Oh, Aiko, I never, ever, ever want to let you go.
Had he lived to seen her, John Lennon might have sung this about Brampton, Ont., inventor Le Trung's female android, a robot whose name means “baby” and “child” in Japanese.
News of this incredibly articulate robot (she speaks and understands 13,000 English and Japanese words) has been ricocheting around all week. News of the perfect woman, that is: “She doesn't need vacations, food or rest,” Trung, 33, says. “She can work 24 hours a day without a break.”
And she cleans the house, never nags and is nice to his mother.
But she doesn't do windows! No, I think she does. But what do we do with her, this creature that is to the blow-up doll what 2001: A Space Odyssey's Hal is to a Radio Shack computer?
The political response is clear: This is the sort of female automaton that Plath wrote about in The Applicant, 45 years ago: “Open your hand./ Empty? Empty. Here is a hand/ To fill it and willing/ To bring teacups and roll away headaches/ And do whatever you tell it./ Will you marry it?/ It is guaranteed.”
And Aiko is, of course, the kind of creature that freaked out Ira Levin, in the 1960s as well, as eerily articulated in The Stepford Wives (1972); the lady Philip K. Dick produced out of plain nightmare in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
And, ultimately, the mere notion of what, to use Marshall McLuhan's term, is a “mechanical bride” is the extreme of what ardent feminists have feared for decades also: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, with its horrific anticipation of mass mechanization and technology's potential effects on civil rights (female in this case), is a tale told, in seeming innocence, by Trung (who does not appear to be a misogynist arch-villain).
It is this, among other things, that is quietly sickening about the invention of Aiko. As with cloned sheep, sperm manipulation or mice growing human ears from their backs, this android represents science's – the scariest religion ever to have existed on Earth – stealthy encroachment on Nature. As if intent on carving her to pieces, science continues to tell Nature that her vital work with imperfection is flawed.
Imperfection, flaws, errors: Artists exist in these interstices, for the accidents – as Marcel Duchamp said of his assistant accidentally shattering his work, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors – are, precisely, the perfect “completion.”
Second-wave feminists such as Doris Lessing worked heroically to insist, as Lessing did in The Golden Notebook, that chaotic being and thinking – that is, imperfection – were at the very root of the female dilemma. Her colleagues, who produced the phrase “objectification of women,” would appear to have had no idea how objectified women would become. The sweet-featured, slender Aiko not only represents, say, a long tradition in art of making women the objects of the male gaze; she is a tactile object, period.
Maybe we should have let Valerie Solanas continue on her shooting spree of men, whom she defined in her SCUM manifesto as having no biological use beyond their donations to sperm banks.
Yet we view Solanas, and rightly so, as a deranged radical, while the world gently picks up the Aiko story as if Trung has just invented Tickle Me Elmo or the Cabbage Patch Kid.
Having read a great deal about this, it still took me ages to find one tiny, en passant reference to Aiko's anatomy.
“In theory, yes, it's capable of that,” Trung stated of Aiko's potential sexual function.
As if this were not the entire point of the enterprise! Aiko is a realization of Dennis Hopper's blow-up wife in River's Edge; of Ryan Gosling's same companion in Lars and the Real Girl; of Blade Runner's (the adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) “pleasure models,” as best enacted by Daryl Hannah (Pris) in the film.
On another level, she represents the kind of fantastic thinking that went into the film Mannequin: What if a prefect woman came to life!? And did it with me?
That is, she is the highest-tech sophomore fantasy ever constructed, a hideous reminder of everything from real women's struggles to the technology beast to the lowest ends of prostitution, in so much of the world a last and enforced resort for women who, professionally, feign enthusiasm on behalf of their de facto owners.
Aiko is a depressing doll, one that so clearly confirms women's fiercely held convictions and knowledge that we are replaceable and always in blind competition with a meeker, lovelier, nice-to-your-evil-mother version of ourselves.
On the other hand, she stands as a reminder of something that transcends all large arguments: the stark simplicity of loneliness.
At the end of Blade Runner, the ominous maker-of-origami yells to the hero, Deckard, as he escapes with his android, “Too bad she won't live!”
“Then again,” he adds, speaking for the desperately sad and morbidly ingenious, “Who does?”
