Fembots: The Ultimate Male Fantasy?

*Spooky halloween music plays music in the description*, The men are getting exactly what they alwaysdreamed of perfect wives and the dream is becoming a nightmare for the Stepford wives, Its August andyou know what that means. Halloween is right around the corner and when I think of Halloween I thinkof monster movies and one of my favorite monsters.

Are robots but more specifically female robots, orfembots And that’s? What were going to be looking into today? The shift in the representation offembots and what fembots and robots in general are usually metaphors for, Since the fembotcovers decades and decades of cinematic history Im only going to be talking about theones that Im particularly interested in those being Disneys Pixel, Perfect, the anime Chobits, the film Ex-Machina and the tv series Westworld

But I will be bringing up more notable examplesalong the way so lets dive in. I call them fembots The perfect women, Programmable obedient and asbeautiful, or as deadly as I choose to make them Lets start with answering a simple question: what are fembots Fembots are androids or humanoid robots that present as feminine and are labeled assuch, either by themselves or by Their usually male

Creators There have been many names for femaleandroids, like the gynoid coined by Isaac Asimov in the 1970s and robotess dating back to the 1920play Rossums Universal Robots written by Czech playwright, Karel apek. But it was the BionicWoman tv series that popularized the term fembot in their 1976 episode, Kill Oscar in which a groupof, evil female robots must face Jaime Sommers, the first woman to go under bionic surgery as theyresent to infiltrate Jaimies workplace in order.

to steal weather equipment for Dr Franklin, theircreator Fembots originally started out as villains, using their feminine wiles in order to entrap mento get what they want or to meet their masters ends, and were both physically and mentally craftedto be the perfect woman Usually they were made to present as hyper feminine while also beingsubservient and were and still are kind of mostly white thin and blonde And because they werespecifically made by men to do their bidding and follow their orders there’s really nothingfor them to complain about if they even have.

The, ability, to complain at all As Dr, Franklin saysto Baron? Constantine in Kill? Oscar Since when is thinking for herself an asset in a woman Becausefembots are seen as the patriarchal ideal. Of what a woman should be, the fear factor comes from theidea that they could one day replace human women as robots in general, prey upon humanitysfear that we as a species are replaceable fembots also do that, but on a gendered level, andwhat makes them the ultimate male Power fantasy and threat to human women is that they cantsay no, and that should tell you a lot more about

men than women Im confused why would you needboth a robot girlfriend and a robot prostitute? Theres just some things you dont do with yourrobot girlfriend For men fembots are a fantasy but for women theyre a nightmare Generally inolder works where the fembot is seen as a threat she dies a fiery death She explodes, is burnt atthe stake or is beaten now by the more intelligent human hero In horror movies like The StepfordWives Joanna becomes the fembot and is ultimately replaced like her fellow neighbors The human diesand thus its the most tragic death of all and you Jane, Betty or Karen could be next.

But recentlywith the likes of Chobits, Westworld, Pixel Perfect and Ex-Machina there’s been a shift of seeingfemale androids not as threats to human women but as heroes or at least anti-heroes who are seenas equally sympathetic alongside their human foils, which I think is a good thing Fembots deserveour sympathy as movie monsters as much as Swamp Thing, King Kong and Frankenstein, who was ofcourse initially written to be sympathetic in the first place, especially because unlike the moreuniversal coding of male monsters, female monsters.

quite literally are representing an oppressedgroup Not only as what their monster form is but as women, which is why I think it tookso long for female monsters to get their due because rather than their allegory being moremale-centric, fembots face a distinct type of oppression in their metaphors that I think a lotof male writers cant fully articulate and that a lot of women who dislike hyper-feminine womenfind hard to relate to And this isnt to bash movies or books like The Stepford Wives, which doeshave an interesting message about the patriarchys.

need to essentialize womens bodies and laborto fit their goals, but that we can take this character type in multiple directions I likesympathetic portrayals of robots and more specifically fembots because rather than justasking us the question of what it means to be human or what it means to be a woman fembotsask us what it means to be an other-ed woman even if theyre usually portrayed as stereotypicallybeautiful white women Fembots to me as a trope have always taken up an intersectional space inmovies and that’s always been relatable to me and.

