By Lisa Fary
Ever since Fritz Lang put Robo-Maria on screen in Metropolis, robotic women have had a bad time in sci-fi.
Robo-Maria was a copy of the real Maria, a workers’ crusader in the grossly unequal society where capitalism has run unchecked. And what happened to Robo-Maria? She became an exotic dancer and was burned at the stake. But, it could have been worse for Robo-Maria. The blank slate gynoid nearly ended up a sex toy for a mad scientist.
Ever since, gynoids have, for the most part, continued to be sex toys and servants. When they rise above those roles, they remain socially awkward, easily overcome by that thing called love, oversexed, or chock full o’ crazy.
You know, the way many women in sci-fi are written. Here’s a rundown.
Servants
| Rhoda – My Living Doll | |
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Before Julie Newmar was Catwoman, she was Rhoda, a robot built by the military and given to an Air Force shrink to learn how to be the perfect woman. This being 1964, Rhoda’s “perfect woman” curriculum included housework and obedience. |
| Rosie the Robot Maid - The Jetsons | |
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Visually, Rosie is hardly recognizable as female, except for her giant grandma ass and French maid cap and apron. Her basic structure is androgynous, but with a minor costume change, Rosie the Robot Maid could easily have been Robert the Robot Butler. |
| Dot Matrix – Spaceballs | |
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Princess Vespa’s governess/nanny/Droid of Honor, fully programmed with a Virgin Alarm. |
| Rachel - Blade Runner | |
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It’s questionable whether Replicants are robots outright, but they are manufactured and considered products. Rachel’s function was as personal assistant (kind of a white collar servant) to Eldon Tyrell. |
Somewhere Between Servant and Sex Toy
| The Stepford Wives | |
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I’m not sure what men think of The Stepford Wives (and I really don’t think I want to know – I’m afraid too many will think it’s a good idea), but it’s horrific to women. Women in the suburb of Stepford are killed and replaced with docile robot lookalikes that always look perfect and will never age. They’re intellectually uncurious, have no interests of their own beyond housework, and guaranteed not to fall under the spell of women’s lib. |
Sex Toys
| Pris – Blade Runner | |
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Pris is a “basic pleasure model” Replicant produced to service military personnel. Basically, a military sex slave. After that kind life, I’d try to break Harrison Ford’s neck with my thighs, too, if he came to retire me. |
| Zhora – Blade Runner | |
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Upon escape, Zhora worked as a stripper. Supposedly, she was part of a murder squad, but when Deckard came to retire her, she put up little fight. If she were genuinely trained to kill, wouldn’t she have fought more like Pris? |
| Cherry 2000 | |
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Cherry 2000, the ultimate erotic companion, demonstrates the trouble with electronic sex toys: when they get wet, they short out, and then you’re forced to go on a post-apocalyptic road trip with Melanie Griffith. Good sex aside, dudes should be more freaked out by the juxtaposition of junk and electrical appliances. I’m just saying. |
| Buffybot | |
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Not as heinous as a Stepford Wife, but still pretty creepy. Spike commissioned the creation of the Buffybot because the real Buffy was unattainable. To his credit, he didn’t have her programmed to be a mindless domestic goddess – Buffybot retained quite a bit of the original’s knowledge and slayer tendencies, but with additional “Make Spike Happy” programming. |
Subcategory: Oversexed
All of the re-imagined skinjob Cylon babes. These hot babes will nuke your civilization then take you aboard a Basestar for a lifestyle of threesomes and naked ballet. If you’re lucky, you just might see Tricia Helfer kiss herself.
Plagued By Feminine Weakness
| Cameron - The Sarah Connor Chronicles | |
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Cameron nearly ended up in the “Sex Toy” list. She was reprogrammed by the human resistance, but it’s unclear just how close she was to General John Connor or just how far her reprogramming went. |
| Eve VIII – Eve of Destruction | |
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If you’re going to build a robot in your likeness, maybe you shouldn’t program it with your sexual fantasies and daddy issues. But, what else can be expected of a woman scientist? When military robot Eve VIII malfunctions and goes rogue, she begins acting on her creator’s memories and feelings. Of course, this usually ends with Eve VIII killing someone for something stupid, like calling her a “bitch”. |
| Galaxina | |
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Who wouldn’t fall in love with silent gynoid with the looks of a Playboy Playmate? Sgt. Thor of the Infinity did just before he went into cryogenic sleep for a long flight. Galaxina is in love, too, and spends the next 27 years reprogramming herself not to taze Sgt. Thor when he kisses her. She also programs herself to speak, which I’m sure Sgt. Thor was thrilled about. Thrilled. Really. |
Breaking the Mold, Kinda
One gynoid who doesn’t fall into any of the above categories, but is still one-dimensional is the T-X from Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Hardly a role model, but single-minded killing is better than servitude.
