Rise of the (Sexy) Machines

Glenn Reynolds may have whack views on foreign policy, but I like his taste in offbeat links:

Feminist science-fiction writer Amy Thomson, author of robot-comes-of-age novel Virtual Girl, suggests that the fembot myth is attractive to men because it deals with “a woman you create and control.” But tech journalist Daniel Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising, argues that fictional fembots have hardly been portrayed as controllable—in fact, he claims, they’re often presented as the most dangerous robots of all, because feelings of attraction to them could leave their victims vulnerable to attack. “A sexy robot that’s aggressive could be a wolf in rubberized skin,” he says.

In all seriousness, though, while Wilson is correct on the narrow issue at hand here, the theme he points too of the uniquely dangerous nature of the robotic woman is also an antifeminist trope. Women's sexuality needs to be tightly regulated by men or the state because a woman fully in control of herself could, say, trick a man into revealing the secrets that lead to the near-destruction of the human race, as seen in Battlestar Galactica.