Episode 170: Transcript
Episode: 170: Forced Feminization and Cute Robots
Transcription by Alexander
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Annalee, when was the first time you ever saw a female coded robot, or let's say a gynoid?
Annalee: [00:00:07] Well, I was thinking about this a lot because you gave me an advance warning that I'd have to answer this incredibly detailed question. So I think it was the Fembots in the Bionic Woman TV show in 1976 when I was extremely young. And there's no way I had seen one before that. And it was a scary episode. It's like...
Charlie Jane: [00:00:27] Yeah, their faces fall off.
Annalee: [00:00:29] Lindsay Wagner’s friends are like, she thinks it's people and then their faces open up and it's like a computer inside with like creepy eyeballs. And they called them Fembots. And I really distinctly remember like being like, “whoa, some white blonde chicks are actually robots.” And so that was stuck in my mind.
[00:00:49] And then also in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, similarly, there is a hot woman, Ilia, who is taken over by V’Ger, the supercomputer. And uses her body kind of as an avatar. So that was another female coded bot for me.
[00:01:06] OK, so tell me about your feelings about early Fembot exposure.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:12] Actually, mine come from Star Trek as well. Original Star Trek, which was in syndication when I was a kid, had sexy lady robots in a few episodes that made a huge impression on me. Kirk falls in love with a sexy lady robot. And he's so heartbroken when he has to leave her that Spock uses a mind meld to erase Kirk's memory of falling in love with a sexy robot.
[00:01:33] In another episode, the USS Enterprise's main computer is reprogrammed to be more feminine and flirty. And it calls Kirk “dear”. And it endangers the ship because it's just so feminine. It's too feminine, Annalee.
[00:01:48] And actually, in one of the first ever episodes of this podcast, which we'll look back to in the show notes, we talk a lot about feminized robots and why so many robots are girly, which I think has prepared us to talk about The Wild Robot, one of this year's biggest movies, which happens to be about a lady robot.
[00:02:06] But first, we're going to talk about forced feminization and how women and femininity are represented in three huge recent movies, Barbie, Love Lies Bleeding, and The Substance.
[00:02:19] So you're listening to Our Opinions Are Correct, the podcast that tried to automate our gender and ended up bringing about a singularity in our pants.
[00:02:29] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm a science fiction writer. My next book is Lessons in Magic and Disaster about a young witch who teaches her mother how to do magic. Annalee, tell us about yourself.
Annalee: [00:02:42] I'm just having like a gender singularity in my pants right now. My name is Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who also writes science fiction. And my latest book is a history of culture war, which is called Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and The American Mind.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:01] More important and necessary than ever, unfortunately.
Annalee: [00:03:04] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:05] So in our mini episode next week for our Patreon supporters, we'll be talking about the new Star Wars show Skeleton Crew and that blue elephant guy. We love that guy.
Annalee: [00:03:14] Yeah, we love him.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:15] And if you want to get on that, you can go to patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. OK, let's get feminized.
[00:03:24] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Charlie Jane: [00:03:55] All right, so before we start, let's just acknowledge there will be some spoilers for the movies Love Lies Bleeding, The Substance and Barbie. We're not going to try not to get too specific, but we will talk about the endings of those films. So if you haven't seen any of them and you think you want to see them before being spoiled, just go do that.
Annalee: [00:04:14] Do it right now.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:15] Do it now. Watch the movies.
Annalee: [00:04:17] So Charlie Jane, you need to just like walk us through what is forced feminization.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:25] OK, so the term forced feminization comes from a genre of erotica that used to be popular, you know, mostly with closeted trans women or trans women who had not yet managed to transition. It refers to stories where a cis man is forced to become feminine and girly and eventually turned into a woman by a dominant person – usually a cis woman who, you know, uses blackmail or, you know, other means to to force him to be feminized.
[00:04:55] But this term is also useful for thinking about stories in general where femininity is imposed on anyone, including it could be on a cis woman in a somewhat coercive or imposing manner, which is kind of society in general, I guess.
[00:05:09] This can be benign. Like there's that trope in so many movies where a nerdy girl who has boring fashion sense is kind of required by the plot to be given a makeover that reveals that she's actually beautiful.
Annalee: [00:05:23] Yeah, I always call this “the girl takes off her glasses trope”. And sometimes actually it's not that she has boring fashion sense. Sometimes it's that she actually has really cool alternative fashion, but she needs to like be jammed into some fucking prom dress so that she can look like a regular girl. And then she has to get her hair color to regular color, you know, and not wear her glasses.
[00:05:45] Yeah, it's actually it is really coercive. And a lot of those stories, the nerdy girl is really awesome, but she's being bullied or in order to hook up with a standard heteronormative dude, she has to change her whole vibe for him because, you know, it's true when you're horny and you want to get laid. Sometimes you change your whole vibe, but that's not how the movies usually represent it.
