence against women and taught young men how to make women subservient, according to Wikipedia (emphasis added):

A deleted description of the defunct course on the website that prosecutors in Romania have since used in the case against Tate read:
My job was to meet a girl, go on a few dates, sleep with her, test if she’s quality, get her to fall in love with me to where she’d do anything I say, and then get her on webcam so we could become rich together,
Evidence suggested violence against women was also taught and discussed. Victims said sex was used as a manipulation technique. Members of the group believed they were performing “Pavlovian conditioning” on the women, with submission tests such as receiving tattoos on their bodies of members’ initials. A whistleblower, who claimed to be former head of sales and marketing, described the group as a cult he had been “brainwashed” by.  As of August 2022, there were 434 members and 45 potential victims, based on the leaked chat logs.

Tate is, of course, a longtime MAGA and Trump supporter. In late 2025, Richard Grenell, a special U.S. envoy and Trump ally, intervened on behalf of Tate and his brother while both were being investigated in Romania on sex trafficking charges, and pressured Romanian officials to release the brothers from house arrest. The travel ban on the brothers was lifted after Trump officials got involved and both moved to Florida, Trump’s home state. Other administration figures, like Paul Ingrassia, a White House liaison for the Department of Justice, have expressed public support for Tate. Both Donald Jr and Barron Trump are supporters of Tate, as are MAGA influencers and supporters like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. ****

But Tate is only one of the many misogynists in MAGA pushing to degrade, disempower, and even enslave women. The movement is strong among pseudo-Christian “nationalist” influencers and pastors (aka Talibangelists) who are pushing plans to strip women of their voting right, claiming husbands should represent the entire household politically and women should just shut up and cook dinner. For example:

This deeply misogynist MAGA Talibangelist mentor of Trump’s Secretary of Defence, Pete Hegseth, openly promoted eliminating women’s voting rights at a public meeting in Aril, 2026. According to Religion News, Doug Wilson and his fellow misogynist MAGA preachers presented a plan to overturn the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote:

Under their model, voting rights would belong to the head of each household — not to individuals. Women in households led by a husband would not. That means women who are widowed, divorced or otherwise head of their own households would vote.

Wilson and his partners didn’t stop there. They “pitched a vision of America with no LGBTQ+ rights, no divorce and no voting rights for married women.” Wilson, the article notes, “has gained notoriety for his Christian nationalist views and his ties to Pete Hegseth.” One writer called Wilson’s views a “virulent form of misogyny” that is “the single most important force holding together the American right.”

Trad wives

You may also run across the term “Proverbs 31 woman” in these misogynist screeds. It’s a reference to the biblical proverb about the “ideal” woman: a subservient, loyal, “virtuous wife and mother.” The women who conform to this ideal are also called Trad (traditional) Wives (aka tradwives). Or perhaps they are better known as Stepford Wives. It attempts to make women’s subservience to men a matter of faith, and the USA is a deeply religious country where breaking with faith is considered sinful and evil.

Trad or Proverbs 31 wives are the real-life implementation of the Stepford Wives principle. They become mirror images of the robotic domestic servants of the novel. As one blogger wrote,

Like the internet-famous trad wives of the twenty-first century, the Stepford wives voice nothing but happiness in their domestic life, centering all their sense of self around their children and husband. There is no arena beyond the home that they care about; they have no being beyond that of homemaker.

Tia Levings, a former “trad wife” wrote about her experience and escape in her book, A Well-Trained Wife. She describes it as “Being a godly and submissive wife in Christian Patriarchy included strict discipline, isolation, and an alternative lifestyle that appeared wholesome to outsiders. Women were to be silent, ‘keepers of the home.’” She writes on her website:

Christian Fundamentalists want to run the country the way they run their homes. Do you know what that means?
High-control religion is not only reshaping our families. They’re also changing our politics, laws, and elections. And what many don’t realize is that Christian fundamentalists want to govern our country the way they govern their homes. No one knows that as well as the wives and children of the patriarchs––but these citizens of fundamentalism aren’t allowed to speak. And the agenda of the Evangelical Patriarchy is surging ahead by aligning itself with Nationalism.*****

The Friendly Atheist also noted that, “the grip on young men we’ve seen by the Republican Party and conservative podcasters and the “manosphere” is now being shared by religious leaders too. It suggests young men are desperate to follow any older white guy who speaks with authority and tells them the secrets of how to control the women in their lives.”

