Slate's Juliet Lapidos says Battlestar never lived up to the feminist agenda that its detractors accused it of having. If you'll recall, the new series' transformation of the macho pilot Starbuck from cigar-chomping dude to cigar-chomping chick caused a huge ruckus. And certainly many of the women on the show have mastered traditional male roles within the military and politics. But, argues Lapidos:

There's plenty to make a feminist squirm. Perhaps because science fiction has historically appealed to men who don't leave home much, the genre has often used alien mores and alien technology to rationalize pornographic depictions of near-naked women. (Think Jabba the Hutt forcing Princess Leia to wear that ridiculous gold bikini in Return of the Jedi.) Battlestar is no exception. When Cylons die, their memories download into an identical-looking body on a resurrection ship. This process, almost without exception, happens off-screen for the male Cylons, but when a fembot dies she flies through a vaguely fallopian-looking tube then wakes up nude in a vat of goo. Overtly, these are birth scenes. But they are hypersexualized-with lingering thigh-shots and orgasmic-sounding gasping . . . [Also] rape is a trope on the show: Starbuck finds herself in a bizarre insemination farm on the Cylon-occupied planet Caprica, and Adm. Cain orders some cronies to rape and torture a Cylon in "Razor." Naturally the show doesn't condone rape, but it's discomfiting that the writers drop sexual violence into the script so often without comment. If nothing else, this pervasive threat-directed only at women-negates the idea that Battlestar conjures a gender-blind universe.

Some of Lapidos' points are good - she points out that most of the strong female characters are sick or dying, and notes that Cally is a weird throwback to hysterical women of the Victorian era. She also explains that while men like Adama and Tigh have enduring friendships in the show, we see few women with such relationships to each other. Still, I think she's missing the point when she says that the show isn't feminist because the women are sexualized and because the story is not "gender-blind." And that's because the gender politics of this show cannot be understand without looking at how men in it are treated.

Men Are Sex Objects

While I think it's debatable whether the tubs of goo are the place where women in the show are sexualized, there can be no doubt that the male characters are treated like sex objects at every turn. Maybe the scenes with the naked hybrid in goo, or Cavil waking up in goo, are not very sexy. But certainly a shirtless Lee or Helo is. And they are shirtless a lot. For no reason other than to titillate us.

Not only that, but Lee is treated like a worthless slut by Starbuck, who constantly uses him for sex and then discards him for a hunkier, more marriageable guy (Anders). And Lee isn't the only man who is treated like a piece of sex meat for women to toy with.

Baltar, who is practically the embodiment of weakness and emotional hysteria, is repeatedly used as a sex toy by cylon women like Number Six, Tory, and Number Three (D'Anna). When Baltar is held prisoner on the cylon ship, he's virtually a sex slave. The cylon women keep him locked in his quarters, where he's never allowed to get dressed (he wears an awful robe the whole time) and his main duty (other than being horrifically tortured) is to sexually service Number Six and Three - often at the same time. And given that he looks terrified and cries practically the whole time, I don't think he's living out a sex fantasy. I think he's being sexually tortured and enslaved.

Other men who are used for their bodies include Anders, who is one of Starbuck's playthings; Tigh, who is Ellen's sex toy; and Gaeta, who is horribly used by Boomer on New Caprica.

Men Are Abuse Victims

Starbuck bashes Leoben's face with her fist, repeatedly. She waterboards him. She screams at him and throws him out an airlock. She does not rape him the way the human men rape the female cylons, because Battlestar Galactica is not a gender-blind universe: It is a universe where the genders are equal as workers, but still bear their slightly different historical burdens. And so women torture men, but not in exactly the same way men torture women. The cylons torture Tigh nearly to death on New Caprica. They even put out his eye, destroying a classic symbol of male virility and dominance.

And although men are not raped in the same way women are, I would argue that Baltar's torture by Head Six, as well as his torture on the cylon Base Ship, are very close to rape. What do you call it when Three physically brutalizes Baltar until he screams in agony, and then makes him have sex with her later? It is not erotic. It is violent and horrifying.