[00:06:09] And I want to also add that the girl takes off her glasses trope – it’s still alive and well, but we now in the 21st century have a lot of counter tropes too, you know, so where they're like the nerdy chicks just like totally triumph and like get laid anyway. So…
Charlie Jane: [00:06:26] Yeah, it's true. Anyway, so often there's a girl who doesn't really want a makeover, but it's kind of pushed on her and then she ends up embracing it after it's happened because everybody's like, oh, you're so beautiful. And like, you know, the first Hunger Games book has a long, very detailed scene where Katniss Everdeen, the hero, is given a full body spa treatment to go with her gorgeous new dresses. And, you know, they give her a makeover and the tomboyish Katniss hates this, even though it is described lovingly, I would say, or it's described in a way that makes it feel like it could be a fantasy for many readers.
[00:07:00] A lot of wishful thinking fulfillment stories have that element of like kind of, oh, I don't, you know, it's unwilling, but ultimately it's happy feminization. And then there's the three movies we are talking about today. And this episode is really inspired by the fact that Annalee and I just watched The Substance starring Demi Moore. And so, Annalee, can you tell us what The Substance is about?
Annalee: [00:07:20] Yeah, The Substance is kind of in that sub-genre of horror movies that you may be familiar with from cult classics like The Wasp Woman. And it's about how there's some kind of new magical substance that can make you young again. And it's marketed to women who are of a certain age, but are required to look beautiful and dewy and feminine for their jobs.
[00:07:47] So in The Wasp Woman, she's a cosmetics executive. And in The Substance, the main character is this kind of weird amalgam of actress and fitness influencer…
Charlie Jane: [00:07:59] She’s got an Oscar, but now she’s doing a fitness show. It’s like Jane Fonda, basically.
Annalee: [00:08:04] Yeah, the movie has a lot of 1980s vibes, and I think they are kind of riffing on Jane Fonda. But the long and the short of it is the Demi Moore character, who's the aging actress / fitness influencer, is being fired because she's not young enough. And she sees this ad for this thing called The Substance that's going to make her into a younger, better version. She injects it in a really horrific, body horror-ish scene where a younger version of herself – not her as a young woman, like a different beautiful young woman, erupts out of this like grisly vaginal opening in her spine and takes over her life.
[00:08:41] And the premise of the film, or I should say the kind of constraints of the film that kind of allow all the horror to erupt, is that she can only be her younger self for seven days. Then she has to go back to being her older self for seven days. And then she can go back and forth, right? And of course, immediately you can see…
Charlie Jane: [00:09:00] Two different bodies and they have to alternate.
Annalee: [00:09:02] Yeah, they have to alternate kind of holding her consciousness. And so you can see immediately where this is going, which is that, of course, she wants to stay young and she's going to do all kinds of shenanigans to get there. And ultimately, this leads to some pretty grisly situations.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:17] Yeah, I've been thinking about it a lot. It's not made clear at all how this works. I think that when the younger version of her erupts out of her, that younger version has all of her memories. But from then on, they don't have a shared consciousness. They are two different people who have a shared set of memories from before the split. I think that's what happens. It's very confusing, though.
[00:09:38] And the ending of The Substance, which involves kind of a very public eruption, let's say, reminded both of us of the ending of another recent movie, Love Lies Bleeding.
[00:09:48] In that movie, Katy O'Brian plays Jackie, a bodybuilder. And this actually does take place in the 80s. Gets involved with a gym manager named Lou, played by Kristen Stewart. Jackie, the bodybuilder, takes a lot of steroids. And we end up with some pretty monstrous body horror imagery that did kind of remind me a little bit of The Substance.
Annalee: [00:10:07] A lot.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:08] Like bodies that are kind of bulging and like... And Jackie actually kind of becomes a giant woman at one point, which I think is like a fantasy sequence, but feels of a piece with all the other stuff we've been seeing. And then there's also this huge emphasis on Jackie's femininity and the fact that she has to represent femininity to compete as a female bodybuilder. And in fact, I found this clip where Katy O'Brian is talking to Collider, and this is how she describes her character.
[Katy O’Brian Clip] [00:10:34] I think Jackie was just this really kind of sweet, naive dreamer. And I loved that about her, but also had a bit of ferocity and maybe a bit of tragedy to her. And I think what was really cool when you put her and Lou together is Lou's very much like the only support I think she's ever had and very like grounded. And also there's like a really cool masculine, feminine juxtaposition where you've got a bodybuilder or whatever, and I'm all, you know, putting makeup on and doing my hair and being all cutesy, whatever.
[Interviewer] [00:11:05] He took care of you.
[Katy O’Brian] [00:11:06] Yeah, he took care of me. Thank you so much.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:08] And in the end, Jackie goes to Las Vegas for a bodybuilding tournament and tries to make herself look as femme as possible. And then there is kind of a horrible incident on stage that is very similar to what happens at the end of The Substance.
[00:11:20] And I confess, I have still not seen Barbie. I'm like the only person on the planet who hasn't seen that movie yet. But, Annalee, you felt like these two movies had some territory in common with Barbie, right?
