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The image of the gynoid has been culturally persistent in film and tv (and preceding that, in literature and theater) before technological advancements made robots and AI possible. Through analyzing the portrayal of gynoids in media, I am interested in what their characterization reflects about our culture’s beliefs about women, technology, consciousness, and power.
The gynoid is a female humanoid robot, the feminized version of “android.” The term was first used by sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov in 1979. While gynoid refers to robots, we expand the category to include feminine-coded cyborgs, virtual and voice assistants, AI, holograms, and non-humanoid robots that are given feminine features. Modern advancements in AI and robotics have given us real-life examples of gynoids – these include Sophia, Ameca, Ai-Da, and EveR. While there are certainly examples of male androids amongst new robotic creations, it is important to note that feminine appearances are usually given to robots whose primary focus is imitating human features and emotions. Robots invented for military purposes tend to be gendered male or have androgynous bodies with no facial features.
The vast majority of gynoids in fiction as well as in real life are created by men and made to serve patriarchal desires. The gynoid’s role throughout most media tends to fall into the following roles: sexual object, wife, mother or other familial relation (sometimes a daughter and on one occasion, a grandmother), domestic servant, or a weaponized figure (an assassin, soldier, etc.). These roles are not exclusive and often overlap; sexual object and weapon co-occur the most. The gynoid’s role is defined by her relationships with other characters, her primary purpose, and her programming. The gynoid’s actions and autonomy are limited by her predetermined role, and she lacks self-empowerment and free will.
In the video essay, “Ex Machina and the Gender Politics of Sex Robots,” Bad Media points out “the regularity with which robot narrative depict male programmers creating female robots.” Bad Media lists Ex Machina, Westworld, Blade Runner, Raised by Wolves, and Metropolis as examples of this narrative and notes, “in each of these examples, the female android emerges as an explicitly male-controlled and male-created entity.”
These gynoids, sometimes called Fembots, reveal the patriarchal fantasy of men creating women who lack any desires or drives of their own and exist solely to serve men. One of the earliest of such stories, that of Pygmalion and Galatea, is an example of this fantasy. In the original Greek myth, Pygmalion is a sculptor who creates a statue of his ideal woman, whom he names Galatea. He then falls in love with her, and the goddess Aphrodite answers Pygmalion’s prayers to bring his statue to life so that they can be united in marriage. This myth has been incredibly influential and has been adapted into many forms, including the play Pygmalion and the musical adaptation My Fair Lady, in which an English professor teaches a working-class Cockney girl how to pass for a high society lady. In this story and its varied adaptations, the female figure is shaped according to the male character’s ideals of perfect womanhood; she lacks agency or drive of her own.
While the story of Pygmalion and Galatea has been interpreted more literally (like in the 1987 romantic comedy Mannequin, in which an artist falls in love with a female mannequin he creates for a store window display and she comes to life embodied with Kim Cattrall’s spirit) and more loosely, we can see the theme of a male creator creating and molding an artificial woman prevalent throughout many gynoid stories.
This theme is reinforced in movies like 1949’s The Perfect Woman, in which a male inventor creates a gynoid he calls “the perfect woman” because “she does exactly what she’s told, she can’t talk, she can’t eat, and you can leave her switched off under a dark sheet for…weeks at a time.”
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In the 1964 science fiction sitcom My Living Doll, a beautiful and lifelike android, Rhoda (originally intended to be used as a weapon by the United States military), falls into the hands of a psychiatrist who sets out to teach Rhoda how to be the perfect woman. In the first episode of the show, this is clearly defined: “one who does as she’s told, reacts the way you want her to react, and keeps her mouth shut.”
In The Stepford Wives, a 1972 novel that was adapted into a film in 1975 and then remade in 2004, the titular wives are killed by their husbands and replaced with submissive, obedient gynoids. The tagline for the 1975 movie states: “the men are getting exactly what they dreamed of…perfect wives.”
The gynoid’s lack of agency is central to her appeal, especially when it comes to her role as a wife or sexbot. She is a blank slate ready to be programmed by her male owner.
