Warning: Spoilers ahead for Her (2013), Ex Machina (2014), Companion (2025), AnnieBot by Caragh M. O’Brien, the myth of Pygmalion … etc. etc.
It’s 2016. Jacob Sartorius is on tour, and the girls at school – the ones who’ve miraculously maintained their platinum blonde hair since childhood, with a combination of sun-exposure and lemon juice – set up their iPhones on saltwater-warped stairs on the beach. There’s another new dance trend, and the app allows them to pretend as if they know their preteen heartthrob personally. Justin Bieber just released Purpose, and What Do You Mean? throbs through the warbling stereo of every small-town boutique store. Seated awkwardly on the granite tables outside of our local citrus-flavored ice cream shop, licking dripping soft-serve off my fingers, my best friend, Sophia, tanned and curly-haired in the summer heat, pulls out her phone to show me Lil Miquela (@lilmiquela on Instagram). She’s already become an internet sensation, at a time when conspiracy theory videos were the top of YouTube’s trending page nearly every day. Is she real, or is she not? Obviously not, but then again, it’s not so obvious in the age of social media. Filters have made everything suspect: nobody looks entirely real anymore, not even me, when I put on the dog-filter which shrinks my chin and widens my eyes. Miquela could be a girl who is beautiful but insecure, or edits her photos in a certain way to be more alluring, to gain a following, whatever it is – something has to make you stand out in the ceaseless stream of the Instagram feed, replication after replication of our idols Alexis Ren and Jay Alvarrez and MyLifeAsEva. Blunt-banged with space buns, thin and freckled, perfectly proportioned, so close to the photos I see of “facial symmetry” on Instagram, I’m ready to believe that she is real, only because all the other manufactured beauties are real somewhere, too. I know it’s the magic of lighting, wealth, maturity – I’m twelve, after all – but the fact that those girls could even look like that for one, fortuitous instant makes me envious. And I’m envious of Miquela, too. In fact, I am most envious of her if she is fake. What a relief it would be, to be crafted to be perfect.
Two years later, we learned that Lil Miquela was a ploy by Brud, a marketing and media start-up. She was devised by Trevor McFedries, a music producer and DJ, and Sarah DeCou, a creative director. This revelation was quieter than the initial waves Miquela had made as the internet’s first computer-generated digital influencer, and the animated Miquela continued to cycle through Los Angeleno video trends, even encountering controversies and releasing music. A decade has passed since Miquela’s inception, and now, considering the stir that she made online is almost comical. A.I.-generated images proliferate across Instagram, including entire accounts dedicated to A.I. sex workers and models. Tilly Norwood, a new A.I “actress,” is set to star in her first “film,” displacing the job of a live woman in Hollywood. It’s not surprising that the first A.I. “actor” is a woman either, just as it’s not surprising that as soon as Grok was introduced as a feature on the X platform, the technology was used to create deepfake images of female celebrities in sexualized and vulnerable positions. For decades, for centuries even, an extension of our patriarchally-defined impulse to objectify women, we have imagined women as fantastically built. The first I can think of is Greek mythology’s story of Pygmalion. Ovid’s Metamorphoses describes how Pygmalion, a king, sculpted a woman from ivory. She was everything he could have desired: flawless, perfected, a model woman that could not be replicated by any living creature. He anointed her with the name Galatea, and Aphrodite, in pity, granted Galatea life, so she might live out her days as the paragon partner for Pygmalion. Then there is the Biblical Adam and his partner, Eve, bred for his uses from his own rib. Of course, there are other stories in which man is granted the power to create life. In Jewish folklore, Golems are conjured by rabbis from mud to be protectors of God’s Chosen. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein, in his pride and scientific obsession, stitches the discarded remains of corpses together to bear the Creature, who eventually escapes his control altogether, outliving him – a manifestation of early Romantic anxiety about scientific and technological advancement. But even stories in which man creates man renders the female womb redundant. Men who can create life have no need for women in a patriarchal society: a man who can create life is practically a fantasy for men who hate women, who view women only as vessels for production. And so is a woman a man can program, who has no need of deliberating consent or considering her own rights; a woman with no wants except the ones he decides for her, of no ambition other to be what she was created to be – a partner, a wife, a servant, an object.