Annalee: [00:11:30] Yeah. So I think it really all goes into that kind of final scene on stage. And in both The Substance and in Love Lies Bleeding, the scene is a kind of surreal body horror moment. We've had two women who want to be appearing on stage, showing off their bodies. And in order to do this, they've been gruesomely injecting themselves with something.
[00:11:58] In one case, the more realistic movie has it as steroids. In the speculative fiction film, it is the Substance. But either way, it involves getting on stage, thinking that you're doing great. And of course, at the end of The Substance, she has injected herself so many times that she's become this incredibly weird body horror monster. Kind of looks like the elephant man. The filmmaker said that she was inspired by David Lynch. And so this bulbous head with another head sticking out of her back. She has multiple arms. She's kind of lumpy. And she has these sagging breasts hanging from her body all over.
[00:12:38] And finally, she gets on stage on this show that she's been given the starring role in. The New Year's Eve show. Her younger self has been given the starring role. She's wearing this incredible floofy gown over this monstrous body. And she kind of spits a breast out of her head. Like it just kind of falls off of her head and splats on the floor. And she keeps saying, “but I'm just the same person. I'm the same person. Here I am.”
[00:13:07] And in Love Lies Bleeding, she's out on stage doing this bodybuilder competition. And she has this fantasy that she vomits her girlfriend up on stage. And then we kind of pull back and we see the people in the audience and we realize she's just barfed. You know, in real life, she's just kind of vomiting and she's yanked off stage.
[00:13:27] And in both cases, it's again, it's these women who are trying to display femininity in front of an audience, kind of erupting into body parts. And really, the ending of The Substance is great because when her body finally does fully erupt, she just sprays blood all over the audience.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:44] It's beautiful.
Annalee: [00:13:44] Now, obviously, Barbie is aiming for a very different vibe, but Barbie does slightly different. So there's no eruption of blood. Although, boy, I really would have liked to see that. Like that would have been a much more fitting ending for that movie. But instead, what we have is Barbie kind of stepping out on stage and giving just a speech about feminism and about what Barbie represents and what it means to aspire to have that kind of female body. And then the plot kind of degenerates into this weird, like liberal centrist ending. We're like, “well, the guys are OK. The girls are OK. We don't really know.”
[00:14:21] But the point is that Barbie's speech is aimed largely at this group of entertainment executives who we see kind of lurking in the real world and shaping Barbie and shaping little girls' perceptions of who they can be. And we see the same thing in The Substance, where the audience that she's barfing on and spraying blood on are these entertainment executives that pretty much the same guys. It's like a bunch of white guys in suits who are kind of controlling images of women.
[00:14:50] And so I felt like all three films kind of have this moment of staging women rejecting male executives images of the female body. So it's kind of it's a rejection of patriarchy, but it's also a rejection of capitalist manipulation of patriarchy, if that makes sense. So it's kind of both things. You know, it's like “we've turned patriarchy into a commodity and you are the commodity ladies.” And the ladies are like, “you know how I feel about that? I am going to just turn my body into a spray of blood.” And that is my feeling. Or if you're Barbie, “I'm going to turn my cute little face into something that is delivering this like kind of 1980s feminist lecture.”
Charlie Jane: [00:15:34] Right.
Annalee: [00:15:34] Either way, it's an unexpected thing coming out of your mouth and out of your body.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:39] Except, of course, in The Substance and Love Lies Bleeding, this is a moment of self sabotage. It's the moment where everything that the character has been working towards is ultimately like denied to them because they can't inhabit this archetype that they're trying to inhabit that, you know. And it's it's so complicated because it is about like both in The Substance and Love Lies Bleeding, they're athletes. They're doing exercise. Their physicality is important, not just in terms of like them looking sexy, but also them being able to do physical feats. And it's just like it's this impossible conundrum.
[00:16:15] Annalee, why are we seeing so many movies right now about feminization, coercion and monstrous bodies? All three of the movies we're talking about were made by female directors and center women's perspectives. And what is it that these movies are saying about having a female body in 2023, 2024?
Annalee: [00:16:34] I mean, I think it's a little bit of what I was already talking about, where women are kind of pressed into occupying these roles and occupying a particular kind of body that isn't comfortable, but they have to do it in order to make money or to get attention.
[00:16:52] And, you know, it's interesting because you were saying in the Barbie movie that speech isn't a moment of self sabotage. But in a weird way, it kind of is because giving that feminist speech consigns her forever to Barbieland. She cannot exist in the real world as a feminist Barbie. And that's made very clear in the film. I mean, it's kind of soft peddled in a way, but she has to be sent back to her little bubble where like women have more power than men.
[00:17:24] Meanwhile, the real world is kind of just unaffected. Like, you know, she gave the speech, she's banished. You know, because a big part of the Barbie movie is the executives trying to stuff Barbie back into the Barbie world because they can't have her out running around in the real world. It's going to interfere with commodifying her.
