Last week, we looked at The Lonely, an episode of The Twilight Zone made in 1959. The only female in the episode is Alicia, the robot smuggled onto a prison asteroid to help the sole prisoner deal with his solitary confinement. Why was the robot made to be a woman? Why couldn't a companion robot be a man? If the prisoner were detained on earth, he would've had male prison-mates. Surely there's nothing wrong with males having male friendships, right? Maybe it's ok in larger settings, like at work, or on the throne of a kingdom, or on the golf course, but one man and one man can't really be alone together for very long?
Homophobia aside, there's another difficult topic to unpack that I think is evident in the vast majority of robot representations of women in popular culture (not to mention the default voices for real-world AI assistants being female like Cortana, Alexa, etc.). From Metropolis (1927) to Subservience (2024), we have a long line of female-looking robots that are intended to perform a specific kind of service: companionship (ironic innuendos 100% present here).
To be fair, Sci-Fi is often an exploratory medium that can critique culture, technology, and society...but sometimes it simply reinforces stereotypes and systemic structures. With that in mind, let's start asking some questions when we see women represented in robotic form.
Who's Getting Replaced by Technology?
CEOs, trust-fund babies, politicians, and rich people in general don't appear to be too worried about being replaced by technology, especially given that so many of these groups have invested in the technology that does replace jobs—just the kind they don't have to deal with. I guess that leaves a large slice of the population to fend for ourselves: the middle and lower classes. It's much easier to automate, delegate, and replace people with less power and influence, not necessarily because the work they perform is easy, but because the lack of power prevents them from fighting back or saying no.
How dubious, then, to see companionship be a common theme for automation and replacement. Psych 1010 told me that both men and women prefer to go to women for emotional support—the pinnacle of what I would consider to be companionship. Companionship is about emotional intimacy, which can be completely platonic, as in close friendships. Yes, it's not necessarily sexual, but it often carries undertones, if not explicit scenes, in films and stories with women robots/AI (see Subservience, Her, BuffyBot from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and I would submit that our Twilight Zone episode belongs here, too).
Let's take a second and compare this to male-coded robots. Bicentennial Man is one of the few robot/AI movie that I've seen where a robo-man performs the role of a companion—not just a thing that follows the main character around, but actually appears to care for and about a human, with reciprocated feelings from that same human. More often, androids are battle-bots, killers, protectors, comic relief, scheming tricksters, laborers, mentors, guides, and/or philosophers.
Why does it feel like robots that are masculine or even those that aren't gendered have a vast array of possible roles, but feminine robots tend pretty steeply toward traditional roles for women (as sex objects, as close companions, as home-making or domestic care service providers)? Could it be that there is some subliminal if not intentional oppression here?
I read Jurassic Park almost ten years ago, but something that the character Ian Malcolm observed in the book has rattled around my mind ever since:
“The number of hours women devote to housework has not changed since 1930, despite all the advances. All the vacuum cleaners, washer-dryers, trash compactors, garbage disposals, wash-and-wear fabrics…Why does it still take as long to clean the house as it did in 1930?”
Maybe we can say it's a good thing that we're imagining these female-like robots because it implies that we're finally automating and replacing the housework that women have been unfairly consigned to based solely on their "gender." But why are these same robots conveniently able to provide other pleasures to male owners? Are we replacing the work that we don't want to do? Or are we actually replacing the human with a brain and a concept of consent with a slave that can't talk back; can't say no; can't get tired; can't get sick? Is this less about labor and more about reinforcing and defining womanhood in ways that can be exploited—so that even if you don't have a robot, you can treat your wife the same way?
While author Jane Caputi was setting up an argument for a different myth than these women-robots, I think her summary here is just as applicable:
...in a patriarchy, myths of male superiority and victory over the female must be continually retold, participated in, and internalized.
This is, at least from my perspective, why these feminine machines fall so easily into this stereotype of the servile housewife (this idea is blatantly the plot of The Stepford Wives, 1975). In our current system, we have to keep retelling the story that the nature of womanhood is about submission, domesticity, and not about sexual autonomy (or any real autonomy, for that matter). If that is the nature of "woman" then it follows that even the machines that take on the "woman" identity would have to abide the same rules.
Of course, if the robots are deviant, then they fall equally into the archetypes and myths that Caputi does describe in her book, such as becoming the dangerous, independent woman-robot; a deceptive snake/dragon lady (with sexual connotations); an emasculating machine, etc. probably ending up with the robot's destruction (like in Subservience, Metropolis).
