Being a body is a straight-forward way to get access to the physical world. It’s also one of the more surefire ways of arguing existence of a thing. A body is a vessel, a container, an extension and a limitation of the self in space. Creating a body for something like a robot is a way of demanding acknowledgement of its existence. 

But is the form of the robot a body? Are the joints and beams that form a bendable extension from the main hub really an arm? Maybe not if we’re talking about a Roomba, but when you think of a robot I know it’s not the image of a vacuum cleaner that pops up into your head. When we talk about robots we think about bodies that imitate our own. The robot is humanoid.

Keep imaging that robot. Having a body, existing physically, is of course no way a guarantee for having a consciousness. But making the body soft and fleshy, might make us second guess ourselves in this regard. Hyperrealistic robots are becoming more common, and as their level of realism gets higher, the risk of a viewer falling head-first into the uncanny valley of disgust, gets lower. But it’s still a thin line to thread between creepy doll and true to life masterpiece of technology. So the form of the humanoid body must be comfortable. It has to be unthreatening. 

When Forbes listed ”Ten Incredibly Lifelike Humanoid Robots To Get On Your Radar” 7 out of 10 were hyperrealistic and modelled after women. Of the 3 remaining, 2 have feminine names. Another famous example that’s left out is the Scarlett Johansson bot made by an inventor from Hong Kong. When created, Scarlett – I mean, Mark One– was built from an hourglass figure up. The mechanics where second to female bodied realness.

The concept of a female machine is an old one. She is a digital copy, a machine doppelgänger of her human inspiration. A maid, (The Jetsons) a wife, (The Stepford Wives) a lover (Her). Blessed with endurance and obedience that her flesh sisters do not necessarily possess, she becomes an ideal. Maybe it’s no coincidence that the word robot comes from a word for labor.

Something happens to us when we see something so uncanny, or so lifelike as a realistic android. There’s a chock-value, maybe even awe. These strong reactions might blind us from seeing that what we’re looking at. These robotic bodies, modeled as to not upset us, to make us feel comfortable with the machine next to us, what are they based on? They aren’t androids, they are gynoids. Not man-like, no threatening physique, or power postures. They are woman-like, and portray what we expect from such a description. You shouldn’t fear, but maybe don’t trust them fully either.

Gender is a performative act, it’s a role that we are assigned or choose to play. and being defined by your gender – chosen or conditioned – often means you are identifying as more or less female. As it is so defining, it can also be unforgiving in a lot of ways. So here are these objects, just molded from the shape of a sloppy concept of femininity, parading as paraphrases and parodies, and failing miserably while still convincing entire nations that they are people, that they are women. Why are we so easily convinced of giving this gender to a machine when we still won’t believe flesh and blood people making their own choice?

The big question is ”what does it mean to be a human body?”. But asking ”why are artificial bodies based on human qualities always ending up lookin the same?” might be relevant too.