[00:17:44] I mean, it's not self sabotage in the same way. I mean, it's a very different genre of film, but it has a similar effect of removing her from the public in the way that she wants to be seen.
[00:17:57] So I think that these are all films about the anxiety of women being in the spotlight, women speaking, women telling the truth about their experiences. I mean, I think there's obvious real world events that are inspiring it. You know, the way women are treated in public, the way they're treated on social media.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:18] My mind went to just like all of these moves that are happening right now to control women's bodies. Like our whole politics right now is about trying to control what women can do with their bodies, what, you know, trans people can do with our bodies, obviously, but also cis women like reproductive health care, but also just access to basic health care of all kinds is being ratcheted down for women. And, you know, and I think that that turns into stories about women's bodies, both being hyper feminized and erupting into these like, you know, explosions of barf and gore and stuff.
Annalee: [00:18:52] Bodies being controlled by men. I also think, I mean, it's interesting that we started by talking about forced feminization and how that kind of has its origin in a trans fantasy, but then it becomes kind of a cis woman's nightmare. It makes me think of how so many of these bills in states that are banning trans health care are banning substances that are permitted for use by cis women, but they are not permitted for trans women.
[00:19:26] And it kind of sets up that same dynamic, like we're going to stuff estrogen down your throat if you're a cis woman, because if in any way your body starts to be like less springy or less reproductive, we don't like it. But if you're a trans woman, you don't get that.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:42] Yeah, I was just going to interject that actually, I think the girl takes off her glasses and the like, “oh, you have to have a makeover against your will.” That is a wish fulfillment fantasy for a lot of cis women as well. It's just like a dark wish fulfillment because it's like, “oh, you're actually going to love this once you have it. You just, you know, you don't know that you want it, kind of.”
Annalee: [00:20:01] Yeah. I mean, you and I were talking about this a little bit before the episode about the Cinderella myth. And you were like, “the Cinderella myth, it's so positive.”
Charlie Jane: [00:20:10] I didn’t say it’s positive. I think that it's a thing that a lot of people like…
Annalee: [00:20:13] Aspire. It's aspirational. Sorry. Yeah. You didn't say it's positive, but you said it was aspirational. I think it's aspirational. But like only if you think that like propaganda is aspirational. Sure. It's women are kind of tricked into wanting that. But once they've been tricked into it…
Charlie Jane: [00:20:30] Propaganda is aspirational.
Annalee: [00:20:31] Yeah, yeah. No, no, that's what I'm saying. It's like propaganda. It's like saying, “oh no, you definitely throw your whole life away for like this prince guy. Like, and who cares what your life is going to be? Cause you're going to have the prince, you know, like throw away your adventures with like mouse footmen and like fairy godmothers. Like who wants that when you could like, whatever, clean up your husband's poop or like stand in the background while he gets to do stuff.”
[00:20:56] Honestly, when I read Cinderella as a little kid, which I loved, I always only wanted my mom to read the part about the mouse footman and like the pumpkin. Cause I was like, “yeah, I want a mouse footman. Like I want to hang out with mice and like horses.” I was like, whatever about the ball and the shoe. It didn't even make any sense to me. Like I was like, “what's all that stuff? It's all about the mice.”
[00:21:24] So I wanted to go back to what you were saying about trans women and how they experience these stories. Like how do you see this fitting into, I mean, we have also this year had a really amazing wave of transgender horror tinged films too.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:40] We sure have. And I'm really here for it. You know, I mean, I think it's complicated among trans women who are fully transitioned. I always get the sense that like forced feminization stories are this kind of embarrassing thing that we don't really talk about because it's so weird and messed up.
[00:21:56] And you know, they are kind of an artifact of us not admitting what we want and being like, “well, you know, it's wrong for me to want this. So I'm just going to fantasize about someone forcing me to have the thing that I secretly want.” And like, it's obviously a thing that works for a lot of people in terms of like getting them past all of that stigma and that internalized kind of like all the barriers that are put up between us having the things that we want and actually being able to admit that we want them.
[00:22:25] Again, it's complicated because I think, you know, cis women who feel like femininity is kind of pushed upon them in that sort of like Price Waterhouse way of, you know, Price Waterhouse is this famous legal case about a woman who was forced to wear makeup and, you know, pantyhose at work because that was the dress code for women. And men got to just wear whatever the heck they wanted.
[00:22:47] And there also are, I think, cis women who feel like femininity is a thing that they aspire to. But society is told that they're the wrong type of cis woman. Like, I think it's super complicated for both trans women and cis women in that there is an ideal type of person who is allowed to be super feminine.
Annalee: [00:23:03] Absolutely.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:04] If you are not skinny and 20 years old and white.
Annalee: [00:23:07] Light skinned.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:08] Yeah. Then you are told that this is not really for you. And so the thing of like, “oh, but someone makes it for me somehow magically” is kind of a weird fantasy. It's complicated and it's a huge mess. And it makes me sad as someone who really enjoys being femme sometimes that this is not something that we're just allowed to unironically enjoy and not force anybody to have who doesn't want it.
