notes.husk.org/likes images.

Top, Ellie Krakow, Nude From Behind (view 1), 2010, Aqua resin, wood, sandbags, 90 x 62 x 32 inches. Via. Bottom, screen capture from Beyond Love And Evil, directed by Jacques Scandelari, 1971. Via.

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Looking back over movie history, it is difficult to find a female robot/android/cyborg who hasn’t been created (by men, of course) in the form of an attractive young woman – and therefore played by one. This often enables the movie to raise pertinent points about consciousness and technology while also giving male viewers an eyeful of female flesh. (…)

Being literally objectified women, female robots have traditionally been vehicles for the worst male tendencies. Invariably, inventors’ ideas of the “perfect” woman translate into one who is unquestioningly subservient and/or sexually obliging. A Stepford wife, to cite the best-known example. Or, as Blade Runner dismissively labels one female replicant, a “basic pleasure model”. The trashier end of sci-fi movies is littered with these basic pleasure models: they cater to wealthy males’ urges in Westworld, they’re traded like used cars in Cherry 2000, they go-go dance in gold bikinis and prey on wealthy men in Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, which inspired Austin Powers’ fembots, with their weaponised breasts. They’re all programmed to flirt. (…)

Maybe that’s the real problem: robot movies are supposedly futuristic, yet most of them peddle antiquated myths and gender stereotypes. It’s not as though nobody has imagined future scenarios that go beyond all this. Feminist academic Donna Haraway’s influential 1985 essay A Cyborg Manifesto suggests that boundaries between male/female, human/machine or even human/animal are no longer relevant. There is no “natural”. We are all cyborgs, in the sense that we are all “theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism”. Our bodies integrate with technology all the time: medicine, artificial limbs and organs, vehicles, sex toys, communications technology, especially the internet. Biological models no longer apply. “The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the Oedipal project,” Haraway wrote. “The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.”

Steve Rose, Ex Machina and sci-fi’s obsession with sexy female robots From Metropolis to Her, sci-fi films are filled with cyborgs modelled on sexually obliging young women – but not all androids dream of electric sex, for the Guardian, January 2015. Via.