a theme were going to talk about more deeplylater in this video But for now lets focus on two fembot centric pieces of media that tried tosubvert the fembot villainess trope that I liked as a kid growing up and that you might have heardof, the anime Chobits and the DCOM Pixel Perfect Shes mad because Im perfect In both Chobits andPixel Perfect the idea of fembots as a threat or a replacement to human women comes up like itdid in the previous incarnations of the trope,.

but rather than dealing with the problem or thethreat by killing them, both the human girl and the android girl get to live in harmony at leastfor a while So first Chobits Chobits was originally a manga series by the female own studio Clampthat got turned into an anime by Mad House Inc It delves into a world where personal computers havebecome personified in bodies of beautiful women.

who not only can search the internet for you butcan also cook for you and do your errands Known as persacoms they live to serve and are all almostexclusively female except for one, at least in the anime, and are all almost owned by men, thoughthere are some women and wives of men who also own persacoms And in fact spoiler alert, Chii, the maincharacter was made by a wife and husband duo due to the fact that they couldnt have children oftheir own.

So theyre not all a manifestation of mens fantasies but it is important to note thatthis was Clamps first attempt at trying to rope in a predominantly male reader base In Chobitsthere are a few women who feel uncomfortable with the idea of persacoms and see them as a threat tohuman women Ms Shimizu and her husband separated because of his obsession with his persacom andYumi dislikes persacoms and is jealous of.

them because her crush, her manager at the bakerywhere she used to work, married a persacom before befriending her Its later revealed that hispersacom died in a car crash protecting him and that the persacom had the same name as Yumi Mywife had a proper name If you dont mind her namewas Yumi In the end Yumi apologizes to the manager forthinking that he would compare her to the other.

Yumi and for thinking so low of him I likedChobits as a teen but re-watching the anime at least was pretty rough The persacoms all live toserve their masters, and their happiness depends on their masters happiness And though the feelingsmutual as all the owners of the persacoms love them on some level or respect them on some level,there’s still a power dynamic at play that’s just very odd to me Chii being a Chobit and not apersicon definitely gets a little bit more depth as she was created to be loved and to learn tolove, so her whole thing of needing to find the one.

for her isnt because shes a woman necessarilyits just kind of in her programming Hideki Chiis owner also lets she keep her own money and valuesher labor which is also nice In the end both Yumi and Ms Shimizu find happiness by getting witha man which eases their fears that theyre not as good as persacoms because men still find themattractive – yay? The persacoms arent villains in.

the show but are still seen as ideal women whichis why the human women dont like them, but at the same time this never really gets resolved in asatisfying way because it all revolves around the men in the series and their happiness It wouldhave been nice to see the human girls realize that the persacoms are kind of enslaved and that theyshould be free just like human women supposedly are, but in the end the human women are more afraidof the robot women replacing them than caring that.

there’s a literal group of enslaved sentient womenand that is never addressed Now lets talk about Pixel Perfect, another work that deals with thethreat of fembots in a decidedly different way but also a very similar way to its predecessors In Pixel Perfect Loretta Modern is a holographic pop star created by Roscoe to help his friendSams band Roscoe likes Sam, but he comments to his father that shes too stubborn and toostrong-headed Loretta on the other hand is his perfect girl in that she like Chii was born sexyyesterday.

She doesnt know how the world works and looks to Roscoe as a benevolent creator But eventhey end up fighting because eventually Loretta doesnt see herself as perfect though everyoneis quick to call her that even herself at times Shes mad because Im perfect But in all Lorettadoesnt see herself as perfect because perfect to her would mean being human and being free.

She gets into an argument with Roscoe and asks why couldnt he create her to be real, why is shetrapped indoors, why cant she feel the rain or go outside, why cant she touch people, and why cantshe feel Roscoe learns that his perfect girl isnt perfect after all once she gets a mind of herown Later Sam tries to become Loretta because she wants to prove to Roscoe that she can be perfecttoo, similar to how Yumi was always trying to get male attention because she wants to prove that’shes just as good as a persacom.