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My search for a non-degrading female robot in film and television yielded only one positive result: Annalee Call, the Betty’s android mechanic in Alien: Resurrection. She’s hot like Winona Ryder without being a sex toy. She’s scrappy without being single-minded. She doesn’t crush on any member of the crew. Annalee Call acts like a fully thought out character.
Why am I not surprised that she was penned by Joss Whedon?
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Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.
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Lisa Fary's earliest influences are Princess Leia, Rainbow Bright, Astronaut Barbie, and her 6th grade teacher, Ms. Palmer. She's angry that it's 2011 and she still doesn't have a hovercraft, but will accept a jetpack as consolation. That jetpack had better be pink with a rhinestone monogram. 
So science fiction + tv + popularity = star trek = crap. Got it!
Of course! How else can we explain Nemesis?
[laughing] I’m happy we’re on the same page on this one.
If they do end up doing the Star Trek Pinnochio plot with Cameron, I’m going to be very upset. I liked what the actress said a year ago about “I think it’s more interesting to explore my character’s inhumanity than her humanity, because she doesn’t have any humanity.” I like to think that she had at least an inkling of what the producers were up to when she said that. As such I’d like to think her emerging emotions are part of a larger plot, and presumably a scam on the part of the Terminators, rather than an emerging Blue Fairy in the programming.
@ Hoobajoobah: I disagree with you on this one, only because the whole point of making a robot a character is to explore its humanity. Creating a character implies that the character has, well, a CHARACTER, which can only happen with human traits. There are plenty of robots in sci-fi without human characteristics, but they are either boring, like the “Terminatrix” (which you yourself called bland), or they’re non-main characters who could care less about human beings, like the old Cylons on BSG. It would be impossible to have an interesting robotic character WITHOUT giving it some humanity, and that usually comes in either human “programming” or an evolved desire to be human. The movie “AI” was intersting to me, because while the AI in question was programmed to love, and programmed to have human reactions to things, we never saw it in a “non-human” state. We were only given access to its humanity, which is why we feel so sorry for him, and why his story can carry a movie.
I don’t know what it is in Cameron’s case yet, but it’s one of those, and that’s why she’s so interesting. The most poignant scene of hers, to me, was when she was dancing ballet – something that a machine isn’t supposed to be able to do with so much feeling. Here we have a terminator appreciating art. That’s a big deal.
@ Alpha-Girl: I LOVE the word gynoid. And I never would’ve thought that the word android should only apply to male robots until you used this word.
Oh, no, the old-school cylons from the ’78 show had personality. We saw the chrome ones express fear (“Oh no!”, “Uh-oh!” etc.), we heard about them grumbling about throwing their lives away needlessly. We saw them express shock – not confusion, but shock – and that’s just the Centurions. The IL series models we saw (Lucifer and Spektre) were very machiavellian and speculative, entirely geared towards their own advancement with the least exposed risk. They lied, cheated, schemed. The Imperious Leader himself (Both of the ones we saw in the show) showed anger, frustration, petulance, and even a bit of pretention. And then there were the civilian cylons that we only got a glimpse of, but seemed to act more or less like people would in similar situations.
A bit of dialog from the show that always jumped out at me:
Lucifer: What you request will be very hard on our pilots.
Baltar: What do you mean ‘hard’ on them? They’re machines, they’ll do what they’re told.
Lucifer: They will do what they’re told, but we are all machines, Baltar, even you. You are simply a machine of a different kind.
I *Love* that!
I respectfully disagree about the point of AIs being to ‘explore their humanity.’ I think that’s what they’re commonly used for, but I think that’s a copout. There’s no reason to assume that just because an alien or a machine looks human, it thinks or acts like a human. Particularly when it comes to machines, since our thinking is remarkably inefficient on a lot of levels. I think machines can be sentient, but think *differently* that we do.
Wasn’t that the old pulp definition of SF? “Give me something that thinks as well as a man, but differently…”