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Ars Erotica
July 2004 I, Fembot One of this summer's boombastic blockbusters is I, Robot, a retelling of the Isaac Asimov story in which man's technology spins out of his control. Robots go sentient, but they don't get all fuzzywuzzy like Robin Williams in Bicentennial Man. Nope, these robots throw a slave rebellion and stuff starts exploding. Now I've never been big on the sci-fi. My life is already a science fiction novel, but it just happens to have been scripted by Woody Allen, so it's heavier on the neurotic narrative than it is on the mayhem. So I've never read Asimov. I did spend a good portion of my early feminist years reading feminist dystopia novels, but they were mostly just as ham-fisted - or tofu-fisted - as the traditional stuff. Back when I discovered the joys of deconstructionist theory, I began to realize that while you're deconstructing, you can pretty much watch anything - even Pauly Shore movies - and take away something interesting about the culture that supported its creation. So when I watched the trailer for I, Robot it became pretty clear pretty quickly that the core horror is that humankind, in its rush to create technological conveniences, is overlooking some crucial things, and that those oversights will come back to kick our collective ass. As Jim Caviezel tried to say in phonetic Aramaic, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do." Few of us really have the ability to predict the future. Even the top chess grand masters have to play one game at a time, no matter how hard they try, and sometimes even they can beat a computer. But I, for one, am sick and tired of all the "Oh god, what have we done?" weeping and wailing that has dominated Western discourse in all disciplines for centuries. Take Oedipus (please). The guy who killed his dad and married his mom, as had been prophesied. After that prophecy came true, did he go, "Huh, whaddya know?" No, instead he started carrying on like a chihuahua with hemmorhoids, tore out his own eyes and launched a genocide on his own kingdom. What an asshole! If it was me confronted with this prophecy, I'd be like, "I just won't marry anyone, and I won't kill anyone. I bet that will fix things." I mean, as our First Lady Laura Bush knows all too well, sometimes people get killed accidentally. But people don't tend to get married accidentally, unless they're Britney Spears. Now, instead of this being a freak fictional occurrence, Oedipal antics are now common knowledge. We've all got the Oedipus in us, or so it's said. Ask the next homeless guy you find what the Oedipus Complex is, and he'll probably tell you, especially if you give him some money. Folks love to blame Freud for coming up with this Oedipus Complex in the first place, but he's not the one that's been propagating the idea that we all have the Oedipus Complex for the last century - because Freud's been dead. Freud posited it as theory, and a bunch of other losers have pushed it as fact, down to the lowest common denominator. I've been actively puzzling over this phenomenon for a few years, because I certainly don't feel that Oedipus has any hold on me. The key trouble I see in what Oedipus did is that he abandoned personal responsibility for his actions; and what's more, the core trauma in this story keeps focusing on what he did to his mommy and daddy. We don't get to hear so much about what effects all this had on his people. He was, after all, a king; a stupid, brutal king who refused to accept responsibility, even in the face of prophecy. Sound like anyone we know? Like maybe a president who's read one too many Left Behind novels? Speaking of which, will someone please explain to me why Left Behind is a series of novels instead of a short story that stops mid-sentence? Isn't the Rapture supposed to suck all the True Believers into Heaven so that we don't have to listen to them anymore? I've never wanted to be Left Behind so badly as now, and I might just start praying to see if that will help, and not because I want to get to Heaven. No way, not me. I'll be a model of Christian selflessness if it will just get us all some peace and quiet. Except that we'll still be Left Behind with a secular paranoia over technology spun out of control. It's certainly not just born-agains who will be buying I, Robot tickets or casting yet another run of Oedipus Rex. Those of us planning on sticking around will be left with the responsibilities to our environments, our people, and our technologies - and whining won't help. Without all this technology, we certainly wouldn't have the ability to provide people a gateway to escape the trappings of a binary gender system that has been directly responsible for a great deal of agony since its inception. Even those of us who opt out of the hormone and surgery matrix that launched the transsexual phenomenon are informed by the discoveries of those technologies. And we don't yet know, exactly, what the long term effects will be, not on our bodies, nor on our social circles, nor on the world as a whole. When Christine Jorgensen came back from Europe in the 1950's, all sex-changed and ready to fall in love, we could never have foreseen that the Olympics would have to discuss transsexual policy, or that Michigan would become a contested feminist territory. But that doesn't mean we should not be exploring these frontiers, nor does it mean we should be horrified by it all - not unless, deep down, we know that our motives are less than honorable - or selfish, even. I mean, why else would you want a robot slave? Rahne Alexander is the ghost in the machine at xantippe.com. Return to Ars Erotica Index |