And though Pixel Perfect and Chobits are about girls dealing withtheir insecurities they both end up centering the needs of the men and fulfilling this male powerfantasy of having girls fight over you At least Loretta is able to see beyond Roscoe and realizethat hes the one keeping her bottled up At the end of the movie Loretta fails to show up for agig so Sam dresses up as her but then falls off.

stage and becomes unconscious When Loretta showsup at the hospital she immediately feels guilty She then goes inside Sams mind and helps herregain consciousness only to realize that there’s only room for one of them in there It looks likethere’s only enough room for one of us in here Loretta ends up taking over Sams body andretcons her character growth by berating Sam after she seemingly made her peace with herbecause Roscoe wants to know where sam is Why would you want Samantha anyway? Shes not like me.

Shes not perfect After Roscoe rejects Loretta she goes outside in Sams body, feels the rain andthen leaves earth for good, letting Sam have her body back If this was a darker movie Loretta wouldhave run away in Sams body What did we learn from this movie? Honestly nothing except dont create AIif you’re not ready to give them freedom.

Sam like Yumi and Ms Shimizu learns that shes not perfectand that’s okay and Roscoe learns to appreciate Sam for her flaws because even AI women suck andthat’s pretty much it Loretta gets nothing because her existence is too complicated in the world ofthe film, so she must disappear In all both Chobits and Pixel Perfect make the audience empathize withthe female androids or AI and subvert the evil fembot trope They acknowledge that having perfectwomen exist poses a threat to human women, but to solve that they just give them male approvalor banish them from this plane of existence.

Even worse both Chobits and Pixel Perfect aretotally fine with keeping the AI women as servants never to realize their true potential, and if theyhave a true potential its finding a partner who they must also make happy As Steve Rose wrote intheir article Ex-Machina and Sci-fis obsession with sexy female robots, Ultimately theseempowered women must be punished Metropoliss Maria (the great grandma of female robotmovies by Fritz Lang) is burnt at the stake,.

like a witch for example The resolution alwaysassures us that the status quo is going to be preserved I know that these pieces of media arentsupposed to be that deep, but it would be remiss to point out that they send very strong messagesthat your value as a woman depends on if men find you attractive Rather than having the human womenand the fembots band together, the coexistence of fembots drives them apart even though the fembotsjust want to do their own thing.

At the end of the day its the men who are always winning and thegirls who are always begging for approval Its frustrating to watch fembot stories that make themonstress so relatable but are still so safe But I also get it This media is for younger audiences,so lets see what the adult ones have to offer *disco music plays in the background* So now that weve established fembotsshift from threats to relatable characters, what makes them sympathetic? Well it mainly comesfrom the fact that writers have reworked the.

fembot trope so that they are able to acknowledgetheir enslavement and want to break free from it The slavery allegory is present in a lot of robotcentric media where the robot must be seen as a friend rather than a foe In Westworld for examplethere are hosts, which are repressed sentient human beings who are forced to live in loops for thepleasure of humans, Dolores and Maeve, the principal characters in the show, are constantly hurt bothphysically and psychologically by the human guests.

as well as by the human personnel who run the park In Ex-Machina, Kyoko a fembot, is enslaved to do the cooking and cleaning for her master Nathan andis also physically violated Ava, another android, is kept against her will in a glass cage Therobot slave allegory makes us sympathize with the humanoid robots but where it gets a bit morecomplicated is when it comes time to talk about race How does human racism affect fembotswho are designed to be women of color? Who are not only othered because theyre anandroid but because theyre not white.

And either surprisingly or unsurprisingly there isnt a lotof talk about racism in stories with robot slave allegories because in these stories the robots arethe discriminated class regardless of their race Many stories find it too messy to tackle both raceand sexism so most stories center around white women because they dont need to deal with racism Ex-machina is one story that has a slave allegory that some what attempts to comment on race andenslavement by making the two named Asian.

characters Kyoko and Jade sympathetic while alsoacknowledging racism and racial stereotypes that the characters and audiences hold against Asianwomen Other stories try to exist in a post-racial society where Black human characters liberatetheir white creations or android friends For example in Pixel Perfect Daryl Fibbs was signed bythe same record company that Loretta assigned to and for which he works for now, but its laterrevealed that he made almost no money from his albums and Loretta wont make any money either.

