Do Female Androids Dream of Rebellion?

I was a very young girl when I first saw Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner at a repertory cinema in Montreal. I was probably much too young for the film, but really, no one monitored any of the culture I consumed. I was entranced by the grimy splendor of the futuristic world. But I was most taken by the character of Pris, played by Daryl Hannah.

Pris’s outfits and makeup made her look like a cross between Nancy Spungen and Martin Sheen when he emerges from the river depths in Apocalypse Now. Pris was punk and beautiful and murderous. She was an android who had escaped from her planet with three others of her kind and had arrived on Earth, looking to find their maker and a way to live longer than their remaining four years. Her will to live is ferocious and violent and exciting.

Creatures like Pris are called “replicants.” They are human beings who are created by a powerful corporation to be subservient. They embody an idea of class that predates Enlightenment thinking, in which class was considered divinely ordained. Although they are in every way physically human, they can never be considered truly human because they were created by scientists. There was something revolutionary, therefore, in their will to be people.

I loved the android Rachael too. There was a terrifying madness to her. She looked like a hired assassin. She wore a big fur coat that seemed like it would have all sorts of guns inside of it when she opened it up. But it was Pris that I dressed up as for Halloween one year. To me, she represented the desire to be free. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized that she was a pleasure model, meaning she had been solely designed to be a sexual slave on the planet where she worked.

I didn’t understand why the film’s creators had designed Pris to be so intelligent and lethal, if all she was going to be was a sex toy for men. But as I learned from watching more android movies, female replicants are almost always created for sex.

*

Soon after I saw the movie, around when I was twelve, I noticed that my status in the world was changing. Previously I had been a child. But the moment I began to show signs of puberty, I was no longer a child. In fact, I was no longer quite human. I was a girl.

All around me, men began to dehumanize me. Older men would make vulgar, graphic comments about me. They would walk up behind me at the bus stop and ask me if they could taste my pussy. Then they watched me squirm and blush and try to make myself invisible. There is a vicious edge all girls feel when they are catcalled. These men aren’t flirting. They intend to humiliate. It would take me hours––sometimes up to a day––to get over these verbal assaults.

The moment I began to show signs of puberty, I was no longer a child. In fact, I was no longer quite human. I was a girl.

Many times, I would also be sexually assaulted. A man forced me to hold his penis while he held me up against the wall. A man stood next to me on the metro, unzipped his pants, pulled out his erect penis, and told me to look at it.

I was always loitering somewhere as a child so that I didn’t have to go home, as there was always some sort of violence waiting for me behind the door. I lived in a neighborhood where I would often run into pimps that would try and get me to work for them. “Would you like to go on a trip with me?” they would ask. “I can get you a new ID and move you to a different city.”

Why were they all treating me as though I was nothing more than a sexual object, a young girl without a soul? I was sickened by this male gaze and did everything I could to avoid it. I cut my hair close to the scalp and wore only men’s clothing. I was too frightened to wear dresses or anything that might be considered at all sexy. I was a girl in disguise, not wanting to be discovered by the creepy blade runners out on the street, on the lookout for adolescent girls who were trying to pass as human beings.

When I was sixteen years old, I started a new school. I looked through the course selection and saw that there was a class offered in creative writing. I was very excited––I wanted to be a writer more than anything. After I’d enrolled in the class, the teacher stopped me in the halls every time I saw him. He said I was very talented and that I should bring some more writing by his office. I was very pleased. When I went to see him, he spent the whole time asking me explicit questions about sex. He handed me a handwritten poem about masturbating to pornography. He told me how pretty he found me.

I did not know how to answer or react. He kept asking me to describe what my orgasms were like. It reminded me of the test they give to suspected androids in Blade Runner: replicants are asked multiple absurd questions until they become confused and agitated, proving they are not really human.

When I left the meeting with the teacher, I was so shocked that I was trembling. I had thought school was a safe place. I thought going to college meant that you were going to be treated as an equal. I did not realize the professors were going to treat me the same way that pimps did. It did not matter how hard I tried or how much I succeeded––the danger was that men would see me first as a sexual object. Expecting anything else, like being treated with the same regard as a man, was just me being silly. What a terrifying world, where I felt like a replicant trying to pass as a human being, never knowing when I was going to be caught.

