In writer/director Drew Hancocks new film Companion, Sophie Thatcher plays Iris, a young woman who seems almost obsessively devoted to being a perfect mate to her new boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid). Hes everything she wants, and its not long before we find out why: Iris is a highly advanced robot, manufactured and programmed to Joshs exact specifications, and controlled by him from a mobile device that looks a lot like an iPad. He can adjust everything from her intelligence to her level of aggression, the latter proving both useful and wildly dangerous as the story unfolds.By the time the eerie and also shockingly funny Companion reaches its climax, Iris is not only aware of what she really is, but increasingly self-aware and self-determining as well. While her ultimate fate is left open-ended, its strongly hinted that Iris is now free to make her own choicesan outcome which is weirdly positive despite the death and mayhem that shes a central part of for the previous 90 minutes.The same cannot be said, sadly, for Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross), the doomed and all-too-human heroine of director Bryan Forbes 1975 film The Stepford Wives, to which Companion owes a debt. Based on a novel by Rosemarys Baby author Ira Levin, The Stepford Wives finds aspiring photographer Joanna reluctantly moving with her husband Walter (Peter Masterson) and two children from Manhattan to the sleepy yet wealthy community of Stepford, Connecticut where the streets are clean and the crime is non-existent but the wives all look perfect while being intellectually vacant. They seemingly exist merely to keep their houses clean, their kitchens stocked, and their husbands sexually satisfied. Despite Joannas best efforts to restart the towns defunct womens organization, none of them are remotely interested since it will take time away from their important cleaning and cooking duties.It turns out, of course, that a Stepford residentand president of the secretive local Mens Associationhas perfected technology from when he worked at Disneyland. Through chilling sci-fi allegory, he and the other men in town have taken the women of Stepfordall of whom once embraced agency, feminism, and liberal social policiesand gradually replaced them with androids programmed to be perfect housewives and sexual slaves. Although Joanna tries to save herself and two unchanged friends she makes in town, they are all eventually replaced too. The film ends with the new Joanna drifting vacantly through the supermarket, now dressed and coiffed like all the other Stepford wives.The meaning of The Stepford WivesIra Levin, who died in 2007, said that he based the town of Stepford on the village of Wilton, Connecticut, where he lived in the 1960s. Both the book and the original film (were just going to ignore the insipid 2004 remake, as well as several cash-grab sequels) are pointed, darkly satirical takes on mens reactions to the womens liberation movement, which was roiling the U.S. and larger world at the time both were released. The story also touched on the plight of suburban housewives in the 1960s who, overwhelmed by their homemaker duties and with husbands unwilling to shoulder any of the burden, were prescribed massive doses of tranquilizers that all but turned them into automatons.The message is clear: rather than treating women as equals and participating in marriages and households as partnerships, this story postulates that a certain faction of men would rather get rid of their wives entirely and replace them with submissive duplicates who always looked voluptuous (the robots in The Stepford Wives all have conspicuously large and full bottoms), are ready and willing to jump into bed and indulge their spouses sexual fantasies, and were left with all the house-cleaning and child-rearing duties while foregoing their own careers and ambitions.This was a theme that hit hard at the time the book and the movie were released, as women were starting to awaken to the fact that there was a major power imbalance in society and that they were capable of being much more than homemakers and sex dolls. The term Stepford Wife became part of the cultural zeitgeist, an expression that instantly calls up an image of a vapid, blankly smiling woman clad in an apron and push-up bra, her hair and makeup lacquered into immobility, surrounded by a spotless household and docile children that she spends all her waking hours taking care ofwhen shes not, of course, getting her man a drink or yielding at command to his bedroom urges.To be sure, there were and are women in the world who are either raised (by their own mothers) to aspire to domestic perfection or make that choice for themselves. There are women who quite willingly give up careers or jobs to stay home (although thats far less financially feasible today than it was six decades ago). But the Mens Association of The Stepford Wives doesnt offer the women of the town that choice.The Legacy of The Stepford WivesWe mentioned Companion earlier, in which technology makes it possible to order up a perfect mate and have them delivered right to your home. Jack Quaids character, Josh, eventually reveals himself to be an embittered and angry young man (its implied that hes more or less an incel) who feels the world owes him something, yet is also unwilling to do the work necessary to make a real human relationship thrive. Hed rather adjust his girlfriends behavior and reactions through his control pad (interestingly, there is a male robot in the film as well, although hes also the property of a man, not a woman).The idea of using robots as submissive playthings seemed to be in the air when The Stepford Wives came out; the original 1973 film Westworld tackled the same subject, paving the way for the 2010s TV series as well as other recent movies like Her and Ex Machina. But Levins novel and Forbes film, while both satirical on some level, went much darker and far earlier than most of these descendants. The Stepford Wives suggested that some men would be