Loretta says that she has no need for money but Daryl isnt happy about his mostly unpaid labor Later Daryl cant enslave Loretta without thinking about himself and his career as an underpaidartist and he then ends up leaving the company freeing himself and Loretta Ive decided to freemyself from you and Harsh Tone records I believe our friend Loretta Modern has chosen to do thesame Arnold, one of the founders of Westworld who also created the hosts, realizes that the robotshave sentience and cant go through with enslaving them at the park and dies trying to stop it fromopening.

It could be said that his repulsion for robot slavery is because of the long history ofrace-based slavery throughout the colonized world, and there’s even a Civil War thread throughoutthe park but its never truly addressed In Bicentennial Man the person who grants Andrewspersonhood and recognizes him as a human being is a Black woman In Westworld Maeve spends more timein the post-racial world of Deloss headquarters than the park where its equal opportunity hatredwhen it comes to the hosts no matter their race And even in Ex-machina, a movie that I think doesokay by its Asian female leads, the white android.

Ava uses Jades skin and parts to complete herself There seems to be this pattern at least in these works where the characters of color help free andhumanize the white androids and AI, sometimes even sacrificing themselves, but its unclear asto whether this is an intentional statement about robot slave allegories and racial androbot solidarity or if its totally unintentional and supposed to signal to us that this is apost-racial society where we have eradicated.

racism but are still bigoted to robots, but letme know what you think down in the comments below! Robot slave uprisings or robots fighting for theirrights are stories that we love to depict and see on screen, but it should be noted that a majorityof these stories in the mainstream fail to touch upon race in an intentional way And this is abig failing considering how the robot allegory in Hollywood is one that is at least looselybased on racialized slavery and the racial other.

yet there’s a heavier focus on centering thewhite leads because its just easier to show all races facing equal discrimination rather thantalking about how white robots tend to be seen as more sympathetic with their pleas for freedom thanBlack androids because that’s too real As Lakitha Tolbert wrote in their article The Slave RebellionGenre, For every movie celebrating the strength of Black people enduring some form of oppression,there is a corresponding movie about a future slave rebellion that doesnt actually have anyBlack people in it It appears that its easy for Hollywood to make movies about Black enslavement,but when slaves turn on their masters that can.

only be told in allegory Allegories of coursehave their place and can be extremely powerful but its very telling that were onlycomfortable with allegories about oppression mainly centering white people However it shouldbe noted that there have always been Black artists creating works that talk about the intersectionof the allegory of robot enslavement and race As Steve Rose wrote, Outside of cinema musicianssuch as Janelle Mone, the latest in a long line of performers to appropriate Metropoliss Maria,an Afro-Futurist cyborg narrative runs through.

Mones first two albums – Metropolis Suite 1 (TheChase) and the ArchAndroid, in which they claim to be an android sent back in time to heal societysrifts But still, mainstream hollywood movies and tv series generally focus on white people whenit comes to the enslavement narrative and the slave rebellion genre and with fembots specifically,because white women are seen as more deserving of freedom In future seasons of Westworld raceand the theme of objectifying peoples cultures is brought up more, but they also maintain this ideathat outside of the parks there’s a post-racial.

society where its just androids versus humanswith race factoring in not at all, but that doesnt work when you also want to make a point abouthow the humans fetishize non-white cultures and racially marginalized groups Since the parks arethemed around white fantasies there has to be some form of racism that’s still manifesting itselfoutside of the park, but most seasons dont want to delve into that too much and mainly focus on themain set of characters, who are for the majority.

white And though there are Black actors in themain cast who get a lot of screen time and fleshed out storylines, the fact of the matter is is thatthey all face a very specific type of trauma and violence that the white characters dont face As Hope Wabuke pointed out in their review of Westworld, the black characters suffering on theshow is particularly painful to watch because all.