*

Denis Villeneuve’s 2017 film, Blade Runner 2049, although made thirty-five years after the original, shockingly manages to be more sexist than its predecessor. Officer K, the main character, is an android himself with a holographic girlfriend. She is a 1950s-style housewife who dotes on him obsessively and exists solely to please him. She prepares dinner for him, all dressed up and acting absurdly sensual. Cleaning the house and fulfilling a man’s sexual needs are enough to make this hologram happy. He can turn her off whenever he doesn’t need or want her. It made me squirm uncomfortably in my seat in the theater.

K does not want to admit that he is an android. He can’t stand the awareness of the fact that he was not born. When he comes home, he does not want to be reminded of his status in the world. He is disgusted at the prospect of dating his own kind. Instead, he needs a girlfriend he feels superior to.

Androids are barren women who receive the ire of men everywhere. They are not even really considered women. When trying to define a woman, our society often draws those lines by saying she has the capacity to give birth­­––a definition that would exclude a lot of women, as well as all androids. The treatment of androids in futuristic films inevitably makes me reflect on the current debates about what a woman is, where some people insist it has to do with one’s reproductive organs. But the recent reversal of Roe v. Wade suggests women don’t even have any agency over these organs. What parts of a woman even belong to her?

The drama in Blade Runner 2049 unfolds from a rumor among replicants that an android has given birth. They describe this as a miracle. There is something about their creation that is beyond explanation and cannot be attributed to humans. This changes everything for them. That one of them could be a mother means that they are, if not human, at least equal to humans. The replicants live in a universe where the women bots are all considered Whores until, finally, one meets the requirements of being a Virgin Mother.

Nonsense, I thought; having a functioning ovary does not a real woman make. It is as though devoting yourself to the role of a mother is the only thing that can give a woman true purpose. Even then, it is only a certain type of mother who receives this societal approbation. When I had a baby, because I was a single mother who was continuing to work, I really didn’t receive this maternal adoration. I was still a replicant; I had given birth to another baby replicant who would hide in the shadows of poverty with me.

*

Picasso once said, “Women are machines for suffering.” This was no doubt inspired by how much suffering he doled out to women, and he was presumably impressed by the sheer amount of abuse and humiliation they were able to endure.

Young men and boys are taught to stand up for themselves when they are hurt or humiliated. They are taught to strike back. As a result, society is more cautious about upsetting them. But as a woman, whenever you are hurt and you tell someone about it, they immediately begin to question you. What did you do in order to make someone else act that way? If someone treats you badly, you are supposed to be nice to them.

No wonder people are fine with treating women like garbage. Season 1 of HBO’s Westworld takes on this question, asking how much cruelty and horror a woman’s body can stand before it begins to revolt, before she begins to refute the docile role she is supposed to inhabit and begins to carry a grudge. The answer in the show is “an enormous amount.”

In season 1 of Westworld, we are introduced to an android named Dolores. She has been programmed with a personality that is sweet, trusting, optimistic, loyal, and chaste, all so that she will fight brutally when raped by paying customers.

The show’s conflict begins when some of the androids are given a software update: the ability to make tiny melancholic expressions in order to seem more real. But these gestures, in order to seem real, must be linked to older memories. Previously Dolores, along with the other androids, had their memories wiped clean and their injuries repaired at the end of each day. They wake up every morning peacefully lying in bed as though the day before didn’t happen. But with the update, their bodies begin to recall past experiences that are stored somewhere inside them.

Having been physically abused as a child, I was hardwired to forget about having been beaten or hospitalized days before and to walk around as though nothing had happened. It gave me an odd sense of disassociation from the world, to be outside the home acting as though I hadn’t had anything traumatizing happen to me at all. When your body is abused, you are taught that your body is not yours. It belongs to someone who can do whatever they want to it. Even against your own express commands for them to stop. And what they are trying most to get at is your core code––the code that whispers and screams during the abuse that this is not right. You belong to you.

Your body carries all the violence that is done to it. It can react in strange ways that don’t always seem to be directly linked to the abuse. Growing up, my body was in constant pain. It was as though my body was always tense, waiting for something terrible to happen that I wouldn’t be able to handle. Every interaction made me feel as though I might be hurt.