Women also rape each other. In last week's episode, Boomer escaped from prison, then beat the shit out of her sister Eight, Athena. She then tied Athena up and put her in a storage locker where she could watch Boomer have sex with Athena's husband Helo (who can't tell the identical cylons apart, and believes he's sleeping with his wife). It's a shocking and disturbing scene precisely because it's a form of sexual torture.

Also, one of the most harrowing rape scenes in the entire series is ordered by a woman - Admiral Cain - to be visited on her one-time lover Six. After she discovers the woman she's been dating is a cylon, Cain has her thrown in the brig and orders the prison guards to torture and rape her. The horrifying result, when we see the traumatized, raped Six lying on the floor of her cell and refusing to eat, is the first moment in the series when we truly understand why the cylons are often right to hate the humans.

The multitude of these scenes does raise the question of why BSG shows so many women being raped during torture, but not men. I think it's because as long as we don't have artificial wombs, a feminist world will never be completely gender-blind. One of the central fixations of this show is reproduction. The human president at one point outlaws abortion because she wants to increase the size of the ailing Fleet. And the cylons are constantly trying to figure out how to reproduce "naturally" without using the resurrection goo. This desire to use women as vessels for reproduction shows up in the way men and women are treated when they are prisoners of war.

Although men and women are equal on Galactica, there is one crucial difference between them. When you dehumanize a female prisoner, you turn her into a battered womb. When you dehumanize a male, you simply beat him any way you can.

Male Friendship Is Predicated On Violence and Drunkenness

There are no long-term close relationships between women on BSG, and there is only one long-term relationship between two men. Admiral Adama and Commander Tigh are the two highest-ranking officers on Galactica, the ship that leads the entire Fleet, and they are buddies from way back when the humans fought the cylons the first time around.

Their friendship is touching at times, but they seem incapable of expressing affection towards each other unless they are destructively drunk. And most of the time, their comraderie is shot through with rage and mistrust. They spend more time beating each other up than any other two characters, including humans and cylons at war with each other. And of course, it also turns out that Tigh is a cylon, so our only enduring friendship is not between two human men, but between a man and a machine. Because Tigh turns out to be a cylon, this one example of male friendship is also founded on a betrayal.

It is truly hard to say which gender has it worse in this situation. Is it more awful to be a woman in a world where women never have close relationships, or to be a man in a world where the only way you can express brotherly love is through violence?

Male Leaders Are Often Weak and Make Decisions Based on Intuition
I have always disliked Roslin's character, partly because she's a female leader who gets religion and bases her leadership on feelings. But viewed in the context of male leaders like Adama, Zarek, and Baltar, Roslin's weak-minded reliance on emotion puts her smack-dab in the middle of the old boys' club.

Adama is a great military leader, but he frequently lets his feelings for his son Lee and (almost) daughter-in-law Starbuck get in the way of good decision-making. Last season, when the Fleet was being menaced by cylons, he held up their mission for a whole month while Starbuck traipsed around in a ship with Helo and a sizable crew questing to find Earth, based on a vision she had. During that mission, Gaeta loses his leg, indirectly leading to his later mutiny with Zarek. He also appoints Lee head of the Pegasus after Admiral Cain is shot, which turns out to be a terrible idea because Lee isn't ready for a leadership role.

Meanwhile, Zarek and Baltar embody the weak-willed but power-hungry types who lurk behind true power trying to influence by manipulation. In Baltar's case, that often means sexual manipulation, especially when he creates his army of devoted fangirls. Zarek first manipulates the Fleet by claiming victim status when he's in prison, and gains political power for this reason. Then, during the mutiny, he secretly slaughters the entire Quorum rather than trying to lead them.

These are not male leaders whose strength and honor cast long shadows over a series of weak and ineffectual female characters. Instead, they are weak and compromised, ruled by the same hysterical emotions that women were once accused of possessing in such quantity that it disqualified them from leadership roles.

