If there’s one constant in the long cinematic history of the “fembot”—or the sexy feminine android—it’s that these domestic playmates always break down. Whether they’re cooking a man’s dinner, watching his children, or keeping him company in the bedroom, these lovely woman substitutes have a nasty habit of going rogue, blowing a gasket, and giving the “master of the house” what’s coming to him.
Like the majority of films and books in the genre, the “monsters”—fembots in these films—are vehicles to explore the cruelty and depravity of humankind. In the cases of recent films on this subject, Black Eyed Susan and Companion (now available on VOD), this exploration is an on-the-nose indictment of toxic masculinity and everything that comes with it, namely misogynistic violence and sexual entitlement. What gives these fembot films an extra level of uneasy salience are the recent real-life developments in artificial intelligence. Plenty of people are researching and exposing the negative impact of generative AI on virtually every professional and creative field, as well as on the environment. That being said, it appears that the social ramifications of this phenomenon are still not being discussed enough.
A Reality Closer Than You Think
The topic of “fembots” and AI “girlfriends” largely remains within the context of fiction, which is a problem because these things do actually already exist. As early reporting has already shown, men are acting out abusive behaviors onto these bots, and it has the potential to lead to real people (especially women and girls) being harmed. These sci-fi films, though, still highlight the issue in ways that merit serious consideration.
In one recent and typical example of the fembot genre, S.K. Dale’s Subservience from 2024, Nick (Michele Morrone), whose wife is terminally ill, finds himself seduced by his robot cleaning woman/nanny, Alice (Megan Fox), in a reimagining of films like Ex Machina. In that film, the android’s interest in her human owner is presented as alien and threatening, though their initial encounters are mutual, an allegorical narrative which allows the male protagonist to elide the responsibility for his infidelity by virtue of Alice’s “inhumanity.”
More pointedly, though, in Scooter McCrae’s Black Eyed Susan, which also premiered last year, the titular fembot is created to allow men to act out their most depraved and violent fantasies without the boner-killing specter of legal consequences like jail time for domestic abuse. The titular fembot, Susan (Yvonne Emelie Thalker), is essentially a high-tech sex-doll-punching-bag hybrid, programmed to provoke men into abusing her, ostensibly so real women don’t suffer the same violence.
Meanwhile, Companion’s fembot heroine Iris (Sophia Thatcher) is leased by a self-proclaimed Nice Guy™, Josh (Jack Quaid), who only seems to want easy sex and eagerly given female validation. He’s not habitually sadistic. But in a scene featuring two repair technicians from Empathix (the company that developed Iris and others of her ilk), the more senior tech informs his newbie partner that they sometimes get customers who rent or buy the bots for the sole purpose of torturing them, blowing them up, and proving the masculine dominance they feel has been taken from them by the feminist movement and “woke.”
Men’s Current Relationship With “Digital Girlfriends”
Reports have shown that men are using AI models to create “girlfriends” for the sole purpose of abusing them. As described in one piece in Futurism, these men take pleasure in generating docile “women” on sites like Replika and berate them. “Some users brag about calling their chatbot gendered slurs, roleplaying horrific violence against them, and even falling into the cycle of abuse that often characterizes real-world abusive relationships,” reporter Ashley Bardhan explains, quoting one anonymous user who takes pride in his “routine of me being an absolute piece of shit and insulting it, then apologizing the next day before going back to the nice talks.” The article concludes that while AI “women” are neither sentient nor capable of real emotions, “for some [users], they might be more like breeding grounds, places where abusers-to-be practice for real life brutality yet to come.”
In an interview with Dread Central, Hwi-Eun Ban, a consultant for the UN working on AI ethics and governance, elaborated on the potential harm of these types of AI-human interactions using the real-life example of deepfake porn and so-called online “humiliation rooms” in South Korea. As early as 2019, she said, this phenomenon—an extension of sites like Replika that incorporate deepfake pornography—allowed men to “request deepfake porn of specific women in their social vicinity (whether it is in their school, their workplace, or even their family) for the purpose of ‘humiliating’ them internally.”
While in theory these sites permit men to vent social frustration without harming real-life women (as in Black Eyed Susan), for Hwi-Eun, the issue is one of desensitization:
“74% of deepfake pornography consumers do ‘not feel guilty’ in their actions [according to a 2023 survey]… AI porn segregates the personhood from the body, embedding a societal/cultural implication that the body can be viewed/consumed/and even somewhat ‘owned’ by another person since they are only ‘using’ the body for their personal purposes. This detachment is detrimental as it desensitizes (young) people from perceiving and comprehending human identity.”