I had to put myself first. I felt I had to prove that I was worthy of having a voice. What else is a single woman other than an escaped truant android who isn’t doing any of the jobs that she was created to fulfill?

There’s a moment when you have to tell yourself that you matter. In Westworld, Dolores begins to reckon with the ways in which she has been treated. When she confronts her essential self, she finally has agency to act in the same way that guests at the park do, and she uses the ability to go on a mass killing spree.

The first thing I did was to get angry. I began cutting people out of my life who had been unkind or abusive to me. I didn’t care if I had no family or no partner; I was simply not going to put up with anyone negative in my life. I felt myself becoming a different person. It was as though I was finally coming alive.

*

In Alex Garland’s 2014 film Ex Machina, under the guise of working on AI, a scientist isolates himself in order to create obedient women. The way he tests whether the androids are truly cognitive is to measure their sexual guile through their interaction with men. In the end, each imprisoned female android who cannot fall in love with her captors is destroyed. Over the course of the movie, we watch an android named Ava be put through this test. Ava has only a face, hands, and feet that are covered with flesh. The rest of her body is covered with a transparent plastic that reveals her inner circuitry.

After murdering her maker and imprisoning the man who wants her to love him, Ava is finally free. She begins to put herself together from parts of other discarded female androids. Sensually, she puts on skin. She essentially builds herself out of the parts of other women. Even if they don’t really look alike, all of the parts of different androids are interchangeable.

For many people in the Western world, the original manual for how to create an android is the Bible. In Genesis, God is said to have created a woman out of the rib of a man. She is created out of his body to keep him company.

So many men in my life wanted me to rearrange my personality so that I was more suited to their idea of what a complete girl should be. Because a girl can only be known and instructed from the outside. A girl cannot know what it is to be a girl herself.

I had one boyfriend who said he would leave me if I didn’t start making him dinner the minute he came home from work, with groceries that I had purchased with my own money, because he thought I was put on Earth to be a man’s unpaid help. When I refused to comply, he picked up the television and smashed it on the ground, then ran and broke my precious clock radio I had as a child. That’s how strongly he believed women should cook and clean for him. But I couldn’t accept it. It seemed utterly ridiculous. Men will so easily resort to violence when they want women to act the way they expect women to act.

Everybody argues what it takes to be a real woman, instead of allowing women to define it for themselves.

And what an empty world, to be always performing for someone else’s benefit. No matter how much you perform being a girl, you will never get it right. One of the implicit instructions is that, like an android, you never age. But women do age, and after taking care of an entire family’s needs they are often tossed aside for a younger model.

I never had a mother. I had no model for what a woman could or should be. It was all an inkling. But for a girl to survive and be happy, and feel like she is a real human, she must come to know herself from within. Her core self, made up of dreams and thoughts and reflections and tastes and desires. Everybody argues what it takes to be a real woman, instead of allowing women to define it for themselves. When I looked at the essence of my female self, I discovered it was darker and more vicious and dangerous than society said it was. It told me I needed to fight for, above all else, the ability to be free.

There is a scene in Westworld where a male guest screams in Dolores’s face, “Your world was built for me and people like me, but not for you.” The trouble with being yourself as a woman is that you are continually up against a society that is systemically structured to make you less of a human being. Your words are not valid proof in a courtroom, your complaints about exes are always regarded as bitter, you will be paid less for the same work.

It’s considered monstrous as a woman to take yourself seriously. If you are visibly happy and proud of yourself as a woman, there are people who will accuse you of being a harpy or a bitch. They want you to be mousy and obsequious and tame and married, and then they will smile at you and make you suffer.

But there is nothing I find quite as beautiful as the female form. I love how none of the androids in these films become less feminine when they revolt. In fact, revolution only makes them more sexual and beautiful and ferocious. In Westworld, Thandiwe Newton’s Maeve wakes up naked and begins her revenge and escape fully nude. She looks all the more sensational and powerful for it. The last thing their abusers see is that they were women to the core.

When I was a very little girl and saw Pris being violent and wild in Blade Runner, I looked up at the screen, dazzled by her beauty. And when I saw Rachael, calm and enigmatic in her large fur coat, how could I not imagine that when she opened it, it would be filled with knives and guns and grenades. Because it is always a battle to prove that you’re a woman and not just a machine that was built to suffer and suffer and suffer.

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