Men and Women Are Equals on Battlestar Galactica
If we define feminism as the critique of a world where men unfairly wield power over women, then BSG is post-feminist. In other words, that critique is no longer necessary in the world of BSG: The show more or less successfully depicts a universe where women and men are equal in the realms of work and family. However, BSG was not made in a post-feminist world, so there are all kinds of hiccups where you get retrograde characters like Cally, or naked cylon chick fetishism, that are relics of our own society, which still so desperately needs a feminist slap upside the head on a regular basis.

But I strongly believe that BSG should be considered a contender for the status of feminist story in the genre of science fiction - and indeed, in any genre of television. And this isn't just because it depicts women in positions of power, honor, and competence, but also because it depicts men as possessing the same weaknesses and flaws that women do.

The project of feminism isn't just about changing women's roles in society, but to change male roles too. You cannot have one without the other. That's why feminism, to my mind, shouldn't preach for a gender-blind society, but rather one where men and women share the burdens of life equally. As long as we are reproducing the old-fashioned biological way, it will be impossible for us to be gender-blind. But at least, in BSG, we get glimpses of what it might look like to live in a world both women and men can be commanders, fighter pilots, presidents - and both men and women can be sex objects, suffer from emotional overload, fear the physical wrath of the opposite sex, and gain power via subterfuge and manipulation.

Feminism, as BSG makes clear, won't turn us all into saints. It will just make us all capable of achieving the same levels of social power, as well as the same nadirs of social humiliation and defeat.

I called our preview "spoiler-free," but I will go so far as to explain the basic premise of the show, which you could glean from watching the previews. In Dollhouse, Eliza Dushku plays Echo a young woman whose mind has been erased, to make her perfectly mutable.

The insanely wealthy (and a few charity cases) can hire Echo to be whoever they want - with the personality, childhood memories, and skills that they want her to have. After each "engagement," the Dollhouse wipes her memory, leaving her an empty vessel until the next client. But things go wrong with Echo's "engagements," and she also starts to remember stuff that she's not supposed to. Oh, and Dollhouse starts tomorrow night at 9 on Fox.

Now that we've watched a few episodes of Dollhouse, a few things are clear:

This is a development of the River Tam story. Long-time Joss fans will remember Firefly's River Tam (Summer Glau), a mysterious naked girl who alternated between having uncanny abilities and crazy broken-brain talk. Both the abilities and the childlike dementia came from the mysterious experiments the Alliance did on River.

Dollhouse feels very much like an expanded, and more nuanced, version of that story. You have the weird brain science, the childlike babbling, and the uncanny abilities. But there are a few differences: Echo is the show's main character, and she's not just being fashioned into some kind of super-weapon. Instead, she's transformed into an all-purpose wish-fulfillment device, the ultimate emotional panacea.

There's no Simon Tam - everybody around Echo is complicit in what's happening to her, and she's their property. (And yet, you get hints that her "Handler" Boyd cares about her, and may take on a Simon-like role at some point.) Where River Tam's story was a Girl Interrupted riff with ninja moments, Echo's is becoming something much darker, and and yet much more fun as well.

The girl-power is in there. One of our biggest fears about Dollhouse, going into it, is that Echo's just a puppet. She's not a real person, she's just a braindead non-entity. So if she kicks ass, it's because she's been programmed with ass-kicking skills, that aren't really hers.

Except the show neatly sidesteps that pitfall - Echo often exceeds her programming and kicks more ass than she's supposed to. She's not programmed to be a super-ninja in every episode, and her "engagements" usually go wrong in some unforeseen way. At that point, she has to find reserves of strength and courage inside herself, and it's beautiful to behold.

It's all a metaphor for how you're brainwashed in real life. The show doesn't bludgeon you with how deep and metaphorical it is, but that stuff is all there if you look. The people that Echo is programmed to become have childhoods, they have little quirks and extra neuroses that aren't strictly necessary for them to do the job. Echo's relationship with her handler, Boyd, is almost a father-daughter one, partly because of her programming. And squirming beneath the surface is a sense that all of us non-programmed people have our social roles imposed on us, just as much as Echo does. Plus we're all playthings of the rich, just like she is.

Nobody on this show is whom they seem, exactly. And going along with that theme of "everybody's brainwashed," nobody on this show is who we think they are - or even, necessarily, who they they they are. Everyone seems to have secrets, and stuff they're hiding even from themselves.