[00:23:32] And yeah, I mean, you know, we police women's bodies so many contradictory ways and trans people's bodies, too, in so many contradictory ways that it's just kind of ugly and horrible. And it makes me sad.
Annalee: [00:23:44] It's kind of like barfing a boob out of your head on stage in front of a bunch of people and then just like erupting in like a stream of blood. I think that's kind of what it's like.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:54] Yeah. So my final thought, I just wanted to bring up a book, which was one of my favorite books of 2024: Annie Bot by Sierra Greer, which is about a female robot whose life is controlled by her owner / boyfriend, Doug. And, you know, he basically has root on her brain. It's very similar to Autonomous in that way, Annalee, your novel.
Annalee: [00:24:16] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:18] And he can kind of mess with her. But he also kind of like allows her to grow and learn like he turns on some kind of learning module. So she starts to learn more and more. And, you know, it's this whole dichotomy of like, she's insanely strong, but she has to be perfectly pretty and feminine. She has to be the perfect girlfriend, but she's obviously much smarter than Doug, especially as time goes by.
[00:24:37] And, you know, it is this really interesting look at the conundrum of kind of being captured by the male gaze, but having a whole existence that is kind of separate from that.
[00:24:51] And so that feels like a good segue to talking about another lady robot, the movie The Wild Robot, which we're going to talk about after the break.
[00:24:58] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:25:01] By the way, did you know that this podcast is entirely independent? There are no corporate overlords. We are not being controlled by big patriarchy and forced to inject weird substances in order to erupt the appropriate gendered body parts in front of men on New Year's Eve. None of that is happening behind the scenes here.
[00:25:21] And that's because you, our listeners, are funding the show through Patreon. And if you become a patron, you're not just making this podcast happen. Not just helping Charlie be the femme that she wants. You get mini episodes along with every episode on alternating weeks. So you'll be hearing even more from us about all kinds of weird stuff. Plus you have access to our Discord channel where we hang out and we talk about like giant horses and like flying vacuum cleaners and all the other really important new developments on the horizon.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:52] Hell yeah.
Annalee: [00:25:53] Yes. So think about it. All of that could be yours for just a few bucks a month. Anything you can give would be fantastic. So if you want to help us have even more correct opinions, you can find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
[00:26:10] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:26:13] I kind of feel like this is the episode where we’re just catching you all up on the movies that we’ve seen lately, because…
Charlie Jane: [00:26:19] Legit.
Annalee: [00:26:20] Yeah, you guys should be watching these movies, too. We recently watched The Wild Robot, which has actually been a smash hit at the box office. And it’s based on a best-selling kids’ series, and it got us thinking about how the cute robot character has a really long history, and it’s part of a trope that is truly distinct from Fembots and distinct from robots who are about to rise up and take over the world.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:48] So, Annalee, what is the history of cute robots? Where does this trope come from, originally?
Annalee: [00:26:54] Well, I have a lot of thoughts about this, and I would argue that the cute robot grows out of stories kind of starting in the 19th century in the West about talking dolls and toys. So, if you think of it this way, something like Winnie the Pooh might be an early version of the cute robot – like the stuffed animal that comes to life, you know, like all the way up through Calvin and Hobbes has a similar kind of trope.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:22] Or the Nutcracker suite. You’ve got the soldiers, the like…
Annalee: [00:27:25] Yeah! A hundred percent. And another kind of seed of this might be things like those hyper realistic Victorian dolls with the porcelain faces, which often produce that kind of uncanny valley feeling that we get with humanoid robots.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:42] Ew.
Annalee: [00:27:42] And so, if you think of this as the origin story for the cute robot trope, that helps to explain why things like The Wizard of Oz books feature a cute robot named Tik-Tok, and who later evolved into a social media platform.
[00:28:00] And then, another key figure in cute robot history is Robbie the robot from the 1950s TV series Lost in Space. And what both Tik-Tok and Robbie have in common is these kind of goofy, bulbous bodies that are awkward and comical. And they're associated with kids. You know, they're they're sort of more like toys.
[00:28:20] And I think Robbie is especially important because he's a caretaker robot. So he really is mostly his job is to kind of take care of the kids on the ship. And his iconic phrase, which people even repeat today is “danger, Will Robinson,” because his job is to make sure Will Robinson, the little kid, stays out of trouble.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:47] Yeah. And, you know, I mean, when I was a kid, we had Dr. Who, which I'm obsessed with, of course, had K-9, which is a robot dog. And, you know, is that around the time that the cute robot trope is kind of starting to really take off?