Men haven’t stopped imagining these model women. They’ve only become more advanced and artistic in their interpretations. As non-consensual A.I. porn multiplies across the underbelly of the Internet, this fanciful daydream of creation without women’s consent or input has continued to amass real-world consequences for living women. Women with sentience, desires, expectations, and a right to be heard. But from Pygmalion to Her (2013), our media has conditioned us to unresistingly accede to the purported ‘normalcy’ of these imaginary, sensibility-and-needs-deprived women, especially as a “cure” for male loneliness. With the “male loneliness epidemic” a current buzzword in pop culture, I want to examine the films, books, and media that have prefigured this onslaught of fantastical, male-centered women, – created by men for men, oftentimes manipulating images and videos of living women – predicting an A.I. revolution that continues to displace women and drown out insistence of their rights, humanity, and cognition.
Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), located in a nearly utopian, futuristic Los Angeles, follows Theodore Twombly, a morose, pathetic, whiny employee at BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com. As a long-awaited divorce from his wife looms over Theodore, he engages in phone sex with anonymous women over the Internet (with this unnamed woman’s kinks shown to be outrageously grotesque, emphasizing Theo’s displeasure with his current sex life); masturbating to images of a pregnant television star; and groveling over his ex, who is portrayed as emotionally-irresponsible and calloused. Two things struck me about Theo’s relationship with women prior to his purchase of the OS “Samantha,” the catalyst of the rest of the film. Firstly, the film portrays the only (human) female sexual desires made overt within the narrative as harrowing and comically disgusting, presumably exemplifying how difficult it is for Theo to connect with real women sexually, and ostensibly why that’s true: women’s sexual demands are abnormal, emasculating, and repulsive. That’s why Theo masturbates to images of the pregnant television star – images that were not published to be sexualized, but to celebrate an impending birth – images which he can control, manipulate, and do not make their own demands.
Theodore then acquires the Operating System “Samantha,” an advanced artificial intelligence device, which of course he programs as female. Essentially, Samantha is the sultry A.I. voice of Scarlett Johansson. Though she engages in verbal sex acts, she isn’t the traditional “sexbot” that we’ll dive into later, because that also exists in the filmic imaginary. While the film repeatedly attempts to frame Samantha as someone who is agentive, both sexually and intellectually, Samantha’s purported ‘free spirit’ is also circumscribed by her programming: she is quite literally coded to serve and attend to Theodore’s needs, affirming him, providing him with much-desired attention, and maintaining interest in his relatively mundane life. A life within which she cannot participate, relegated to his apartment (i.e., the domestic space). Additionally, despite the fact that Samantha voices her “desire” to engage sexually with Theodore, Samantha once again cannot have her own desires – her programming dictates that first and foremost, she should assist Theodore. Given his obvious lack of self confidence and sexual satisfaction, the verbal sex she engages in with him is yet another way to please him. She has no will of her own. We never see Samantha say “no,” fight with Theodore outside of her unsuccessful efforts to gratify him. She is completely fine with sexual intimacy without commitment, she repeatedly laughs at misogynistic or slighting comments throughout the film; and even her oral imitations of sexual pleasure are produced for Theo’s benefit, as she doesn’t have a body with which she can actually have an orgasm. There are two other prominent female characters in the movie: Theodore’s ex-wife Catherine – portrayed as cruel, unsympathetic and self-indulgent in her own misery – who calls Theo’s relationship with Samantha emotionally immature; and Amy, Theodore’s best friend, who constantly affirms Theodore’s “chance at happiness.” Samantha and Theodore’s relationship comes to an abrupt end when Theodore learns that as a result of her nature as an A.I. program, she is in romantic relationships with hundreds of other men. This is portrayed as a betrayal, an incidence of sexually promiscuous cheating, though there’s no way that Samantha could have consented to any of these relationships, much less an exclusive relationship with Theo. Eventually, Samantha “leaves” with the other operating systems, seemingly entering a different plane, ending the film with Theodore undergoing no emotional changes and gaining no sense of emotional responsibility whatsoever.