Every episode is going to be a cult movie. Without giving away the plots of any of the episodes, I can tell you they're all cult movies. Some of them are classy cult movies - the kind that would star Denzel Washington, George Clooney or Meg Ryan - and some of them are more like decent B-movies. But every episode is self-contained, at least in the first batch, and it feels like a mini-movie. Every week, someone hires Echo to be someone new, and somehow the situation turns into a kinked-out thriller. Not that any of the episodes I saw were campy at all. They were more like tense, sparky crime movies or girl-in-the-woods movies.

By the way, there's a meme going around that the show's second episode is way better than the first. I actually liked both episodes about equally. But if the first episode leaves you flat, you should try the second, just in case you agree with the people who preferred it.

This is an incredible ensemble cast. Your feelings about Eliza Dushku are inevitably going to color your opinion of Dollhouse - especially since the show calls on her to play a huge range of different characters. (Personally, I thought she was good most of the time, with a few moments of greatness and a few minor false notes.) But in any case, the show also boasts an incredible supporting cast.

We all expected Battlestar Galactica's Tahmoh Penikett to rule as FBI agent Paul Ballard, but he's actually way better than he was as Helo. In the early episodes, Paul is just sniffing the trail of the Dollhouse, but Penikett manages to keep his dead-end investigation riveting. Also, Fran Kranz is great as Topher, the show's "Xander," who programs Echo with a new personality every week. Kranz gets most of the show's Whedonesque dialogue, and makes the most of it. And Harry Lennix and Olivia Williams are also captivating. Oh, and the brother from Journeyman? He's in it too, which I didn't even realize, and he's a dick. In a good way.

Bottom line: I've already totally fallen in love with this show. I was excited for it before I saw it, and now that I have, I am filled with a fevered desperation to watch a hundred more episodes. I wish I had a half-dozen DVD box sets of this show.

James Tiptree Jr.
Given Name: Alice “Alli” Sheldon
Works: Numerous short stories, including “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” and “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”
James Tiptree Jr. was an elusive figure, giving only one interview in “his” career, which was condcted by mail. He had a post office box and his own back account, but no one had ever met him in person. In 1976, they learned why: Tiptree was actually Alice Bradley, a one-time CIA agent who had adopted the Tiptree pseudonym while finishing her doctorate in psychology. Bradley said that when she started writing science fiction, she wanted to create a persona who would be sufficiently removed from her previous writing – which had focused largely on women and the nature of girlhood – and she wanted to submit her stories with a name that no editor would remember rejecting. She took the name “Tiptree” from a jam jar and the name “James” because male names were more common in science fiction than female ones.

When Tiptree was revealed as a woman, it caused quite a stir among the science fiction community. Tiptree’s followers recognized the name as a pseudonym, but Bradley’s frequent travels and intelligence background led many to believe he was a high-ranking government official, but few had considered he might be a woman. Sheldon would later say that she was “ashamed” of taking a male pseudonym because she had taken the easy path into the male-dominated field.

CJ Cherryh
Given Name: Carolyn Janice Cherry
Works: Over 60 novels and short story collections, including Downbelow Station, Cyteen, and Cuckoo’s Egg.
Carolyn Cherry submitted her first two novels, Gate of Ivrel and Brothers of Earth to DAW Books in 1975. Donald Wollheim, DAW’s founder, purchased both manuscripts, but, for marketability, suggested she go with a different name. The initials CJ disguised the fact that she was a woman and adding an “h” to her last name made it look less like a romance novelist’s.

Vernon Lee
Given Name: Violet Paget
Works: Several ghost stories, notably “Oke of Okehurst: or the Phantom Lover”
Vernon Lee wrote not only supernatural fiction, but also papers the theory of philosopher and aesthetics, subjects women were not considered intellectually suited for. Lee herself once said, “I don’t care that Vernon Lee should be known to be myself or any other young woman, as I am sure no one reads a woman’s writings on art, history or aesthetics with anything but mitigated contempt.” But she quickly became known as one of the premiere scholars in aesthetics and her fiction continues to be republished today.