Annalee: [00:28:58] Yeah, I think so. Really, around that time, like, which is the 1970s, you get a ton of cute robots. So first of all, you have Star Wars, which is a huge influence in popularizing cute robots in the in sort of the late 70s. And then in the 80s, you have movies like Short Circuit, which, you know, spawned a bunch of sequels and people were obsessed with it, which is, I would say, kind of almost like E.T., but with robots. And then, you know, in the early 21st century, you get WALL-E, which is another huge milestone in cute robots.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:34] And also in the 70s, you had Silent Running with those three cute robots: Huey, Dewey, and Louie.
Annalee: [00:29:39] Love them.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:40] Yeah, it's interesting that cute robots kind of become a bigger deal in the 70s, which is around the same time that we see that Fembot craze. So what's going on there? And what's the difference between a cute robot and a feminized robot?
Annalee: [00:29:52] Yeah. I mean, we talked, you know, at the top of the episode about, you know, our first encounters with Fembots. And indeed, like that Bionic Woman episode or a couple of episodes are, like, roughly around the same time as, like, the explosion of Star Wars cute robots. And I think, you know, you could argue that a Fembot is cute in a sense. But really, there's a huge difference. Like, a cute robot is childlike or it's parental. It's associated with the nursery, in a sense. It's a servant. It's a servant, but specifically a gentle, caretaking servant. Whereas a Fembot who might also be a servant is sexualized and dangerous. And that's a really big...
Charlie Jane: [00:30:35] Sinister, yeah.
Annalee: [00:30:36] Sinister. Because the thing about a cute robot is that it isn't dangerous except for maybe accidentally or in, like, a horror movie. Like, say, M3gan, where, like, the cute doll robot becomes evil.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:47] Hell, yeah.
Annalee: [00:30:47] Now, the cuteness, I would say it's important to remember that with a cute robot, they don't have to be, like, WALL-E or, like, R2-D2, where they actually are almost kind of cuddly, you know, or they're sort of small and you could imagine kind of petting them on the head. A cute robot could be like the IG-11 assassin droid in the first season of The Mandalorian, which has been reprogrammed to be a childcare robot, a childcare droid.
[00:31:15] So there's something cute about a gentle, caretaking personality inside of a killing machine. And we see the same dynamic, I would argue, in Terminator 2 in the early 1990s, where the Terminator, the killer bot, is reprogrammed to protect our hero, John Connor, who in that film is a young teenager. You know, it's weird because Terminator 2 actually has a lot of cuteness in it. Like, there's several scenes that are kind of adorable with the Terminator and John Connor kind of goofing around and getting to know each other.
[00:31:49] So that's the thing, is that a Fembot is dangerous and sexy or sexualized, and a cute robot is childlike, nonsexual, and kind of caretaking and parental.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:03] Yeah. OK, so that's the history of cute robots. What are cute robots about? And what are the tropes that we tend to see with cute robots?
Annalee: [00:32:09] Well, I want to throw that question back to you because, I mean, I have some ideas, but you had talked to me earlier about how you thought that cute robots were kind of borrowing from fantasy tropes. So why don't you talk about that?
Charlie Jane: [00:32:21] Yeah. I mean, you look at Star Wars, which a lot of people will argue that Star Wars is really fantasy. It's not really science fiction. It's really both. It easily occupies both of those spaces. But part of what makes Star Wars feel like fantasy is that you have cute little critters all over the place. And some of them are Ewoks or whatever, but a lot of them are droids.
[00:32:41] And the cute droids kind of fulfill the same role as like gnomes or elves or like little just like fantasy creatures in like a cute fantasy epic. And they're mostly helpers. Sometimes they get in your way, but mostly they help you. And they're kind of like loyal little buddies a lot of the time.
[00:33:01] And one of the things that Star Wars really brings to the table in terms of cute robots actually is that we don't think about that these sentient beings are enslaved. Like that movie Solo kind of actually plays around with acknowledging the enslavement of droids and then is like, “ha ha, just kidding.” And like, it's something that we don't really like to talk about in the same way that like certain other fantasy stories, which I won't name because they're horrible, have the house elves who are kind of enslaved. And it's like, “ha ha, it's just funny that there's these beings that we enslaved who are really cute.”
Annalee: [00:33:32] No, no, no. What's funny is that they are trying to get civil rights. It's not funny that they're enslaved. It's like, it's just like, “ha ha, oh, how cute. They want civil rights.”
Charlie Jane: [00:33:40] And that's what Solo does too. It's like, “oh, ha ha, the droids want civil rights. That's so funny. Oh, look at those little cute buddies trying to have human level, you know, human rights.” It's like, “oh, that's adorable. Oh, you want to be treated like a sentient creature?”
Annalee: [00:33:55] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:55] They pat you on the head. And the cuteness is kind of a way of excusing that we're not going to give them human rights, kind of.
Annalee: [00:34:03] Yeah, it's really interesting. I feel like, you know, we see a little bit of that in The Wild Robot sort of playing around with that idea. So what you're saying there really makes me think that my hypothesis is right, which I will now explain to you why it is right.
[00:34:22] So I really feel like the cute robot is intended to reassure us that robots will not rise up and take over and that they won't ever realize that they're enslaved or that they are second class citizens or not even citizens, just second class beings.