willing to use whatever resources at their disposal to acquire the perfect spouse, rather than engage with their partners needs and with the larger womens liberation moment as a whole. And that, in the end, they will use the tools of the future to despairingly keep the patriarchal power dynamics alive.Whats striking is how that idea still resonates 50 years later in a movie like Companion. The womens liberation movement itself is older than that, and theres no question that while significant societal, cultural, and political roadblocks remain, women (along with people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and other marginalized communities) have made considerable gains. Yet those gains themselves have resulted in a creeping backlash, whether its the wholesale curtailing of womens reproductive rights, the so-called mens movement facilitated by the right, or the toxic fan response to women (white or otherwise) taking lead roles in the Star Wars franchise.Join our mailing listGet the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!In other words, its still clear that a significant portion of the male population, even in a supposedly enlightened society like the United States, cannot accept the idea of women as equals and cannot find the maturity, emotional or psychological, to engage with them on anything but a sexual or submissive level. In Companion, as in The Stepford Wives, we see the ultimate expression of that: programming a non-human partner to do exactly what you want and never raise a fuss is far more attractive than engaging with a real human being. The rationale is exactly the same in 2025 as it was in 1975.In some ways it has proven resiliently relevant, akin to Margaret Atwoods The Handmaids Tale, which existed first as a novel, then as a film, and most recently as a TV series. In all iterations, American society has transformed into a Christian theocratic dictatorship where women are little more than sexual chattel owned by powerful men as breeding receptacles. And like Stepford, its a tale that seems to remain eerily, eternally timely.Real-Life Stepford Wives?Still, despite advances in AI and robotic technology, no one is making cyborg wives, husbands, or partners just yet. But the tradwife movement, in which modern women purposefully embrace a traditional homemaker role and tend only to their husbands and children, bears some disturbing similarities to the twisted ideals espoused by the men of Stepford and personified in their robot replacement wives.The idea of women serving traditional roles as full-time homemakers and mothers is deeply rooted in human culture, but the modern tradwife movement (according to the Guardian) began sometime around 2013 in online forums for far-right, so-called Red Pill women, who embraced a strict code in which wives were subservient to their husbands in all ways, stayed at home, and largely out of the workplace and family finances. They also were encouraged to covered up their bodies with long, often floral dresses (not far off from the floral prints in Stepford) and focused on pleasing their spouses by keeping his house and children running smoothly.Tradwives began to make greater inroads into public awareness around 2020, thanks to the population at large turning inward due to the COVID pandemic, the rise of platforms like TikTok, the first Trump regimes assault on protections against sexual harassment and gender discrimination, and the backlash against women taking on more positions of power in the two previous decades. While No one political group or specific ideology has the market cornered on the tradwife movement, its no shock to find that it is primarily based on right-wing ideology.There are degrees of how extreme that ideology gets, with tenets ranging from simple belief in traditional gender roles to the virulent embrace of nationalism and white supremacy. Religion plays a large role in the culture as well, along with opposition to feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive freedom, and gender equality. Social media has been the platform through which many in the tradwife culture have shared presentations of their allegedly perfect lives, with much of the content containing a right-wing, conservative subtext underneath the gauzy homemaker sheen. Many tradwives also do not admit that they come from privileged backgrounds that make it easier for their young families to prosper financially.Not every tradwife espouses far-right views, experts are careful to caution, with a number of women choosing the lifestyle because of a genuine desire to do so. And it should be noted that there is, in the most general sense, nothing wrong with embracing that way of living. But there seems to be a fairly large Venn diagram where the tradwife ideal and extreme right or theocratic views of womens roles in society overlap. Are these women truly happy in their traditional roles in the household? Perhaps some are. At least its a choice they seemingly get to make themselves for now.After all, it wasnt long ago that a candidate for governor of North Carolina proudly proclaimed his desire to absolutelygo back to the America where women couldnt vote. Reproductive freedom is being denied and even criminalized across large swaths of the U.S. The noxious rallying cry of Your body, my choice erupted after the 2024 election, during which Donald Trump proclaimed hed protect women whether they like it or not. No, women arent being replaced by robots yet, but five decades after its release, The Stepford Wives reminds us just how chillingly far some men will go to keep women under their control. Thats also why a movie like Companion, which pays tribute to The Stepford Wives with its submissive, programmable, partner-in-a-box conceit, is still sadly relevant as well. Given the choice, both films seem to say, there are men who would prefer a souped-up sex toy that cooks and cleans for them to a real, flesh-and-blood human being with a mind and body that belongs solely to her.The Stepford Wives can be streamed on Tubi and Pluto TV.