Paul Ash(well)
Given Name: Pauline Ashwell
Works: “Invasion from Venus,” “The Winds of a Bat,”
The short story “Invasion from Venus” appeared in Yankee Science Fiction in 1942 under the name “Paul Ashwell.” But the real author was a fourteen year-old girl by the name of Pauline Ashwell. John W. Campbell would eventually publish “Unwillingly to School,” Pauline’s “debut” (now under her real name) in Analog magazine in 1958. She would continue to publish stories from time to time under the truncated name “Paul Ash,” including the Nebula-nominated “Wings of a Bat.” In the 1990s, Ashwell would publish two novels, Unwillingly to Earth and Project Farcry.

CL Moore
Given Name: Catherine Lucille Moore
Works: Numerous short stories, including “The Code” “Promised Land,” and “Heir Apparent”
Although claims that CL Moore tried to conceal her gender are in dispute, Astounding editor and fellow scifi writer Frederik Pohl once said that Moore “felt a need to tinker with” her name to appeal to her overwhelmingly male readers. It apparently worked, as in 1936, Moore received a letter of admiration from science fiction writer Henry Kuttner, who believed Moore was a man. They married in 1940. The pair would go on to collaborate on many short stories, signing each work with a single pseudonym – one that was invariably male.

L. Taylor Hansen
Given Name: Lucile Taylor Hansen
Works: A handful of short stories and 57 science articles in Amazing Stories from 1941-1949.
L. Taylor Hansen, who was better known for her science articles than her fiction, didn’t merely attempt to obscure her gender; she denied it entirely. Hansen once titled a letter in Amazing “L. Taylor Hansen Defends Himself” and once included a photo of a man with one of her stories, claiming it was a photo of herself.

Tarpé Mills
Given Name: June Mills
Works: Miss Fury
Comic book artist June Mills dropped her first name in favor of her more gender ambiguous middle name when she started making action comics. She created Miss Fury, one of the early female action characters in comics, and the first created by a woman. When Miss Fury proved a commercial success, she couldn’t hide her gender from interviewers, who realized that the comic creator was not only a woman, but bore a close resemblance to her character.

Andre Norton
Given Name: Alice Norton
Works: Over 300 titles, including Star Born, Merlin’s Mirror, and Star Man’s Son
Alice Mary Norton went beyond pseudonym to increase her marketability. The year she published her first short story, she legally changed her name to Andre Alice Norton, figuring the male name would fit better with the boys her were her primary market. Over the years, she also published under the names Andrew North and Allen Weston.

Murray Constantine
Given Name: Katharine Burdekin
Works: The Devil, Poor Devil, Proud Man, Swastika Night, and Venus in Scorpio
Katharine Burdekin’s novels dealt primarily with fascist dystopias, and as her work grew more critical of fascism, she adopted a pseudonym to protect her family in the event of a German invasion of England. But her choice of a male pseudonym was likely linked to her feminist approach to the subject, and she frequently linked fascism to a “cult of masculinity” and “reduction of women.” Although the feminist overtones led many critics to believe that Constantine was a woman writing under a pseudonym, it wasn’t until two decades after her death that a scholar identified Constantine as Burdekin.

JK Rowling
Given Name: Joanne Rowling
Works: The Harry Potter Series
These days, people will wait in line hours to purchase something from Ms. Joanne Rowling. But when she first submitted her tale of a boy wizard to Bloomsbury, the publisher suggested that she use two initials instead of her first name, so as not to turn off the young boys (Rowling doesn’t actually have a middle name, and took the K for her grandmother, Kathleen). If children care that the creator of Hogwarts is a woman, it certainly doesn’t show.

Deadgirl is such a striking entry in the zombie feminism genre because it's just so damn literal. You've got a naked girl, strapped to a bed in a mental institution, being raped by a bunch of teenaged guys. Clearly a situation in need of a feminist zombie intervention if I ever saw one. If you were to boil the message of this film down to one basic point (which you probably shouldn't), it would be that men shouldn't rape women because those women might turn out to be superpowered zombies who want to eat your you-know-what.

