Writing for The Daily Beast, Rebecca Dana expounds upon the “fembot” phenomenon, describing these women as surgically augmented, power hungry and litigious. I’m not exactly sure where the term “fembot” came from, but I think it has something to do with the killer female robots in the Austin Powers movie (Wikipedia says it comes from The Bionic Woman). Wherever fembot originated, the word has been used extensively by a number of male bloggers (Roissy in particular makes good use of it), and has come to connote a youngish, aggressive feminist.
So when I saw the article written by Rebecca Dana, it appeared to me that her use of “fembot” to describe slutty celebrities was slightly off. However, her understanding does jibe with my own to some extent, as suggested in the following passage:
Modern-day Fembots aren’t just debatably pretty faces. They’re also lawyered up. Last week, Montag announced she is suing Hills creator Adam DiVello, without whose intervention she would probably still be an anonymous aspiring fashion designer in Los Angeles. She alleges unwanted touching. And then, of course, there is Gloria Allred’s entire legal practice. In the last year alone, Allred has become the first name in pre-emptive Fembot litigation. Southwick will likely employ celebrity divorce attorney Robert Kaufman, if she goes ahead with the divorce.
It is always interesting to see how memes propagate across the blogosphere and are adapted to fit the perspective of whoever seizes upon them. Obviously, fembot has negative overtones these days, but women often have somewhat different ideas of what constitutes a negative trait, and thus we see that Ms. Dana’s main issue with the women she describes as fembots is that they employ exaggerated sexuality to further their goals:
Here is Heidi Montag-Pratt, in her teeny-weeny bikini, posing half-nude next to every single swimming pool between Nevada and the Pacific, ever since her gag-inducing 10-in-one-day full-body reconstruction this winter. Here is new mother Kendra Wilkinson discussing her plans to follow in Montag’s footsteps and get a whole new body before she turns 30. Here are Tiger Woods’ frighteningly lifelike blowup-doll mistresses. Here are Eliot Spitzer’s.
From my perspective, these women would be more properly termed “tramps,” and I would reserve the term fembot for someone like Jessica Valenti, who is a hardcore female supremacist and has punitive rather than mercenary intent when it comes to males. Whatever the proper definition of fembot is, it is fascinating to see women taking hold of some of the concepts that have floated down into the common consciousness from the heights of the manosphere.