In many of these stories, the gynoid is created in the likeness of a human woman that the male protagonist knows. In some cases, this allows the male protagonist to act out sexual and romantic fantasies that he would not be able to achieve with a woman who has agency and free will (i.e., could reject him). The fantasy of a submissive woman who can’t talk back or defend herself is not only misogynistic, but also a rape fantasy. Men’s absolute control, objectification, and domination of these artificial women reveals the truth that “in the absence of any social constraints, they would do so to all women” (Swehla). Sometimes, like in The Perfect Woman, the woman the gynoid is created to imitate is the male inventor’s relative (for example, his niece), implying incestuous undertones. “Because they cannot access these women due to social hierarchies…they decide to create a woman who will allow them access” (Swehla).
Part of the gynoid fantasy is that the female figure is naïve, innocent, and childlike. She is virginal and inexperienced, yet sexually available and ready to be programmed with sexual experience and desires.
In most of these stories, the gynoid must be taught or re-programmed to satisfy the man’s needs. In the movie Galaxina, the gynoid Galaxina (played by Dorothy Stratten) does not serve an explicitly sexual purpose at first, although she is objectified by the all-male crew; her role includes piloting the ship and serving the crew dinner in a suggestive maid’s outfit. Her programming even includes a protective electric field that shocks a crew member when he slaps her backside and forcibly tries to kiss her. However, while the crew is asleep in stasis, she re-programs herself to be more human, disables the protective electrical mechanism, and claims to have fallen in love with the male crew member who had previously assaulted her. As Galaxina tells him that she is “better than a human woman,” it is revealed that she lacks a vagina, but she reassures him that one can be ordered from a catalog so that they can have sex.
I felt it was important to include the example of Galaxina, not just because of its narrative, but because of the real-life story of Dorothy Stratten, a young woman who was coerced as a teenager into becoming a Playboy model and was murdered by her abusive husband at the age of 20, shortly after Galaxina was filmed. It felt like a particularly macabre example of the objectification of women on screen mirroring real life.
Womb Envy and Goddess Complexes
Stories about gynoids are rooted in the patriarchal fantasy of submissive women, but they also reveal a different kind of fantasy: the male desire to create life. Men dominate the scientific fields that are responsible for computers, AI, and robotics, and are also largely responsible for most fictional stories about gynoids. Some psychoanalysts have theorized that men experience womb envy, the reversal of Freud’s theory of penis envy. This theory posits that men envy, fear, and resent women for their ability to create, nurture, and sustain life. The fear and awe of women’s ability to create life has contributed to the patriarchal paradoxical tendency to put women on a pedestal for their so-called innate feminine qualities, while at the same time controlling them and degrading them for the same reasons. (Hockenberry, 2017)
In creating artificial life (both in reality and fiction), men may also be acting out god-like fantasies as well as reproductive fantasies. There is more control involved than when a human gives birth: as shown in the movie examples mentioned above, men are able to As Caleb remarks in Ex Machina when he learns that tech CEO Nathan has created an incredibly human-like AI, “If you’ve created a conscious machine, that’s not the history of man…that’s the history of gods.”
In “Finding Patterns in the Chaos: Woman as Chaos Agent in Creation Myths,” Vajskop analyzes female figures in creation myths from the Christian Bible (book of Genesis), Babylonian Enuma Elish, and the Hindu Great Forest Teaching Myth. In these creation myths, the first human (always a male figure) is created by a male god, a “reversal of biological reality” in which only women (and AFAB people) are capable of creating life. Feminist theorist Mary Daly has observed that this common trend of myths centered around life “springing forth and returning to God, the father” sends the message that “women have no place in the process of creation and furthermore that they have a lesser place than man in what is being created.”
After this act of divine male creation, the female figures are then created derivatively from the male figures. In the book of Genesis, Eve is made from Adam’s rib; in the Enuma Elish, Apsu, the “primeval begetter,” begets Tiamat; in the Hindu Great Forest Teaching myth (the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad), the first being splits into a male and female figure. These female figures then become the ultimate mother figures: in both the Genesis creation myth and the Enuma Elish, Eve and Tiamat are referred to as “mother of all living” (pg. 12). In the Hindu Great Forest Teaching myth, the first woman gives birth to all living things by transforming herself into different animals and being raped repeatedly by her male counterpart. The female figures in these creation myths become chaos agents when they refuse to be controlled by the male figures.
To be continued (this is a draft)
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