If I could write books as fast as I get ideas for one, I would be the next J.K. Rowling. But being contracted to two more Mark Slade detective thrillers by next year, and the Great Hollywood Novel after that, I have to put off my new bestseller brainstorm until 2029 — when I hope it won’t be too late for it, or for America. Unless a sage, prescient publisher, or producer, makes me a lucrative offer I can’t refuse for an earlier appearance of The Harpy Syndrome. Put simply, The Harpy Bug is the far scarier 21st century antithesis to The Stepford Wives. But what’s making these women so insane in the first place?…. What can make them risk their liberty and lives for criminal scum that would rape them or beat them without a second of regret? Ira Levin’s 1972 feminist horror classic follows a progressive New York married couple, Joanna and Walter, who relocate to Stepford, Connecticut, where all the women are gorgeous trad housewives catering to their husbands’ every behavioral and sexual preference. They dress provocatively, showcasing physical attributes that invite the Male Gaze. Of course, the initially liberal Walter starts unfavorably comparing Joanna to her more physically and domestically attractive sisters, and ultimately assents to her transformation into a Stepford Wife. Naturally, when Hollywood got hold of the story for a 1975 production, they blew it as usual. The late, great screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, The Princess Bride) had happily signed on to adapt Levin’s book, fascinated by the concept of husbands turning their spouses into subservient, sexy trophy wives. His contentment was short lived once British director Bryan Forbes discarded the wives’ skimpy outfits in favor of absurd long frilly sundresses and, worse, wide ugly hats. Goldman, a purist artist, knew that men would realistically show off their enhanced wives in enticing wear. At the time, the 70s, this meant hot pants, mini-skirts, tennis shorts, and the like. Which in Goldman’s view worked visually and thematically to highlight the horror of liberated women mutated into obedient sex kittens. But when Forbes changed their dresses to ridiculous body-hiding things, he tried to take his name off the script, as he wrote in his requisite book, Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting.  “More than anything else, it was the costumes in the movie that set my teeth on edge,” Goldman wrote. “At a lawn party on a summer afternoon, the men are in jackets and ties, the women in floor-length dresses. In Stepford? … The women, bringing the beer, would wear hot pants and low-cut blouses. Or maybe wet T-shirts. But Forbes had two bad reasons for his credibility-killing change. First, he feared the reaction of his liberal peers to overt stimulative eroticism even if intellectually salient — such as poster images of the Stepford Wives resembling Russ Meyer-type Supervixens (1975). Second, Forbes cast his wife, Nanette Newman, as one of the main Wives. Then in her early 40s, Newman couldn’t compete with Hollywood pulchritude — including the film’s star, Katharine Ross — or rise to the aesthetic vision of Levin and Goldman. Nevertheless, in the mid-Seventies, feminism was culturally ascendant, and Hollywood was all in on the movement on both screens. Almost every film featured a lead starlet who could never make the beauty grade as a Stepford Wife “finding herself” by discarding “oppressive” men — Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman, Meryl Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer, Sally Field in Norma Rae, etc. Television was even worse, offering a plethora of homely shrewish “protagonists” — Bea Arthur in Maude, Bonnie Franklin in One Day at a Time, Linda Lavin in Alice. Even an established sitcom, M*A*S*H, stopped being funny when a sexy main character, Hot Lips, became annoying no-nonsense Margaret. Fortunately, three later 70s TV shows brought back female sex appeal and interrupted humorless feminism — Charlie’s Angels, Three’s Company, Wonder Woman. It took a bit longer for the big screen to catch up, with the antifeminist monster hit, Animal House. But for the rest of the last century and a decade into the next, appealing sexy women dominated multiple genres — comedy (Porky’s, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, American Pie, There’s Something About Mary), erotic thriller (Body Heat, Basic Instinct, 9-1/2 Weeks), children’s animation (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin) and especially romantic comedy. Then, around 2010, suddenly and decisively, it all ended, It’s not that women took over the arts and almost the government, it’s that batty dysfunctional leftist women did. Because the normal reasonable women have more important contributions to make to society — like raising the next hopefully great generation, with the help not hindrance of the heads of their husbands. Weak men gave crazy females the power, as George Lucas gave Kathleen Kennedy (see my article, Exit the Hollywood Women, Part 2 — Kathleen Kennedy) and Barack Obama tried to give Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden did Kamala Harris. But what’s making these women so insane in the first place? That even those blessed with children — though not real men husbands — would drop off their kids at a school then go with their “wives” or beta male companions in freezing, snowy weather to interfere with law-enforcement agents doing their dangerous legal duty. (“Show your face, big boy!” Renee Nicole Good’s “wife” taunted an ICE officer.) What can make them risk their liberty and lives for criminal scum that would rape them or beat them without a second of regret? It would have to be something mind-blowingly, abnormally evil. Read The Harpy Syndrome, coming to a bookstore near you in 2028. READ MORE from Lou Aguilar: Exit the Hollywood Women, Part 2 — Kathleen Kennedy Exit, the Hollywood Women Heroes and Zeroes of 2025