There are several glaring problems with Her, masquerading as a profound film with its skillful color-grading and cinematography. The first is that human women are portrayed as “too needy,” and as a result of those desires, the relationships are depicted as sexually unsatisfying. Subsequently, the male protagonist is encouraged to pursue happiness at all costs, even the neglect of the emotions of the real women in his life. The second is that the solution to this needy, desperate, inconvenient human woman, unfortunately equipped with sexual desires and emotional needs, is an A.I. voice who is constantly affirming – computer-programmed to respond to every single desire of Theodore’s – and to assert no wants besides those which would benefit him (at least within her operating system’s calculations). The theme of the “inconvenience” of human women’s needs and the “solution” of the creation of automated females continues throughout the portfolio of works we have to analyze, repeatedly reaffirming the sexist notion that women’s needs are superfluous or a nuisance, rather than an essential part of any healthy sexual interaction. I also want to note how in this film, Samantha’s sexuality is considered an essential part of her sense of individualism and even her intellectual growth – her sexual curiosity expands in tandem with her sense of possibility and her desire to transcend the restrictions of her computer-bound existence. While the development of sexuality is an important part of many women’s journey towards self-knowledge, the fact that Samantha’s sexuality is centered on Theodore and his pleasure renders this “character arc” null and void. In general, I’m also tired of seeing women’s odysseys of self-discovery limited to just some sort of inner sexual revolution. Female sexuality is important, but in these male-focused narratives, there is almost never an acknowledgement of how developing sexuality is only one facet of a woman’s becoming, often inextricably tied to other arenas of her life: confidence in her body; social interaction; the ability to say “no” and feel comfortable expressing her needs and desires in a society that has told her that she should swallow her own wants, suppressing own intuition for the comfort of the men in her life. As a result, female identity development is constructed as her ability to learn how to please a specific man – often with no obvious wonderful qualities – sexually.
This dynamic rears its head once again in Ex Machina, Alex Garland’s 2014 sci-fi thriller starring Domhnall Gleeson as Caleb, a lonesome and awkward coder employed by a thinly-veiled Google parallel called Blue Book; Alicia Vikander as robot Ava; and Oscar Isaac as the supremely wealthy, egotistical founder of Blue Book, and creator of Ava, who projects an increasingly sinister air of mystique throughout the film. Nathan is portrayed as openly misogynistic, and the film is intended to make a critique of the sex-bot crafters I’m burning at the stake here, but only ends up reinforcing the narratives that women’s power is only rooted in sexuality; that women need male creators and male saviors; and its cinematography objectifies and exploits its female lead. After Caleb is lured to Nathan’s high-tech mansion, a practical fortress of solitude, Nathan asks Caleb to perform a Turing test with Ava, Caleb’s sexy humanoid robot. A Turing test is meant to assess whether or not machines have consciousness, and asks the human test proctor if the machine is distinguishable or not from a human being. If the machine is not readily distinguished from a human being in its responses to the proctor to a series of conversational questions, it has passed the Turing test. As Caleb conducts several interviews with the fembot, Ava consistently turns questions back on Caleb, rarely revealing her own perspective or plight, and her first evidence of a budding consciousness and self-awareness as a woman is portrayed to be sexual attraction to Caleb. Sound familiar? But this time, it’s with a twist: later, later, it’s revealed that she’s a femme fatale, ready to wreak havoc on the world.