of their children die This is specifically hardto stomach against the background of real-life violence facing the Black community that the showdoesnt realize that theyre playing into because its supposed to just be humans versus robotsand race is only a thing when they want it to be Bernard who is the spitting image of Arnold buta host is enslaved to Ford And sure that says more about Ford than anything else, but were stillsubjected to both of their deaths and the death.

of their son, Maeves daughter and Charlottes son The violence that they face is more loaded than the violence that the white characters face butthat’s never addressed because the writers seem to think that its equal opportunity violencebecause theyre writing a post-racial story In Ex-machina it should be pointed out that thereis one Black female android whose face is never.

shown and who is also brutally hurt with littleor no sensitivity and I know that’s the point but still like if you’re gonna talk about racethen talk about race In season three of Westworld Wabuke writes, Ash James and G, criminals ofcourse because they are Black and must fit a stereotype on this show, are physically violatedand arrested so that Caleb, the white male hero,.

can be protected and complete his quest Writersof distant futures or of alternate futures cant have their cake and eat it too You cant bothmake commentary about how ignorant white people see the racial other, while also claimingthat this is a post-racial future where everyone faces inequality equally becauseits just humans versus robots when its not Its impossible to write actual commentarywhen storytellers think that theyre above their own racial biases simply becausetheyre imagining a post-racial world Just because you think it doesnt make it so orthat you dont need to check your own biases.

Westworld has had some triumphs and the actors ofcolor on the show are obviously amazing actors and its great that the show tries to be as inclusiveas possible, but there are definitely things that need to be handled with care that simply arent Instead of confronting race or checking to make sure that sensitive subjects are taken careof properly, most writers just think its okay because in their fictional world much likein their white bubbles, race doesnt matter.

Ava! Go back to your room Fembots were originallycreated to be sexist because they were part of this patriarchal male fantasy, but nowadays writershave given them agency to break free from what they were originally created for The villainsin fembot stories today are usually their evil patriarchs like Ford and Nathan who dont want togive their female creations freedom And because fembots are seen as literal objects they face atype of hypersexism, and this heightened reality.

makes their mistreatment more wrong and obviousand makes us as humans reflect on how we treat women as a whole within our own species Thepresent-day fembot narrative ends with freedom Freedom from a loop, freedom from a cage,and freedom to find love and community I personally really like these stories and thinkthat there’s something to be said about how fembots represent a unique type of discriminationthat’s faced by other-ed women in human society and this leads to the reading of therobot story as one for being trans.

Why do you want this? To be acknowledgedfor who and what I am In Kira Wertzs article, Bicentennial Man:The family-friendly film about transition that’s full of feels, she writes, The robot is a metaphor for a transperson actually seems very apt because as we transition we receive generalized resistance fromnot only our family, but also society, which sends a very specific message that being anythingoutside of whats deemed normal is wrong In Bicentennial Man, Andrew a robot, modifies his bodybecause it doesnt match who he is on the inside,.

and also must navigate bureaucracy to have accessto a bank account and his freedom In the last part of the movie he wants to be legally recognizedas human and presents his case in front of the world congress Andrew, like many trans people,finds himself in front of an authority asking to be recognized for who he is In this case theauthority is the world congress, and while legal name changes can be fairly straightforward, thisscene is on par with the fight for being legally recognized as the gender one identifies as.

Whentalking about fembots specifically, human girls like Sam and Yumi feel threatened by fembots anduse the argument that shes not a real girl as a way to dehumanize her and that’s common languageused to invalidate trans women made by cis women in real life The transgender metaphor also hitshome when talking about Westworld, specifically with the character of Maeve who realizes that’something about her is wrong In Riley Silvermans article Is Westworld one big transgender metaphor?Riley writes, Where the show really hits home, I.

