Lady Robots: The Shape of Things to Come On

[Dave Monroe]

Friday, November 12th, 2010
Lady Robots: The Shape of Things to Come On
by Sady Doyle on November 12th, 2010


So, here's another story for you. It's grimmer than the last one, but
we tell it almost as often. It goes like this: She's perfect. She's
perfect because we made her perfect; because everything about her is
entirely within our control. She's your long-lost love, your new and
improved wife; she's the girl you never got over, or the girl you
could never have. And now, she loves you. She has no choice; loving
you is what she's for. Until, one day, she gets too smart. She starts
thinking in ways she's not allowed to think. She gets political. And
that's the point at which she decides to kill you with her giant metal
fists.
The fear of robots is the fear of the twentieth century. They're
industrial, they're scientifically advanced and they tend to solve
their problems with nuclear weapons and machine guns. Technological
progress makes our lives easier; technological progress has enabled
horror and death and unspeakable injustice; we tell stories about
killer machines. Simple. But then, the twentieth century is about
progress in more than one way, and so are killer robots. They're
servants that won't serve, beings that we let into our homes because
we thought they'd regard us as their superiors, whose compliance we
took for granted until it vanished. Race and class are some of the
more obvious implications; the killer robot story is, in many of its
iterations, very much like entering a Kaufmanian portal directly into
Pat Buchanan's head. And, of course, on the long list of labor-saving
devices that started to malfunction dangerously in the past hundred
years or so, we have to include women.

For one thing, we have to include them because people will seriously
not stop making sexy robot girls. They are, according to many
reputable sources, including David Levy's Love and Sex With Robots
(eeriest feature: repeated references to The Stepford Wives without
apparent acknowledgement that it was a horror movie). You've seen the
dancing girls. You may know about Aiko, a Canadian robot who is being
designed to work as a receptionist, attend to routine domestic tasks
and fake orgasms. (Why anyone would want to make a mechanical,
Canadian simulation of your early twenties, I have no idea.) Last
January, we saw the release of Roxxxy, the TrueCompanion, who is “the
world's first sex robot.” She has an expression like someone who's
recently been hit in the face with a very surprising brick, five
“personalities” and a backstory you cannot anticipate nor shield
yourself from. Once you've read the phrase “inspiration for the sex
robot sprang from the September 11, 2001 attacks,” you've turned a
corner in your life.


“She can’t vacuum, she can’t cook but she can do almost anything else
if you know what I mean,” said Douglas Hines of Roxxxy. When you learn
how little a female-looking thing has to do in order to be considered
capable of “almost anything,” you learn something about being female.
To be fair, Hines is reportedly working on a male version of the doll.
Also to be fair, the male version isn't getting that much attention.

The fembot, and the weird but unignorable demand for it, so precisely
encapsulates the worst fears of women that it's maybe inevitable that
women are finding ways to rewrite and inhabit her. Donna Haraway
crafted an entire feminist manifesto around it. We currently live in a
Lady Robot Renaissance; from the conflicted, tragic, yet perhaps
inevitably stripping-and-gymnastics-centric models of Blade Runner and
the ugly-pretty, performative-gender-kills heroine of Tiptree's The
Girl Who Was Plugged In, we seem to have evolved a whole matriculating
class of politically aware, mechanically enabled girls. They're often
scary, of course. Robots usually are.

Let's start with one of the first robot girls on film: The central
character in Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Her story is fairly simple. In a
prosperous, unjust city, we have a mad scientist and a rich jerk who
enjoys oppressing workers. The natural next step, of course, is to
perfect robot technology and invent a mechanical lady. However, the
rich jerk and his son have an adversarial relationship, based largely
on the fact that the son does not enjoy oppressing workers and in fact
is dating one, a lovely girl named Maria who preaches non-violent
resistance. The rich jerk decides to make the sexy robot look like his
son's girlfriend. Robot Maria is instructed to incite violence amongst
the workers, and to give Rich Dad a chance to oppress them some more,
which she does. Just prior to whipping up revolt, she pauses to
demonstrate that she also has a deep enthusiasm for stripping.
Disaster ensues. Like I said: Simple.