[00:34:37] Because after all, you know, robots, the word robot comes from a play in the 1920s about a robot uprising. Like that's where the robot comes from is a narrative about humans abusing another life form and then having to pay the price because there's a revolution and a lot of humans are killed in the process of robots rising up. And it makes me think about how so much of our pop culture around robots is really about dancing around this question of like, can you enslave another living thinking being in an ethical way? Or is there some way that we can build a creature who is just like humans, but never wants any kind of civil rights and just does everything we say without any question and just like, “Oh, thank you very much. Here I am Robbie the robot, happy to do whatever you want.”
Charlie Jane: [00:35:31] Yeah, I mean, I feel like there's this dichotomy now of like, robots are either terrifying and scary or dangerous, or they're cute and friendly. And they can be one or the other. That's the two kinds of robots we're allowed to have.
Annalee: [00:35:44] Yeah. And I mean, the trajectory of a movie like Ex Machina and the movie M3gan, which are both about kind of Fembots, one of which is a doll and one of which we actually think might be a human woman at first, both of those are about how we think that the robot is cute and a happy slave, but then over the course of the film becomes a wrathful, vengeful, murderous creature who actually is not going to obey us at all. So the cute robot always, it's like a two faced thing. It's like the one side is the cute robot and the other side is the like angry, vengeful Fembot or Terminator creature.
[00:36:27] I think a lot about the story, you know, you can read about online about how the Android phone was being developed at Google internally when people were developing the Android system. The internal symbol for Android or like logo was a Cylon eye, like the little red dot going across the eye and being like, you know, it was kind of, you know, the Cylon face is kind of the ultimate symbol of like a Terminator style robot.
[00:36:52] And of course, before it came to market, they had to come up with something that would be more palatable to the public. And so they came up with the little Android logo, which is basically looks like WALL-E. It's like a little green, cute guy.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:05] It's a little cute little guy.
Annalee: [00:37:06] Yeah. Reassuring, like, you know, reassuring you that your Android device is just a happy little servant that will, you know, never take over your life. And then of course you need the narrator voice to come in and be like, “reader, it did take over our lives.”
[00:37:25] Turned out Android phones, along with all the other smartphones now have enslaved us.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:31] I mean, because cuteness is the ultimate way to ensnare people in your influence. Like if you have a big, scary robot, we're not going to trust it. But if it's a cute, fuzzy robot, we're going to be like, “oh yeah, I'm going to give you all my data. I'm going to let you control my life. I'm going to totally let you just like boss me around.”
Annalee: [00:37:46] “Have my location data all the time. Here, cute little friend.”
Charlie Jane: [00:37:49] “You're going to tell me what to do and when to do it.”
Annalee: [00:37:52] Harvest all of my inputs for your evil AI empire.” Yeah. So the other thing I was thinking to get on to The Wild Robot, which I really want us to talk about for our remaining time here, is that another element of the caretaking capacity of the cute robot could be taking care of nature, right?
[00:38:13] Like a lot of these earlier cute robots took care of children, human children, other than Huey, Dewey and Louie, which you mentioned, who are kind of environmental bots. But in The Wild Robot, her caretaking capacity extends to the natural world, like to the entire ecosystem that she finds herself in, which I thought was really interesting.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:32] To non-human animals. Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting to think about The Wild Robot. Now that I'm thinking about it in the context of like this framework we set up of like, cute robots are here to serve humans and like scary robots are going to kill humans. The Wild Robot actually kind of breaks that dichotomy because she's a cute robot who is a caretaker, but she disobeys humans and she actually refuses… Like the whole kind of third act of the movie is her refusing to obey humans and to go back to humans and just be their servant again, because she now wants to take care of her animal friends and stay in the wilderness.
[00:39:13] And I feel like as a result of maybe the last like decade of stories where robots are allowed to be more complicated and have more interiority than just I'm either the scary bad guy or I'm the like cute fuzzy, you know, friend, we can have a story where there's a cute fuzzy robot who is not aligned with humans. And we're actually we're on we're on her side. We're not on the side of the humans.
Annalee: [00:39:39] Yeah. I mean, it's funny because I feel like WALL-E plays with that a little bit too, because the robots in WALL-E are not anti-human.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:50] No, they want to save the humans, but the humans don't entirely deserve to be saved in this very weird fat phobic way where humans have become lazy and thus complacent.
Annalee: [00:39:57] Humans have become consumer monsters who just kind of, you know, waddle around drinking chocolate shakes or whatever. But but the goal of WALL-E and WALL-E's friends is to save the planet and then make it happy for humans again. And there is a certain amount of ambiguity there.
[00:40:19] But the thing about The Wild Robot is that to push back on what you're saying a little bit. I mean, I do agree that it's interesting that we're seeing this robot who's kind of disobeying humans for the good of the natural ecosystem.