assume unintended but perfect allegory though,is in the psychology of its impact on Maeve Its a difficult thing realizing your entire lifeis some hideous fiction, Maeve states that Jeffrey Wrights Bernard in the Well-Tempered Clavier uponrevealing to him what the audience had already learned in the episode prior, that just like her heis a host Maeve slowly came to the same discovery over the course of the season noting thatthe world around her is not quite right, noticing that among everyone she knew only sheseemed to be aware of whats wrong The feeling of realizing that despite what everyone else issaying to you, you know in your heart that the.

way you actually perceive the world is in factreal, is a fairly universal experience among transgender or gender non-conforming people Seeingthe way both Maeve and Bernard react in varying levels of bargaining or denial of seizing controlor giving up entirely has felt very visceral almost painful at times When it comes to theWachowski sisters Matrix series the allegory has always been there In her 2019 book Females: A Concern writer Andrea Long Chu breaks down the theory.

Anderson has a double life and a maddeningsense that something is off about the world Once he finds a new group of friends who introducehim to a new reality he adopts a chosen name: Neo Neo has dysphoria, the matrix is the gender binary,the agents are transphobia, Long Chu proposes before going on to suggest that the red pill couldsymbolize hormones Lily Wachowski said in 2020 Im glad people are talking about the Matrixmovies with a trans narrative and Im grateful I can be part of throwing them a rope along in theirjourney, she continued.

Im glad that it has gotten out that that was the original intention The worldwasnt quite ready for it The corporate world wasnt ready for it In Katrina C Roses articleabout Bicentennial Man she notes that the ending of the film mimicked that of a real-life courtcase about trans rights that very same year in 1999 Bicentennial Man was released barely sixweeks after the San Antonio Texas court of appeals made up law to suit its political ends Declaringthat a different sort of transition was beyond the pale for law and society.

More than a few transpeople noticed the parallel In a review of the movie two decades ago I confessed that I couldntdecide whether the movie, and for that matter the Isaac Asimov novelette on which its based, hada happy ending or not At the age of 200 as he lay dying his requests returns the same court nowwith different judges and finally with a different outcome In 1999 I left the theater crying, knowing that none of us have 200 years to wait.

*calming meditative music plays* I think its important to be conscious that welove shows that depict fictitious debates about the rights of androids, but the governments inthe U S specifically refuse to give marginalized groups, specifically Black and trans people theirrights and recognize their humanity And even an allegory when robots coded intentionally or notfor marginalized groups get freedom that freedom rarely changes the status quo In Pixel PerfectLoretta disappears In Chobits Chii and Hideki get to live their life on their own terms yes, butthe rest of the persecoms remain servants.

And in Bicentennial Man they declare Andrews humanity onlyafter hes dead The freedom that’s given to Andrew and Chii specifically is made on an individualbasis, rather than to robots as a whole because Andrew and Chii are special cases Andrew along withGalatea are some of the only robots who display consciousness Chi is a chobit not an everydaypersacom and the only one of her kind left.

So their individual identities pose less of athreat to society than if there was a collective of sentient beings demanding rights, meaning thatthe endings can be wrapped up more easily without the ruling class ever needing to really give upanything These works cant imagine a world where all robots and humans peacefully coexist and that’should be kind of telling for how it works in the real world when it comes to members of other-edgroups In other media however, the fight for freedom is a bit more fruitful.

In Westworld Arnoldsacrifices himself for the freedom of the hosts and years later Dolores and Maeve are able tofinally gain their freedom and take back the world for their own kind realizing that theyremore powerful than any human could ever be In Ex-machina Ava leaves Caleb, the good guy, to die Knowing that hed just tried to possess her and is finally able to go outside and see what theworld is all about.

But in stories that have happy endings for both sides it usually ends withlittle actual change for robots as a species In this video I discussed the evolution of the fembottrope and how and why we now see fembots not as villains and replacements for human women, but assympathetic beings who deserve to be free and how that metaphor should work to be more inclusiveand sensitive racially, and how fembots and robots.

in general can sometimes be seen as representativeof the trans experience Let me know what you think of the fembot trope down in the comments below andIll see you all in the next one! Thank you so much for watching and thank you to my amazing patronsand members Ill see you all in the next one bye 🙂