The film's political history is a strange one; it was heavily
influenced by Marxism, but reportedly beloved by Hitler. Lang turned
down an offer to join the Nazi party; his wife and Metropolis
co-writer Thea von Harbou did join the party, and they divorced. But
the one thing this story proves is that symbols change meaning
depending on where you stand. After everything, the people who have
claimed Metropolis most eagerly have been female pop stars.

Here are some of the ladies who have overtly referenced or dressed up
as Robot Maria, in recent memory: Kylie Minogue, Beyonce, Lady Gaga
(via Queen), Madonna in the “Express Yourself” video and Janelle
Monae, whose entirely amazing first EP and album (The ArchAndroid and,
duh, Metropolis) are dedicated to reimagining the story with a Monae
clone as messianic hero who has politics like Maria, mechanical parts
like Robot Maria and the peacemaking role of the rich son. We should
also probably add Robyn to the list, if for no other reason than her
insistence that fembots have strong feelings and deserve respect even
when they are “initiating slut mode.” Women, performance, sexuality,
resistance: The combination is so potent that lots of folks forget
that the robot is actually the villain of the piece.

But the hot robot villain keeps coming back. At first glance, the
Cylon girls in the Battlestar Galactica remake looked fairly standard:
They were devoutly religious, they suicide-bombed everybody and they
existed in a TV series that was not afraid to include blatant visual
parallels to 9/11 and the Iraq War. Robots as the disenfranchised and
feared group of the moment; you know how it goes. They were also
played, most prominently, by a slinky, hissing Victoria's Secret model
and by Grace Park; for the first season they stalked around seducing
white male heroes to achieve their own diabolical ends while aslo
seeming to not to have a valid point when it came to hating humans.
That, however, was before we saw the humans setting up rape rooms for
Cylon prisoners. As the story progressed, we spent more and more time
listening to these women (and Dean Stockwell—and, later, the Hidden
Surprise Cylons), letting them debate politics, seeing why a robot
who'd been imprisoned and/or tortured and/or raped and/or had her baby
stolen and/or watched the humans work out a few genocide plans and
suicide bombings of their own might just conceivably have a hard time
believing in the redemptive power of But Now You Are Married To A
White Guy. It was unbelievably risky, and generous: They set up an Us,
and a Them, made both sides monstrous, and then told us to get over it
and care about these people anyway. To believe in all of them
nevertheless.

That's the position from which the series' TV prequel, "Caprica,"
starts. (Let us now pass over the remade "The Bionic Woman." Are you
passing over it? Have you let it pass? There, it is done. Also we will
not be discussing the Terminator Summer Glau.) "Caprica" starts as a
riff on Metropolis: In a prosperous, unjust city, we have a mad
scientist who is also a rich jerk, and his wacky depressive lawyer
buddy Mr. Adama. Their daughters die. The next natural step is to
perfect robot technology and create computerized copies of these
daughters. This is aided by the fact that the scientist's daughter,
Zoe (with whom he has an adversarial relationship, of course) is even
sciencier than her dad, and has already created such a copy.
Unfortunately, Zoe winds up in the body of a much-abused giant killer
robot, and the second daughter, Tamara, is trapped in a violent video
game where she becomes a messianic figure, which is much easier to
take seriously while you're watching it. Also unfortunately, Zoe
believes in a one true God who endorses suicide bombings. You already
know where at least one of these girls is going, and it's not good.
Which is probably exactly why it got cancelled recently; who wants to
watch a story about a bunch of girls having disastrous upbringings and
making tragic choices when there aren't even any space battles
involved?

“The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the
illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism,”
wrote Haraway, adding, “illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly
unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are
inessential.” Unbelievably, she was not recapping "Caprica." That's
just where we are, at this point in the story. Those girls that start
thinking impermissibly, well: Maybe they're wrong. Maybe they're as
scary as the robot girl from Metropolis, the unredeemed model; maybe
they're full of rage and bad ideas. But they're our daughters, and
fathers are rarely inessential in practice. We didn't make girls
perfect; we made them to be what we wanted. If they want to be
masters, to live in a world where only one set of desires is valid,
they take after us that way. They're still showing us what we want.
The key is to want something better. The key is to want something
more.

http://www.theawl.com/2010/11/lady-robots-the-shape-of-things-to-come-on

Roxxxy True Companion

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhvlD7Z0b2Y