[Jaws] is the ritual retelling of an essential patriarchal myth—male vanquishment of the female symbolized as a sea monster, dragon, serpent, vampire, or some other creature, administering a necessary fix to a society hooked on and by male control. The purpose of Jaws and other myths of its genre is to instill dread and loathing for the female, and they usually culminate in her annihilation.
Cyborg
It is becoming more clear to me how important the stories we tell are, the more of these AI/robot stories I encounter. I've been shocked at what some of our stories tell us about consent, what they say about women and their abilities, what they say about our society's heroes, what they say about who deserves power and who does not. Our stories influence our society's values and vice versa.
Despite much talk of God being "love" and associated with creation, the phrase "I am God" is not uttered in delivery room rooms by mothers, or about those getting the news that they have received the Nobel Peace Prize.
...though that phrase is uttered frequently by "victorious players of violent video games," as well as serial killers—or talk about serial killers on news, films, etc.—as Caputi demonstrates in the introduction of her book...
The dominant action of god in the Abrahamic patriarchal religions is an all-male being whose defining characteristics seem to be omnipotence, jealousy, righteousness, judgment, and dominance. This notion of god powers all sorts of terrorism: religious, political, criminal, familial, militarist, nuclear, and any combination of these as power-mad men take up that mythic role, "playing god" by waging war, accumulating fortunes, toying with others' lives, and lording it over everybody else.
The close relationship of masculinity and god in our culture spills over into our representations and conceptualizations of technology. This includes diminishing, demeaning, and demonizing women, femininity, and other marginalized gender identities. With so much emphasis on creating all-powerful technologies that provide god-like abilities to us humans, what are we hiding or replacing? Are we really so self-absorbed that we'll opt for a toy instead of a partner, just because of the allure of god-like power and ability to reign over something else?
My title here (The Critical Replacement Theory) is referencing the untrue, racist conspiracy theory that white people are being intentionally replaced by non-white immigrants. The theory plays on xenophobia; on the fears of seeing lowering birth rates in white populations; and on fears of mixed-race partnerships/marriages. It's not only false, it's exceptionally dangerous. I'm using this allusion to the theory ironically, because while "The Great Replacement Theory" is a fantasy of victimhood, there is a real danger of replacing—or erasing—women and women's rights. I'm not saying that we really will create a world where women somehow don't exist and only human males and female-looking robots walk the streets. I am saying that there is something sinister in fantasizing about such a world: one in which women are enslaved. After all, that was the world that not too long ago was a reality for most women in the West, if not globally—in the U.S., women have only had unrestricted access to hold credit cards in their name since 1974 (that's only 52 years(!!)).
Women have not been seen as human beings with equal ability or rights alongside men for many thousands of years, so all of the newfound freedoms that women enjoy in our modern era is extremely new. The connection between a robotic woman as property is all too similar to our actual history. The Holy Bible clearly demonstrates through its legal descriptions and other stories that women were viewed as property.
What this collection of laws in Deuteronomy 22:22-29 indicates is that rape was thought to be a crime against the property rights of men. The autonomy and agency of the victim was not relevant...A marriage constituted a man's sale of his daughter to another man...
But until she was engaged or married, a woman's body was the property of her father, who stood to benefit financially from the bride price that would be paid upon her marriage. The rape of a virgin who was neither engaged nor married was a property crime against the father. According to Deuteronomy 22, then, the punishment for rape depends on the type of claim that a man has to the victim's body.
What's my point? I think we need to start turning an actual critical eye on what we're doing, where we're going, and why we're doing these things and going these places. I used to fear feminism so I understand if this article feels threatening regardless of your own gender. But the more I listen, read, and experience, the more I do see that this isn't about man-hatred or intentional disparagement of "traditional values"; it's a life-and-death, world-changing attempt to put all humans on equal grounds. Humans should not be replaced. Women cannot be replaced. Our technology only ever supports our own motivations, our own goals, our own thoughts because technology is not science—it's a reflection of us.
When we harm the vulnerable and the less-powerful, we eventually harm everyone. If we objectify women, we eventually objectify everyone. If we start replacing women—the role, not necessarily the people—we start to look everywhere for further dominance, control, and possibly violence. Is that acceptable to you?