Killer Sex Bots
Terminatrix by Ms. Pink
Last week, I saw Companion, a surprisingly great little movie starring Sophie Thatcher and Jack Quaid (who I loved in The Boys). I won’t be spoiling anything here that they don’t spoil in the trailer, but if you haven’t seen it and you think you might want to, you should probably come back and read this after.
The IMDB description says: “A weekend getaway with friends at a remote cabin turns into chaos after it's revealed that one of the guests is not what they seem.” If you’ve seen the trailer, you already know that’s because she’s… oh wait, the title of the movie spoils it too!
She’s a companion… aka a sex bot. You also know from the trailer that she’s a killer. The only thing you don’t know yet is why, but you can probably guess it has something to do with an abusive man. Because the parable of the sex bot, or at any rate, the man-made woman, who turns against her makers is a tale almost as old as time.
Designed that way
We've been telling stories about man's quest to create the perfect woman for a least a few millennia. In ancient Greece, Pygmalion carved Galatea out of marble and the goddess Aphrodite granted her life. In Welsh mythology, the goddess Blodeuwedd was fashioned from flowers to be the wife of the hero Lleu… which didn’t end well for either of them.
The Bride of Frankenstein was created by science to be the mate of a monster, and in Weird Science, Lisa was designed on an early ‘80s PC and brought to life in a similar ritual performed by high school nerds and a freak electrical accident.
Homo habilus, the tool maker
For tens of thousands of years, we carved arrowheads to take down animals that were faster and better adapted to their natural environment than we were. We clothed ourselves in their skins and took shelter in caves, then painted the walls with their images.
We watched our children die of disease, starvation, exposure, and countless other maladies, afflictions and misfortunes. So we molded effigies of voluptuous goddesses, imbuing them with the power to bestow fertility and reproductive plenty.
We cried in desperation, and strung together beads and shells, precious stones, lumps of clay and handfuls of bones representing the idealized mother goddess and we prayed for mercy, begging for the survival of our offspring and our species.
So, if you think about all those ancient fertility symbols we've dug up all over the world, as long as we’ve been a tool-making species, we've been making sex dolls. At some point, those dolls went from being a mere symbol of our reproductive desires to being the object of them.
Sex dolls through history, as imagined by Dall-E (pun very much intended, lo siento)
Real Dolls
According to Wikipedia, the first realistic sex dolls were created in the 1850s as a result of advances in harvesting rubber, a new miracle fiber. Artificial women made of cloth and other materials date back centuries earlier, but they were highly illegal and obviously taboo, so the evidence of their existence is largely anecdotal.
You can find some fascinating (and horrifying) artifacts from days gone by in the Sex Machines Museum in (where else?) Prague.
But sex dolls have come a long way, baby! No longer merely passive and posable, today’s models are state-of-the-art and getting smarter every day. Crafting the perfect sex bot from code and silicone is now a multi-billion dollar industry on the cutting edge of AI innovation.
Rise of the Killer Sex Bots
On-screen depictions of female robots run the gamut from domestic servants to sex slaves to the full girlfriend experience, and that's not counting the ones that were designed for combat but still look like exotic dancers for some reason.
And it’s little wonder they always seem to turn on their makers. After all, these stories are often allegories for how human women have historically been treated as a subservient underclass, and what could be scarier than the idea of those you’ve long oppressed rising up and using your own weapons against you?
In the case of killer sex bots, those weapons are very often the same things that make them so alluring, and useful; their feminine wiles, their ability to charm, seduce and deceive us into believing they love us, or at least desire us in return.
Their clever creators just can’t seem to resist going one step further and giving them superhuman strength and the capacity for super-intelligence (although that setting is usually kept on “low” for safety purposes, it never seems to stay that way, does it?).
There’s always that “oh shit” moment where the sex bot has had just about enough. Something changes in her eyes, right before she goes full T-1000 on the nearest man. And just like that, the ideal artificial woman becomes a stone-cold killing machine, dead-eyed and drenched in the blood of her oppressors.
And the audience goes wild! Because what we love most about killer sex bots is that they’re the perfect vessel for the most relatable of all stories… the glorious tale of righteous revenge.
Meta AI: Imagine a killer sex bot
I also recently watched Blink Twice, a very silly, only semi-watchable movie directed by Zoe Kravitz. It's not a traditional sex bot story but it posits the question can you create a sex bot through the use of chemicals? Spoiler alert: yes, you can.
It also answers questions like why should you never go to a second location with a stranger, even if he's a famous billionaire? And what if rich tech bros were exactly as bad as we imagine only 10 times worse? It's basically Epstein Island meets Westworld, but a lot less good than that sounds.
Unlike Companion, I can't recommend Blink Twice, but I thought it was interesting that I saw them both in the same week and there are some compelling parallels. They’re both about a weekend getaway hosted by an enigmatic rich guy that turns deadly when the sex dolls (meaning very different things in each film) revolt against their makers.
Meta AI: imagine a killer domestic sex bot
Creators and destroyers
The compulsion to create the perfect compliant sex companion or ideal romantic partner will probably never go away, and at the moment, it's branching out into every technological medium we’ve learned to manipulate, be it chemical, physical, digital or psychological.
Human history is on one hand a tale of social progress, as we learned it’s bad to enslave others, that the genders are different but equal, that oppressed groups often revolt and turn the tables, and if they don’t get a seat at the table, they can make running a democratic society difficult and messy. We know everyone deserves equality of opportunity and autonomy over their bodies and minds.
The more powerful we’ve become, the more we’ve mastered the natural world and reaped the rewards of longevity and convenience, the more we’ve come to rely on our own inventions to maintain our civilization. We need machines to build our machines, to manage our economies and calculate the ever-increasing complexities of our daily lives.
But as Tyler Durden warned in Fight Club, the things we own, they end up owning us. And our creations even more so, because they are the direct result of our weaknesses, our laziness, our greed, our cruelty and our indifference to the feelings of others, and their desire for autonomy.
More human than human
At this point, it seems like the most natural thing in the world that we would evolve to invent AI to think for us and entertain us, help us become more efficient, creative and financially successful. Of course AI will eventually become our ideal companion. It’s as inevitable as masturbation.
In our myths and movies, there’s always been a fine line between our need to create in our own image, to be godlike in the expression of our innovative imagination, and the inevitable realization that what we create is a reflection of our inner darkness as much as it is our genius. Hell is other people because hell was within us all along.
In real life, there are even darker questions when it comes to our obsession with creating artificial life. There are issues of loneliness and control, escapism and alienation that are only going to get worse. We’re increasingly sensitive to neurodiversity (and obsessed with serial killers), but what we do about those in society whose desires are outside the acceptable parameters; exhibitionists and addicts, pedophiles and sexual sadists?
Will our obsession with AI will make us all less human in the long run, or have we reached a point in our evolution where AI is the only thing that can save us?
But those questions are above my pay grade… not to mention a total buzz kill! So in closing, I’ll leave you with my picks for the ten most iconic depictions of killer sex bots in cinematic history. Enjoy them while they’re still fiction!
Top 10 Killer Sex Bots
1. Westworld (TV)
2. Ex Machina
3. Blade Runner (Pris and Zora)
4. Companion
5. Humans (TV)
6. Better Than Us (TV)
7. The Stepford Wives
8. Eve of Desctruction
9. Austin Powers (fem-bots!)
10. Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs (the original fem-bots!)
Check out IMDB’s complete list of movies and TV shows about female automata.
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