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The Western cultural fascination with artificial women is ancient, dating back to Ovid's tale of Pygmalion and his love for an ivory statue that is eventually brought to life by the goddess Venus. The number of subsequent plays, novels, films and other media based on this theme, from Olympia in E.T.A. Hoffman's 'The Sandman' (1817) to Maria in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), and from Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives (1973) to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), shows how deeply the artificial female is rooted in Western cultural conceptualisations of gender and the nature of women:
Narratives of female automata and their appeal (as women better than the originals) have surprising consistency. In addition to functioning as the perfect servant/domestic worker, the robot wives of Stepford [...] ever willing sexual servants to their 'masters'. The robot wives are love dolls with shapely figures, busty and gorgeous enough to leave their live models in the shade. (Paasonen 2005: 50.)
It is has almost become a truism to argue that our societal obsession with female androids - or gynoids - is a nightmarish extension or logical conclusion of masculine fantasies of female objectification and patriarchal domination. This is not a new argument. Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology (1978) discussed technology as a method of patriarchal oppression; a product of this is what she terms a 'fembot' (Daly 1991: 17): a symbolic female robot that is the cornerstone of male domination of women through technology, as well as a kind of role model perpetuated by patriarchal society for women to aspire to (Daly 1991: 37-40). There is a long-standing historical precedent within women's fashion to approximate as much as possible an inhuman or artificial level of physical flawlessness similar to that presented by a doll. Women have in addition been expected to carry out their domestic activities without betraying the reality of their own effort or suffering, from maintaining a spotless house to keeping the traumatic and painful business of child bearing away from the eyes of men. Women have been, and in many ways still are, expected to carry out their lives in a mechanical manner, to give the appearance of a flawless, tireless being that can fulfil the many and often contradictory expectations of society. Women must be warm,...