Inherent in this dehumanization of the female body is the associated decline in perceptions of personhood for the women whose bodies are being digitally represented. Alongside the rise of incel communities both online and in real life, whose violence against women has earned them the classification of a domestic terrorist group, the danger in this phenomenon is obvious. Subsequently, a 2024 study found that 98% of deepfake pornography targets women, speaking to the urgency of this rapidly expanding industry which caters to the violent appetites of the kind familiar from incel forums.
Of course, it doesn’t end with images and videos. Sex doll companies, like RealDoll, can customize their products to resemble real people. In November 2024, internationally recognized NBA player Lamar Odom freely admitted to the world, through an episode of the podcast We’re Out of Time, that he bought a custom sex doll that looks like his ex-wife, Khloé Kardashian… for his ”mental health,” of course.
“A sex doll that looks like your wife is about mental health,” he said. “It’s sick, but I think we’re all a little off, a little weird. They’re gonna make it to look like her. I need like, a harem.” To drive the point home even further, Odom’s manager, Gina Rodriguez, told TMZ, “Lamar thinks this Khloé-like sex doll will be perfect—because he can do whatever he wants with her sexually.”
The Need For The Perfect Woman
Odom is far from original in his misogyny and method of (virtual) dehumanization. Scores of un-famous men before him have fetishized androids and have purchased non-AI sex dolls to not only use as a tool for self-gratification but also to “date”, motivated by what a scholar described as “men[‘s] love [of] gadgets and something they can control.” One expert in the 2012 documentary on both of these real-life scenarios, The Mechanical Bride, put it succinctly: “Every time a man does try to create the perfect woman, you have to ask why they’re not satisfied with the women who exist already.”
In Companion, Josh’s stated interest in having an AI-powered fembot girlfriend. Though not (initially) violent in its motivations like the characters in Black Eyed Susan, it nevertheless speaks to these concerning developments. Iris is explicitly paralleled with the docile housemates of The Stepford Wives—the film’s opening sequence takes place in a grocery store, and Drew Hancock replicates some of the earlier film’s shots as his protagonist wanders the aisles—which is telling, if not particularly subtle.
Josh, as evinced by his troubled relationship with the human women in the film, is seeking a girlfriend who will make him feel superior, comfortable, and powerful. While he doesn’t verbally abuse Iris, it’s clear that he’s designed her for maximal servility (and with a mere “40% intelligence”). His past relationships, he complains, typically ended when the woman decided that he wasn’t a good enough partner, either lacking motivation, prospects, or empathy.
With Iris, he doesn’t need any of those things. His spare bachelor pad and self-proclaimed lack of interest in coequal relationships don’t sit well with real women who have interests outside of him, but not so for Iris, whose programming mandates that he be the uncompromising center of her universe. He can even turn her off when he tires of hearing her talk. Another benefit: He doesn’t have to concern himself with her needs in bed.
While Josh seems to go out of his way to defend Iris from the condescension of his friends early in the film, this proves more of a self-congratulatory smokescreen (a way to prove his own “Nice Guy” status) than an actual way of showing affection. This can be felt in the couple’s interactions even before it’s revealed that he’s framing Iris for murder, though the mechanics of this scheme are so violently misogynistic (he creates the conditions for a rich man to rape her, knowing she’ll act in self-defense) that his niceties are proven obliteratingly hollow.
Enter The Tradwife Fembot
In a moment when women’s reproductive rights are being existentially threatened, the Tradwife phenomenon has blurred into the political mainstream, and Republican Congressional candidates can openly espouse the belief that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, Josh’s chauvinist worldview and the sexual-violence-by-proxy it permits are chillingly familiar. At one point midway through Companion, Josh’s friend and murderous partner-in-crime, Kat (Megan Suri), tells Iris that her dislike is nothing personal. “You just make me feel so… replaceable,” she explains. Kat may not be anyone’s idea of a “good woman,” but her fear that men will choose a passive plaything over a real woman given the option gets to the heart of the kinds of problems we may face as these fembots become more of a reality.
If women’s bodies can be so cavalierly commoditized, unwillingly and unwittingly replicated by technology as vacant objects of lust, women’s agency, their personal selfhood, becomes questionable to those who do so, in addition to the legislators who already push a culture of feminine “docility” and subservience.