Trad wives, however the MAGA media tries to portray them as the icons of femininity womanhood, are often treated with contempt by their husbands, and even abused once they submit, according to recent reports.

Nowadays most women aren’t forced to marry for survival, yet elaborate propaganda systems have emerged to bait them into believing that traditional marriage, along with its outdated gender roles, is romantic. The Psychology of Women Quarterly study shows just how much the notion of chivalry is actually a myth. As Calarco said, “Misogynistic men will often ‘lovebomb’ their partners, lavishing them with praise and affection in the early days” in an attempt to convince women to give up their autonomy and outside income. Once they are trapped, though, the men will “drop the facade.”
Chivalry is unworkable because it’s simply too dissonant for men. On one hand, as the researchers found, traditional men want the services they believe only women should provide, such as emotional support and housework. But they also believe women are beneath them and, in fact, exist to serve them. So expressing gratitude, much less holding women in respect, is experienced as emasculating. The natural result for a man in this position is what Southern experienced: growing annoyance and resentment at his wife for having the temerity to express any needs at all, instead of functioning simply as a household appliance.

The article ends with “Traditional patriarchy isn’t some cheat code to make marriage happy. It is and always has been just an excuse for men to treat women poorly.”

Incels and rape culture

The manosphere, as the UN Women’s report tells us, is a “a loose network of communities that claim to address men’s struggles – dating, fitness or fatherhood, for example – but often promote harmful advice and attitudes.” It adds:

As the United Nations Secretary General’s report on violence against women and girls highlights, these groups are united by an opposition to feminism and misrepresent men as “victims” of the current social and political climate… two-thirds of young men regularly engage with masculinity influencers online. Experts are finding that the popularity of extreme language in the manosphere not only normalizes violence against women and girls, but has growing links to radicalization and extremist ideologies.

Misogyny is, of course, not new, but has been given a political and social boost by Trump and MAGA (and in Canada, the Maple MAGA conservatives who emulate the Deranged Dictator) and other far-right ideologues. The term “incel” for men who couldn’t get laid and were blaming women for their problems, was coined back in the 1990s. As Wikipedia notes:

Incel rhetoric invokes an idealized patriarchal society in which couples adhered to traditional gender roles, married early, and were strictly monogamous. During this mythologized “golden age”, incels imagine that all men had nearly unencumbered access to women as romantic partners, thereby reducing the competition for sex.

More than a decade ago, the Gamergate scandal broke, described as

…a global orgy of online harassment targeting women in the video game industry. It all started when up-and-coming game creator Zoe Quinn was attacked by a bitter ex-boyfriend in a book-length tirade of sexual and professional jealousy. The non-scandal became a lightning rod for tens of thousands of [male] gamers furious that women were intruding on a medium that was meant to be their personal power fantasy.

As Laurie Penny writes (emphasis added),

Gamergate brought together the disparate strands of what we now call the manosphere: the grifting pickup-artists, the Christian nationalists, the bitter “incels” and the furious fans triggered into mass social vandalism whenever they heard a story they weren’t the hero of. This slurry of half-formed fixations congealed into a coherent ideology of aggrieved entitlement, with its own language – “escaping the matrix”, “taking the red pill” – and their own logic of heroic victimhood in the face of women’s sexual power…
Trump, in his deranged dotage, is openly courting the manosphere, and the young men of gen Z are veering towards the far right en masse. There’s a clear line from the social vandalism of Gamergate to the mega-grifting male supremacists, scamming their followers with the promise of a reality where women and girls are non-player characters, to be defeated, exploited or traded for tokens in a brutal marketplace of human value. Many young men have lived their entire lives in the shadow of this weaponised misogyny – and so have young women. And that sinister ideology is still gnawing at the heart of power.

And then there’s the notorious online “rape academy.” As human rights lawyer Qasim Rashid writes (emphasis added):

Rape Academy is the nickname given to a website that accumulated more than 60 million hits in February and more than 80 million hits in March—the majority from men in the United States. According to the CNN expose, Rape Academy exists for one explicit purpose: to teach men how to drug and rape their wives and partners, prostitute them to other men for money, and broadcast it online for the world to see, also for money.
Read that again. 140 million hits in just two months.
This is not a collection of unrelated bad actors. This is a pattern. And the pattern has a name: systemic male violence.

