Extended Thoughts On Sexy Robots

Video courtesy of Sady Doyle, who marvels that "people will seriously not stop making sexy robot girls."

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.

Doyle describes Roxxxy the sex doll:

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.

Besides the scary robot voice, Roxxxy is nothing new.

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