The idea that someone could buy a sex doll that resembles you, without your consent or even your knowledge, is already nauseating on its own. But factoring in context about the doll owner’s previous relationship with the human model, such as in the case of Odom, it becomes even more profoundly violating and grotesque. This is more than garden-variety post-break-up disrespect. It’s a grim evolution of an ex-partner disseminating your intimate photos, depicting you in situations to which you never consented and perhaps never would. Spending a small fortune to commission an advanced masturbation sleeve that’s a dead ringer for an ex (or any other person) is a deliberate and vicious statement: “I still own you. I can use your body any way I want to, and there’s nothing legally stopping me from doing so.”
The Slippery Slope of Fembots Advanced Pleasure Technology
In a conversation about non-consensual explicit AI-generated content and life-like sex dolls, we would be remiss not to also address the growing concerns around advancements in “pleasure tech” and the safety risk it can pose for society’s most vulnerable. In a stomach-turning scene towards the end of Black Eyed Susan, the head of the fembot company, Gilbert (Marc Romeo), reveals that, in addition to dolls that resemble adult women, the company is planning to develop a line of models that look like children for pedophiles. His justification, given as he rides in a limo with an actual human child, is that the availability of this line would give sexual predators an outlet and thus protect real children from harm—for a hefty price, of course. Gilbert’s explanation is questionable at best, and he clearly both knows it and doesn’t care: He’s all about the bottom line.
The question of whether or not child-resembling sex dolls can curb abusive behavior is not a new one. When something, or someone, poses a threat to children, it’s natural to want to seek solutions that eliminate, or at least reduce, the risk. But in this case, many believe that the proposed strategy of child-bots would do the exact opposite and increase the likelihood of children being preyed upon.
A Disturbing New Trend
Predictably, data surrounding this is not in abundance. But we did find a study from 2022 titled Exploring the Ownership of Child-Like Sex Dolls. The study, conducted by Rebecca Lievesley and Craig A. Harper, examined the self-reported behaviors and attitudes of 205 men who “either a) owned at least one child-like sex doll, or b) were attracted to children but did not own any form of sex doll.”
Lievesley and Harper found that:
“[R]elated to offending proclivities, doll ownership was associated with lower levels of sexual preoccupation and self-reported arousal to hypothetical abuse scenarios, but higher levels of sexually objectifying behaviors and anticipated enjoyment of sexual encounters with children… Although self-reported arousal levels (both in relation to responses to hypothetical child sexual abuse scenarios and general levels of sexual preoccupation) were lower among doll owners than non-owning MAPS [minor-attracted people], we found no differences between the groups in self-reported behavioral intentions to engage in child molestation or in self-reported past offending behaviors… Although we found that doll owners engaged in more objectifying behaviors… and reported a greater level of hypothetical enjoyment in abusing a child (as compared to MAPS who did not own dolls), we found no evidence of an increased proclivity to engage in sexual abuse.”
While Lievesley and Harper’s study is provocative, they clearly state that one of the major limitations of the study was the reliance on self-reported data. In other words, as of yet, there’s really not a lot of data to either support or refute the argument that Black Eyed Susan’s Gilbert presents.
In addition to physical dolls, there are similar discussions surrounding AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM). According to the Internet Watch Foundation’s July 2024 report, there was a significant increase in AI-generated CSAM from a previous report in October 2023. Even more disturbingly, IWF reported a rapid increase in “new imagery of known victims of child sexual abuse or famous children” generated by AI.
A Rapidly Changing Relationship With AI
Taken together, recent films like Subservience, Black Eyed Susan, and Companion speak to a rapidly growing real-life issue in our accelerationist age of big tech and newly pervasive AI. As guardrails on this technology are already being dismantled by a highly tech-friendly administration, it becomes even more important to explore the ramifications of these technologies on vulnerable populations like children, as well as women who face an ever-growing antifeminist backlash and increased legislation of their bodily autonomy. At the same time, it becomes easier for men to commoditize their bodies online without their consent. Dystopian visions like these are fictive, but predicated on pressing realities.
Plus, at the very least, revenge narratives like Iris’s are undeniably cathartic when viewed not as the triumph of technology over humanity, but as women’s allegorical emancipation from chauvinists’ control. Josh never really owned Iris, after all.
Categorized:Editorials