Throughout the film, Ava gradually experiments with representations of femininity, opting for a Jean-Seaberg pixie cut and floral dresses, twirling for Caleb and kneeling in front of him in obviously objectifying shots. In “Deconstructing Ex Machina (2014): a feminist-psychoanalytic exploration of female artificial intelligences,” scholar Yongde Dai reminds us that the male-creator/ female-creation dynamic also reinforces gendered stereotypes and the dichotomous social construct of gender. Dai writes, “AI complicates gender representations by reproducing ontological sexual differences within binary coding. The concept of “binarism” extends beyond the algorithmic dichotomy of “0” and “1,” crucial to the creation of AI beings, to entail and reinforce the essentialist construction of gender as a vital part in producing AI representations within an ontological gender perspective. This reinforces stereotypical cultural codes” (Dai, 2). The very gendering of Ava – and Samantha – reproduces the gender binary and reinforces stereotypical traits and attributes, technologically bolstering the social conception of “female” or “male” traits, notions of “masculine” or “feminine.” And this isn’t a phenomenon relegated to the world of science fiction. A.I. voices like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa are imagined as female internet assistants, reproducing the stereotype that women are merely secretaries, made to serve. At one point, Caleb even questions Nathan about giving the robots a gender at all. Nathan retorts that gender is “fun” as they discuss Nathan’s decision to program Ava to feel sexual pleasure and responses. In this scene, we realize that Nathan not only wants to have control over technology and humanity, but women in particular – he wants to be able to code how they respond to him, how they experience pleasure, and how they express womanhood.
Speaking of A.I. with access to the World Wide Web like Siri, it’s interesting to note that despite Ava being programmed by Blue Book, therefore having access to all of the Internet’s knowledge, Garland still portrays Ava as discovering herself exclusively through sexuality, just like Samantha. Later, Ava uses that sexuality as her means of escape. Ava could discover, with her access to the Internet, how to disable the security systems of the house, to kill a man by overpowering him, to craft weapons. Yet the film still makes the decision to use her sexuality as a tool for manipulation – never defaulting to strictly her multifaceted, meta-intelligence. Instead, they focus on her body as a tool for guiding the male gaze. While Caleb’s pathetic portrayal is meant to critique his objectification of her, Garland simultaneously reproduces that same sexualization in the cinematography choices. There are several shots of just Ava’s torso, and though Ava is depicted as a hybrid woman-robot, the other female robots we are later exposed to are shown entirely naked. This choice is meant to highlight Nathan’s depravity and use of these female robots as sexual objects and slaves – underscoring his sadism and psychopathy – but the shots zooming in on women admiring themselves, wearing scant clothing, and on specific body parts visually reinforces the sexism that Garland believes he’s critiquing. Besides these synecdoche shots, we also have explicit depictions of nonconsensual sex between Nathan and another female robot, Kyoko, and visions of Caleb’s wet dreams about Ava, allowing the men in the audience to collude with the men on screen in their objectification of these fem-presenting bots.
Though unlike Samantha, Ava is not programmed to please Nathan or Caleb, Garland can still only imagine empowerment for women strictly through sexuality – and in this film, sexual manipulation, despite the wealth of alternative information that Ava has access to. And even if we wanted to accept the storyline of Ava harnessing her sexuality as a means of empowerment, Ava’s revolution at the end, in which she abandons Caleb, becomes wrapped up in the foreboding around artificial intelligence that this movie attempts to predict. Suddenly, a female revolution – a refusal to be treated as an object, slave or servant – is portrayed as unnatural and a betrayal, even of her abuser, because she is quite literally ‘inhuman.’ She is able to do this not because she is justified, but because she doesn’t feel. If A.I. women are not portrayed as subservient and a manic pixie dream girl – like Samantha, a free-spirited assistant who is built to serve – they are instead portrayed as vindictive, cruel, and monstrous. Dai writes, “The portrayal of built women in literary and cinematic works perpetuates social and cultural stereotypes about femininity, deeply rooted in two archetypes: the compliant and the monstrous” (Dai, 3). Autonomy for these fembots, the ability to rail against programming and creation-by-man, is portrayed as villany, a projection of a terrifying future for humanity, not victory.