He adds, “Women already know everything I’m about to say. They navigate it every single day—calculating risks, adjusting routes, reading rooms, and making hundreds of small decisions designed to keep themselves safe from us.”

In another post, titled Women are not safe around men, Rashid writes (emphasis added),

Women are not safe around men. Period.
This is not a generalization born of bias. Nor an emotional reaction. But a documented, data-driven, legally and empirically supported fact that our society has spent generations refusing to confront with the seriousness it demands.
Women are simply not safe around men…
With the global rise of right-wing extremism—in the United States, in Europe, in several South American nations, in India, across every continent—women’s rights are being stripped away with deliberate, coordinated intent. Reproductive autonomy is under assault. Legal protections are being rolled back. As I’ve written before, child marriage is a crisis in nations like Afghanistan as well as right here in the United States. The cultural permission structure for misogyny is being rebuilt in real time, from the highest offices of power downward.

A recent article on Jezebel titled, Surprise! Two Most Powerful Men in America Can’t Stop Being Awful to Women, and subtitled, Trump and JD Vance really did their worst this week, captured the current mood:

Horribly, it feels like it’s become a banal occurrence for either of these two men to go and insult women—and it’s not the first time that Trump’s resorted to name-calling female journalists; nor the first time Vance has tried and belittle them. Welp. At least they’re consistent—and regularly the worst, always.

MAGA misogyny

Anyone who pays even slight modest to the news is aware of the continuing spume of misogyny and insult to women that comes from the always un-presidential mouth of Trump himself. The Week has a list of 81 of them, just a small sample of his disdain for and dislike of women, calling women mentally impaired; retarded; a bum; pathetic; fu*king bad; low IQ person; a very dumb person; ugly, both inside and out; piggy; filthy, dirty, disgusting; as crazy as a bed bug; horseface; an extremely unattractive woman; fat, ugly face of hers; crazed, crying lowlife; a dog; no longer a 10; bimbo; deeply troubled, and therefore great in bed; among others.

The deeply misogynist Trump, of course, sets the standard and role model for the way MAGA men treat, imagine, speak to, and respond to women. As as article in MS Magazine noted,

…for the many millions of Americans who are not fans of the current president, one of the truly astounding features of this scandal is how long he has been able to evade meaningful accountability for his history of misogyny—as well as serious scrutiny of his long friendship with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Trump’s close association with the disgraced pedophile has been a matter of public record for more than two decades…
From the moment Trump emerged as a candidate in 2015, advocates and activists in the gender violence prevention field sounded the alarm. Electing a president with a proven track record of misogynous statements and numerous sexual assault allegations would send a terrible message.

OligarchWatch had an article titled Inside the twisted mind of Elon Musk’s favorite YouTuber, about Rudyard Lynch, a  24-year-old,misogynist podcaster. Elon Musk (aka the SpaceNazi), who has frequently posted misogynist and racist comments on his social media platform, Xitter, twice publicly made a Nazi salute at a Trump rally, made Nazi jokes on Xitter, was the largest financial supporter of Trump’s election, and is deeply connected to the worst of the MAGA movement:

Over the last year, Elon Musk has developed a fascination with a 24-year-old podcaster and YouTuber from Pennsylvania who claimed he communicated “with God about what he believes the future of the right, philosophically, should be.”
Rudyard Lynch, addressing his 737,000 subscribers on YouTube, has also envisioned a violent “incel revolution” engulfing the US in the very near future. “I have been betting my money for years that America will have a rape crisis,” he said in a 2024 video in which he rebuked women for treating “incels as if they’re subhuman vermin.”
“Women,” he added, had placed themselves in a “precarious position” by alienating “men who could protect them.”