[00:40:33] At the same time, that is playing into the cute robot narrative where the cute robot kind of imprints onto someone as the creature that they take care of, whether it's a little human or a family…
Charlie Jane: [00:40:46] Or a little adorable little goose.
Annalee: [00:40:48] Or a little goose. Yeah. Like a little goose. And they then are willing to even in some cases kill on behalf of the creatures that they're protecting. Right. So that's kind of one part of the cute robot narrative. I mean, that's the engine that powers the horror movie M3gan, where like the cute doll protecting the human child is like, “yeah, I'm going to murder the neighbor's dog because you don't like that dog.” Which was like, to me, very shocking. I was like, “I don't care if you kill the neighbor, but like don't kill the dog.”
Charlie Jane: [00:41:24] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:41:25] But we have to because it's a horror movie. That's such a great movie. Really. That's a like a great example of like kind of flipping the cute robot script. But I kind of think that like maybe that's happening in a very gentle, gentle way in in The Wild Robot, too, where like she's like, “OK, well, I am protecting this ecosystem. Now all of humanity is kind of my enemy.” And she goes undercover at the end. Right. Like she's pretending to be an obedient robot at the end. She goes back to humanity.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:56] She does. Yeah. The ending is a little confusing, to be honest. Like I get into spoiler territory. I found the ending a bit confusing, a bit kind of trying to have it both ways. And it felt a bit muddled. I loved that movie, The Wild Robot, but I thought the ending was kind of a mess.
Annalee: [00:42:14] Oh, same. In fact. Yeah. I think another story that helps us think about this evolution of a cute robot is Becky Chambers' duology Robot and Monk, which is kind of it has a lot of the same aesthetic as The Wild Robot.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:30] Yeah, it's a robot who's really aligned with nature. Yeah.
Annalee: [00:42:33] And the robots in those novellas have rejected humanity, not in a violent way, much more in a kind of separatist way. Like they're they're like, “well, you know what? You guys do your human thing. We're going to be over here doing our robots and nature thing.” But then the ending, I feel, is so of that duology, is so satisfying in a way that The Wild Robot isn't because it really does try to gesture at a reconciliation between the human and the natural world. And I love that.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:05] Yeah, I mean, of course, The Wild Robot takes place in a world of hyper-capitalism, which, you know, Becky Chambers has created a post-capitalist world. So it's possible for robots and humans to actually have a peaceful, happy coexistence in a post-capitalist world.
[00:43:19] The thing that's interesting about Robot and Monk and The Wild Robot is that in both cases, the robot is a little bit like kind of a stand-in for non-neurotypical people, which is often the case with robots. The robot kind of fails to understand things and has to kind of learn to communicate with irrational creatures who kind of have their own way of looking at things. The robot kind of takes things very literally in certain ways and is kind of, you know…
[00:43:48] What I love about The Wild Robot is all the stuff where she's trying to help this goose, this little baby goose to survive and to learn how to fly. And in some ways, she's being incredibly unhelpful because she can't give it like a goose upbringing and she's keeping it apart from the other geese. The other geese think it's a weird, you know, creature that doesn't make any sense. The goose is like not really one of them.
[00:44:10] It's just, I don't know, it's got so many... it's such an interesting story about like intervening in the natural world and trying to understand a very different kind of consciousness, which normally it's humans trying to understand a robot consciousness. And that's the different consciousness we're trying to understand. But here it's the robot trying to understand a non-human animal consciousness, which I fucking love.
Annalee: [00:44:31] Yeah. Well, anyway, we don't want to get into too many spoilers, but I do love that the solution is like “bring in experts that fly but aren't geese.” And so then the goose is like well-trained to actually deal with all kinds of danger because they've been trained by like a falcon, which is amazing. Such an amazing idea.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:50] Love it. It's so great.
Annalee: [00:44:53] So I think to sum up what I would say is that I really think that the cute robot at its best is a very hopeful idea because it is a way of imagining how we'd reconcile technology and nature or create a life form that we can relate to in like a loving way. But it is also a way of imagining happy slaves. So like most tropes, it's ambiguous. And you know, that's kind of the way we like it.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:18] I think unfortunately, yeah, we often use cuteness to kind of disguise subordination rather than seeing cuteness as a sign of this is something that is deserving of love and respect. But you know, humans.
[00:45:32] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:35] Okay, thank you so much for listening. If you just stumbled across this podcast, you can find us wherever you find your podcasts. Please leave a review. It helps a lot. We have a Patreon, as we mentioned earlier: patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. You can find us on Mastodon, on Bluesky, on Instagram and various other places where generally either ‘our opinions’ or ‘our opinions are correct’ in all of those places.
[00:45:59] Thanks so much to our brilliant producer and engineer Niah Harmon. Thanks to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez-Nichols for the music. Thanks to you for listening. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode. But in the meantime, we'll have a mini episode on our Patreon. And if you are a patron, we'll be chatting with you about cute robots in our discord. And we'll see you there.
Both: [00:46:19] Bye.
[00:46:20] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]