As you can see from this tiny piece of the teaser, the movie is an emo arthouse take on your standard "how do you contain a zombie" plot. Filmmakers Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel did not accidentally create a movie that dabbles in questions of how women are degraded by men. That's basically the point of the story: Our vengeful zombie's refusal to be raped and ruined is symbolic enough to provide social commentary, but grody enough to keep you entertained.

Still, it wasn't that long ago that raped women in movies just stayed dead.

What struck me immediately on seeing the trailer for Deadgirl was that Sarmiento and Harel were clearly referencing another dead, raped girl wrapped in plastic. Laura Palmer, the girl whose murder rips apart the tiny town of Twin Peaks in the eponymous cult TV series, is also found "dead, wrapped in plastic," as one character puts it. You can see her glamor shot above, an image that was used to advertise the haunting David Lynch series starring Kyle McLaughlin as FBI agent Dale Cooper, come to investigate the former prom queen's murder.

Investigating the horrifying events that led to Laura's murder takes Cooper into a supernatural world of ghosts and the undead. But Laura never avenges herself. Her spirit lingers, as does the evil BOB spirit who has helped perpetrate the crime, but Laura herself never has a chance to fight back zombie-style. Maybe she's the pre-feminist zombie, the modest and lady-like creature who lets men solve the mystery of her death for her.

The message of Twin Peaks, at least in terms of its dead girl protagonist, is that men won't get away with rape — but they'll be brought to justice by other men, not the women they've victimized.

Similarly, the cult 1980s film River's Edge features a very Deadgirl-esque plot. A teen rapes and murders his girlfriend, then leaves her body out for all his friends to see. They decide to cover up the murder, visiting the dead girl's body every day until a few of them realize what they've done is wrong and turn in the perpetrator. That haunting image of the dead girl, unable to fight back, is partly what fuels the bizarre rage at the heart of zombie feminism. Watching that pretty, dead face, you want her to get up and scream: You want her to bite that raping bastard's scalp off and drool his brains all over the place.

And that was precisely the pleasure in watching this year's other great zombie feminist masterpiece, Zombie Strippers. This flick features porn star Jenna Jameson as a stripper bitten by a zombie infected by a government drug to keep soldiers fighting after they die. The more zombie-fied she gets, the more the clientele goes crazy for her. Even when she drags men into the back room and rips their throats out and bites their dicks off. Soon, the other strippers are begging to be infected too, so they can make more in tips.

Before long, nearly all the strippers are infected, and they've got a giant basement room full of all the reanimated, mutilated men they've been gnawing on. None of these strippers are being raped or murdered by men — they're just dealing with standard-issue stuff like objectification and the dangers of working in the sex industry. And yet it's hard not to see their undeaths as a kind of revenge on men who treat women like objects. These guys come to the strip club to "get some meat," and then they're turned into meat themselves.

The problem here is that the men actually like it. Their favorite strippers are the zombies, and the women have gained "power" only by becoming monsters. Just as our girl in Deadgirl can only fight back because she's a monster. So is the message of zombie feminism that a strong women is always a monster? That she must die and return as a ghoul in order to fight back against rape and less violent forms of sexism?

Or is the message that men must die and become zombies themselves before women will ever be happy? Two years ago, a brilliant Canadian comedy called Fido posed that very question. A traditional housewife played by Carrie Ann "Matrix" Moss falls in love with the zombie servant her husband brings home from the zombie control factory (after people start rising from their graves, his employer invents a "control collar" that makes them docile). Why is the zombie man better than her husband? He cooks, he cleans, he takes care of their son and pays attention to her. An object himself, he's able to see the humanity in a woman who is treated like an object by all the living men in her life.

Ever since Dr. Frankenstein reanimated a woman to serve as his monster's bride and she said no, the zombie woman has been a weird figure for female resistance to control. Zombie feminism is an uneasy subgenre, daring to use freakish gore and death slapstick to pose questions about what it might take for women to become unrapeable. Or for men to see women the way women see themselves.

The question is, why do we have to imagine ourselves as monsters in order to tell stories about what it would be like to become fully human?

