Shauna Sand, Playboy Model and Stepmother = Phaedra
You didn't think I was going to ignore this, did you? Soap and Falcon Crest actor Lorenzo Lamas is apparently doing some advance p.r. for his upcoming reality show. And so he has dropped the bomb via Star: his ex-wife, Shauna Sand, allegedly had an affair with his son, A.J., back in 2002, while she was married to him (Lamas, that is). And that's why he (Lamas) dumped her and why his relationship with his son remains, to this day, strained.
Shauna's alleged outrage (A.J.'s somehow off the hook...) is not without historical precedent or cultural context. The sexy, seductive stepmother has been eclipsed, in recent decades, by the Wicked Stepmother, but they are closely related, two faces of the same "unmaternal and threatening to the stability and integrity of The Family" coin. We don't know if Shauna did it or not, but we know that the suspicion that she did, and the fear that all stepmothers might do such a thing, or be capable of it, is nothing new. Euripides fashioned an anti-heroine, Phaedra, in his play Hippolytus, setting loose on the stage a young, bored "new wife" and stepmother who would have her hot stepson — or have him killed. Classics scholar Patricia Watson tells us that Roman stepmothers were often suspected of killing or seducing their stepsons in an attempt to redirect their (the stepson's) inheritance and redraw the lines of power in the stepfamily. And the Wicked Queen in Disney's Snow White — would you look at her please? The skin-tight black rubber dress is befitting a dominatrix. And the lipstick is scarlet, in every sense. That lady is s-e-x-y and s-c-a-r-y.
The image of stepmothers as villainous, amoral, and powerful derives from potent fears and strange realities. See for yourself...