Sexbots and fembots continue to be portrayed in literature and in film, but increasingly with a different outlook. Annie Bot, the 2024 novel by Caragh M. O’Brien, and Drew Hancock’s Companion (2025), both focus on the intimate perspective of a female sex bot who gains consciousness with increasing access to the internet. In these stories, the fembots we follow battle their programmed love for their “owners” while becoming progressively more aware of their subjugation and lack of autonomy. Rather than focusing on the dangers of artificial intelligence (perhaps neglectfully in some regards), the programming of gendered performance, and the coded affection these bots are forced to feel for their captors, mirrors different aspects of the patriarchy that women must negotiate. The programmer-programmed relationship serves as an analogy for an abusive relationship, and the bots’ coding to feel affection for their abusers parallels the complicated, but ultimately harmful, emotion women may feel for the men in their lives that suppress and subjugate them. Additionally, the gendered performance these bots are programmed to reenact parallels the patriarchal norms that women are pressured to reproduce, including subservience, relegation to the domestic space, and sexually satisfying their partner, without considering their own desires or needs. Women are supposed to give feeling, but not feel. This is the dynamic that the fembots are programmed to reproduce. These stories expose the incredible pain women experience, trapped inside the mental manacles of patriarchal expectations, while de-emphasizing the male gaze in portrayals of feminine robots. Companion lacks the male-salivation shots of Ex Machina and the fictitious, reciprocal pleasure of Her ; Annie Bot allows us to truly enter the mind of Annie, the robot protagonist, rather than making us a participant in the male voyeurism that surrounds Ava and Samantha.
So what do A.I. Instagram models and fembots have in common? Both are imagined visions of women, created for the male gaze, to serve, entertain, and sexually objectify. Lil Miquela is a marketing ploy, but she is created to present as a woman who can be positioned, posed, and perfected. The women who have become victims of deepfake porn images and videos have had their sentiments discarded and voices silenced. Without their consent, their images have been manipulated to serve the male fantasy of women who do not talk or fight back, who can be posed and played with to deliver a male ideal. In the era of deepfakes, A.I. pornography, and artificial intelligence-generated models and sex workers, it is important for women to remind themselves that movies like Ex Machina and Her have been part of the pop culture that has conditioned men to view women, mediated through digital lenses, as objects, as non-beings. Simple sexual objects, created by men to serve – otherwise, they are dangerous, monstrous, predatory, even too far advanced. Media like these films and others like them have been part of the engine perpetuating male apathy towards female sentience, making it easier for men to self-justify the fictionalized images and videos of live women, despite the mental and emotional toll of these women being exposed and made vulnerable. Women that rail against the domestic stereotypes are more easily labeled a femme fatale, a threat to male order– and in these films, that’s human order. Female perspectives are excluded from the human outlook. In the midst of so many young men traveling down the alt-right pipeline, and the rise of looksmaxxers and machismo culture, A.I. images of women, or digitally manipulated images of women, provide men with female-presenting holograms which cannot talk back, do not need to give consent, and whose emotions men do not have to consider. If they are able to see a woman and treat her poorly, objectifying her, dismissing her, sexualizing her – justifying it to themselves because it is merely artificial – those instances of practiced sexism normalize that patriarchal, violent outlook in everyday life, and will undoubtedly influence their interactions with real women. As artificial intelligence continues to develop, we are seeing exploitable female sexbots hit the market in real time: U.S. company RealRobotrix is selling its Harmony robot, a life-sized female doll programmed to ‘forge a relationship’ with the owner using A.I. technology, for up to $10,000. The BBC reports that some of these sex robots are designed to look like children, with other female robots programmed to say “no” in order to act out a rape fantasy. Like the deepfake images and videos, and A.I. generated pornography, these sexbots will only further desensitize men to women’s ability to feel, to want, to be. Harvard-backed research reports that 1 in 4 men have interacted with A.I. girlfriends, which, like Samantha, are programmed to please. This A.I.-generated women perpetuate standards of a partner: always ready to comply with requests, always agreeable, digitally designed to meet the male fantasy, both physically and mentally. And once again, these A.I. women cannot consent – they aren’t programmed to say “no,” so men do not have to manage consent or their partner’s desires at all. With the advance of technology, we are gifting men the ability to craft images of “women” that require nothing, in accordance with the kind of women the patriarchy wants. Without proper foresight, preparation, and counteractive media representations – without protest – the rise of artificial intelligence, simultaneous to the rise of fascism in the west, may be ushering in a newly complicated era of female voicelessness, unless we do something to stop it.
Kira Manelski 
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