I think that Robocop is my favorite movie. Like, accidentally actually my favorite movie.

A few months ago I was gearing up to watch a rom-com with my friend Brooks when my lizard-monkey brain reared up and told me that “hmmm you haven’t watched Robocop in a minute” and also "hmmm Brooks hasn't seen Robocop yet" and I feverishly convinced her to put down whatever we were actually going to watch to walk with me to the library to check out their Blu-ray copy of the 1987 version.

Later that night, after watching Robocop, again, my long-suffering roommate of four years, Jen, informed me that this was actually the fifth time she’d seen Robocop with me alone. This shamed and shocked me so incredibly: how had this movie with possibly the dumbest name in existence that I had only first watched probably two years prior captivated me so much?

I mean, part of it is just that Robocop is a fantastic movie. Despite Showgirls (a movie I haven’t seen for. You know. Reasons.), Paul Verhoeven is the king of making incredibly smart stories with incredibly dumb premises: a story about stupid beautiful soldiers fighting big old bugs is also an incredibly bitter satire about fascism, an Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle about super spies featuring mutant ladies with THREE boobs (three of them!! Three!!!) is also about a man’s horrific descent into a delusional reality, and a story about a cop who is also a robot, really a cyborg if you want to get specific, is also about the loss of individual autonomy under the cold hard grip of capitalism.

I think what I love so much about Robocop, besides its incredible balancing act of goofy gross action with engaging dramatic tension, is that it does what the best stories about robots do: it uses sci-fi concepts to talk about humanity beyond human means.

Since I was a kid, I’ve been especially drawn to stories about robots because of their ability to tell stories about humanity hiding in unexpected places. The Iron Giant, Wall-e, Data from Star Trek Next Generation, these were all my favorite characters and shows growing up for precisely that reason. They were non-human characters navigating our world and learning how to live in it with a hybrid identity. 

As a socially-awkward child who has grown into a socially-awkward adult, I found these stories endearing and incredibly relatable. I may not have circuits wired in my brain, but I spent a lot of my childhood feeling like I must be wired differently, like there must be some kind of glass plate between me and the rest of the world. A gap existed between me and other people, one that was eventually filled with friendship and care, but was first filled by stories like these ones.

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Unfortunately, when I grew up and went on to explore what else the sci-fi genre had to offer, I found that there were really only two different kinds of robot stories: stories about robots, and stories about robot women.

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Stories about robots are, as stated, based around finding the humanity in non-human characters, but they also function as a dissection of the tropes (or storytelling characteristics) that surround the idea of the robot. Ideas of servility, programmable emotions, and of being designed to make humans comfortable are often taken apart and discussed as cruel mechanisms keeping the robots under our control.

In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the idea that the outlaw Replicants have been manufactured for human pleasure with human emotions but denied freedom and given short lifespans to boot is never not thought of as completely unjust. It’s the reason that, despite his murderous tendencies and intimidating presence, the villain Roy Batty’s death still hits so hard and why his “tears in the rain” monologue is considered one of the most moving in sci-fi cinema. It’s why the question of whether the film’s hero, Rick Deckard, could actually be one of the Replicants he’s been tracking all his life, is all the more engaging.

Stories about robot women, though they may contain elements of human impulses in inhuman objects and some critiques about tropes regarding robot characters, are often centered around the appeal of those very tropes. Who doesn’t want a woman designed for them? A woman who won’t fight you, won’t cross the line, a woman who resists the human impulses of human women?

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 In fact, Blade Runner does this very thing with the character of Rachael, a replicant and love interest of Deckard whose relationship with him culminates in what is essentially a scene of sexual assault. Rachael, who has only recently discovered that her life as a human is a lie and she was essentially made as a cool experiment by the man she thought was her boss, saves Deckard’s life and goes back to his apartment with him. When he makes advances on her, she tries to leave only for him to block the exit (he punches the door), grab her shoulders (hard), push her towards the window, and kiss her while she cries. “Now you kiss me…Say kiss me” he tells her. “Kiss me” she says. “I want you” he says. “I want you” she says (still crying). Though this scene could be very generously read as Rachael resisting not Deckard himself but her programming, it still reads upsettingly like a woman forced into a sexual situation with her violent romantic partner.

And yet in the movie this is played to be this grand romantic gesture: the scene is scored with a horny saxophone solo, the lighting is moody and sensuous, the moment is led up to with a moving scene of Rachael “remembering” how to play the piano. In fact, the Youtube video I found to reference this scene is titled “Rachael and Deckard, Romantic Scene From Blade Runner”; the comments filled with things like “still a better love story than twilight” and “she is not running away from him but herself” and, weirdly, “I love Hairy Women! Especially eyebrows”. In a movie where the servility of these robotic characters and the control humans exert over them is in-text a horrible thing, a woman who doesn’t fight back, who is dominated by her romantic partner, is made all the more appealing because of the control human men can and do exert over her.

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Even if a robot woman manages to escape these tropes surrounding servility, often they’ll still fall prey to other sexist tropes and conventions that show up in other fictional stories: if the robot is not your girlfriend she is your crazy mother,  or a teasing harlot, or whatever other archetypal role you can think of. Not only do these poorly constructed robot women rely on sexist tropes and conventions but they often make for bland trashy sci-fi, relying on the idea of fulfilling fantasies over creating interesting characters and starting conversations about humanity. It seems that in sci-fi, a genre widely regarded to have been invented by a woman, female characters are often given the worst of what the genre has to offer.

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But is there hope to be found in this genre after all? Are there robot women who manage to escape or subvert the genre conventions of their predecessors?

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This website functions as a survey of different stories about robotic women, the ways they change/are adapted over time, the ways they influence each other, and the ways they succeed or fail at telling complex tales surrounding the identities of their robo-protagonists. In "Metropolis Reborn" I discuss the 1927 German film Metropolis, its “adaptations”, and how each piece deviates from and expands upon the original film, in "Rebuilt Women", I discuss movies featuring robotic women as the main characters who essentially have to rebuild themselves physically in order to reach their maximum potential, and in "Matriarchal Menaces" I talk about the trope of the “motherly” A.I. villain as depicted in Disney Channel Original Movies and incredibly horny video games.

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I don’t want to use this website necessarily as a ranking of or final say on the true merit of each of these pieces of media. Rather I want to use this website to give the robot woman the exploration she often doesn’t get even in her own genre. I want to use this as an opportunity to rehabilitate the image of the robot woman, and tell the artists of the world that she deserves better.

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I believe that stories about robots can change our world. They can tell us something vital about ourselves, about the world we live in, about the systems that control us, and they can give us a way out. Stories about robots can help us bridge the gap that exists between us, they can smash the glass plate to bits and find us a path around the shattered pieces. Why can’t we expect the same thing from stories about robot women?