In August, 2025, Musk himself retweeted a post from a hardcore misogynist aptly named Dr. Insensitive Jerk, “an anonymous account known for spouting eugenicist, anti-democracy, and racist takes on X[itter]” that apparently colludes with Musk’s views about women and race:

Women are built to be traded to another tribe (or captured) and slide seamlessly into their new culture. 20 years after they are captured, they are the matriarchs who enforce that culture. That is why women conform to the dominant culture, and thereby amplify that culture. They think that keeps them safe, and they are correct, but only in the sort term. In the long term, they will be forced to remember they are white.

It’s also worth noting that all of the senior people in Trump’s cabinet who have left or been fired are all women and their jobs filled by men. As the UK’s IBTimes noted,

In just five months, four of the most senior women in the United States federal government vacated their posts: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Labour Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Each departure landed for different reasons, through scandal, political friction and personal circumstance. What remained constant was what came next: a man stepped into the seat.
With those four exits, the Trump Cabinet has shed more than half its female representation… The shift did not happen by accident. It happened one replacement at a time, and it tells a story about who Trump keeps and who he discards.******

Until Trump and his MAGA administration are replaced, the misogyny of the rightwing will continue to accelerate and spread. And so will the violence against women.

Notes:

* The document’s authors plan to “Restore the family as the centrepiece of American life and protect our children.” Which is code for getting women out of the workplace (especially in leadership positions), removing their rights (voting rights are already being repealed under the SAVE Act), and putting them back into the kitchen and as baby factories. As an article in Ms Magazine noted:

Project 2025’s plans for women students and workers would devastate their educational opportunities, harming their careers and earning power.
Project 2025 eviscerates women’s long-held rights to sex equality in the workplace. It calls for the next president to rescind executive orders signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the mid-1960s that prohibited federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of race and sex, and it would weaken Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits sex discrimination in employment.
First, it would narrow the meaning of the word sex in Title VII to mean the “biological binary meaning of ‘sex,’” allowing employment decisions based on gender stereotypes. In 1989, the Supreme Court ruled that an accounting firm violated Title VII when it denied a woman partnership based on partners’ comments that she needed “a course in charm school” and should “walk more femininely, talk more femininely, dress more femininely, wear make-up, have her hair styled, and wear jewelry.”
Project 2025 would reverse this interpretation—which would also exclude LGBTQ+ people from Title VII protections in defiance of the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision, penned by conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, in Bostock v. Clayton County.
Finally, Project 2025 calls for the end of all programs designed to eliminate discrimination against women and people of color at the federal, state, local and private-sector levels and directs the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division to investigate and criminally prosecute state and local governments that have these programs.

** As the UN Women’s site notes,

In the manosphere, everyone loses. Misogyny and gender inequality are harmful to men, as well as women. In a collection of global data, Equimundo found that men with restrictive gender attitudes are more likely to engage in harmful behaviours, like risk-taking and substance abuse. They are also more prone to depression and suicidal thoughts.
Gender stereotypes about men in the manosphere act as a cycle. If boys and men aren’t encouraged to speak openly about their emotions or issues, they may gravitate towards these online communities as a place to get advice on topics like relationship struggles, fatherhood, anxiety and sexual health.

*** Like the film, Idiocracy, it’s a satire with a large grain of truth in it.

**** AS this BBC documentary shows, the toxic manosphere is not restricted to the USA and MAGA, but has its claws in men everywhere. “BBC Eye goes inside the global manosphere, meeting the influencers cashing in and their devoted followers — exploring the booming industry where social media algorithms are fuelling a growing gender divide.”

***** Levings was interviewed on Salon, recently, which included this description of the YouTube video:

No, young men are actually *not* more religious—here’s what’s happening instead.
Stories about young men returning to religion are everywhere right now. But when I saw a recent Gallup poll showing that 42% of young men say religion is “very important” to them, I knew something felt off. In this video, I break down why the so-called rise of religion among Gen Z men has less to do with faith and more to do with gender politics and the growing popularity of podcast bro culture.
As Christianity becomes increasingly tied to masculinity and conservative identity, seemingly harmless religious language online often evolves into something far more extreme.

****** To date, 20 women have left the two Trump administrations, either being fired or resigning. That number does not include numerous women who were on the US State Department Senior Staff, the entire President’s Committee On The Arts And Humanities, the entire Presidential Advisory Council On HIV/AIDS, most of The National Park Service Advisory Board, which also resigned or were fired.

Videos about The Stepford Wives:

 

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