Feminism Vs. Fembots

Fembots are having something of a moment. Sometime on your commute, you've probably come across the Svedka mascot, an Amazonian android with a cinched metal waist and creamy fiberglass thighs. Or maybe you've caught the new Heineken ads with the self-replicating cybergirl. She boasts Go-Go-Gadget arms, flapper style, and a draft-keg in place of a stomach. The billboards for the next season of America's Top Model feature the latest round of Tyra-bots, posing in metallic get-ups in front of the slogan, "The Future has Arrived." And premiering tonight is NBC's remake of the '70s hit Bionic Woman. Matrix green motherboard inside.

From Maria, an exotic fembot dancer in the 1927 film Metropolis, to The Stepford Wives to the recent booze-hawking sex-borgs, robotic women have long been a subject of and for feminist critique. Prevailing logic has said that fembots are designed to fit their (male) makers' desires; that no matter how futuristic they may look, they promote retrograde sexist ideals.

Critics have jumped on both alcohol ads. Feminist bloggers, for example, have blamed SVEDKA_GRL for encouraging the Barbification of the female body. And Bob Garfield of Ad Age says Heineken has "reduced half the world to a man-servicing beer tap." Perhaps wary of such conflation, the promoters of Bionic Woman have gone out of their way to point out how their protagonist is different. Michelle Ryan, who plays the new Jaime Sommers in Bionic Woman, compares her character to Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider: "When ... you see her kicking ass, you're like, 'Yeah, I want to be like that. I want to be strong, and I want to be confident and empowered ... I think that's a really great message that Bionic Woman will hopefully bring out there."

From this perspective, the mute sexbots of Heineken and Svedka stand wholly apart from the progressive politics of today's Bionic Woman. But closer examination of these various fembots reveals that feminism isn't served by such black and white simplifications. For all its girl-power PR, the new Bionic Woman is not nearly as enlightened as Ryan suggests. And those booze ads? They might be more futuristic than your average beer billboards after all.

The original Bionic Woman premiered on ABC in 1976, one year after The Stepford Wives. America was in the midst of the Equal Rights Amendment debate, and networks contributed to the national reconsideration of women's roles with a wave of prime time superheroines like Wonder Woman and Charlie's Angels. Jaime Sommers was first played by Lindsay Wagner as a two-episode love interest in The Six Million Dollar Man. Her portrayal of a professional tennis player -- Billie Jean King had won her Battle of the Sexes a few years prior -- bionically rebuilt after a skydiving accident proved so popular she was resurrected from her written death and given a spinoff.

Seen today, the original Bionic Woman's politics are dwarfed by the cartoon sound effects and campy action scenes. Sommers' sex appeal is unsubtle. With her feathered hair and flirty laugh, she seems as feminist as a short-shorted Jessica Simpson singing, "These Boots Are Made for Walking." Some theorists have suggested this was intentional, that the hypersexuality of these uber-chicks made women's social progress cartoonish and thus culturally digestible. Others have argued that, as comic book porn-esque as they were, characters like Bionic Woman paved the way not only for the slew of Xenas and Buffys and Tomb Raiders of recent years, but also for the more realistic and culturally complicated Cagneys, Laceys and Murphy Browns of prime time television.

The new Bionic Woman, then, certainly looks like progress. Gone is the Wagner blond. In is Ryan's brooding brunette. The lighting is dark and a category 2 hurricane seems to be in some kind of holding pattern over the set. One of the first shots has her slamming a man into a window. In another scene, a little girl in the back seat of a car tells her mom about a running woman outpacing them in the woods: "I just thought it was cool that a girl could do that." Later, we see the young newly bionic bartender unintimidated by her new spy boss: "If we do this, whatever it is 'this' is, we do it on my terms."