Why aren't there any bionic showoff scenes in Bionic Woman 2007, despite all the publicity claptrap about how this time around Jaime Sommers is going flex some muscle? Instead we've seen a Bionic Woman who woodenly mouths "you-go-girl" platitudes while displaying a wishy-washy reluctance to show off in front of the boys. It's a sorry state of affairs when the original Jaime Sommers seems to have a better handle on her power than the allegedly updated model.

One of the things that irks about movies like Children of Men is that it's a story all about childbirth and reproduction entirely from the male point of view. In that movie, the big bad at the heart of dystopia is that women are barren and there will be no more "children of men." But what about a dystopia where women are fertile in a way that challenges everything we know about families and parenting? Women could enslave men and turn them into second-class citizens good for nothing but manual labor and soldiering. Or the reverse might happen. Once women could impregnate each other, men might disdain the idea of actually making babies — that's women's work! So you'd get a world where men and women are even more separated than ever before. They don't even have to come together to create new life. AP Photo/Seoul National University.

But, really, WTF is up with this week's constant referencing of 1990s bestselling retro-dating manual The Rules? (According to its authors, "women who call men, ask them out ... or offer sex on the first date destroy male ambition and animal drive.") "[T]hat book is seriously antifeminist" counters Becca when Jaime informs her that calling a boy would be breaking one of The Rules. Neither Jaime nor Becca has done anything to lead us to think they're feminists in the first place, what with Jaime usually needing Jay, Jonas and Nathan to save her bacon at the end of the day, and Michelle Ryan's limp mouthing of lines about how bad it is to be treated like a very expensive object. Ironically—or not—this week is the first time we're allowed to see Jaime act like she has some balls. Of course, it's when she declares they're going back in to save Tom, whom she latter castigates for not calling her in a Rules-approved timeframe.

This just may explain Jaime Sommers's wishy-washy attitude towards the men who manipulate her. Thank goodness, Sarah Corvuss has yet to display any such retro notions of appropriate feminine behavior.

Speaking as someone who spent her summers at Ross Drake Stables, how cool is it that in addition to knowing her own self worth, Sarah loves horses? Will Coco turn out to be Sarah's Rosebud? I don't mean that in a dirty way. Honestly. And while Ruth may not do "warm and cuddly," Sarah certainly does, as Mr. Snowboarder is about to find out. Let's hope for his sake she now has that bionic hand under control.

Rather than buying her sister's affection with $175 jeans and red wine, Jamie would try to set boundaries for Becca—and impress upon her the repercussions for bad behavior. Becca might still act out, but we'd believe she liked 70s punk and Broadway musicals. In fact, everybody would have a believably complex personality, not just the appurtenances of one; a show can buy all the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and New York Dolls songs and vintage GTOS it wants, but these aren't a substitute for good writing. The word "Good!" shouldn't be the first to spring to a viewer's mind when a character collapses after being poisoned.

Because Jamie wouldn't be working for the Berkut Group, she wouldn't have a boss like Antonio, who plays the Wise Black Man one week, and the Scary Black Man Threatening A White Woman the next. Ruth's authoritative manner and short haircut wouldn't immediately rate the questioning of her sexuality ("Is she a lesbian?").

Would it be a better show? I don't know—but I think I'd rather watch it than this one.

Famous names: Bryan Forbes, William Goldman, Katharine Ross

Crunchy goodness: 4

Ripoffs: The early twenty-first century saw two weird remakes of this flick: the first was a made-for-TV movie called The Stepford Husbands, which was about women replacing uppity, unsatisfied hubbies with sensitive dudes who love to repair the sink; the second was a hideous remake of the original movie with fembot-esque actress Nicole Kidman (she of many bad SF movie remakes) defeating the formerly-unstoppable bots.

Elevator pitch: It's like Westworld crossed with Ms. magazine, but you still have a bunch of hot chicks to stare at.

Design breakthrough: Despite its feminist "the man is keeping us down" message, The Stepford Wives manages to show us lots of super-sexy robot ladies, thus catering to both the growing female SF audience, and the never-depleted audience of fanboys who want to fuck fembots.

The Stepford Wives Review at Movie Gazette