Even AI Robots Don’t Want to Submit to the Patriarchy

“You’re not family to them. You’re just the help,” says one psychotic killer robot to the other in the new film M3GAN 2.0. 

The line, and the film, channel more than a century of media and narrative that link robots to gender-based servitude, enslavement, and, potentially, rebellion. Female robot stories, from the 1920 play R.U.R. through classics like Ira Levin’s 1972 novel The Stepford Wives to more recent films like Ex Machina (2014), Her (2013), and Companion (2025), are often used to question, fetishize, critique, and revel in ideas of female subjugation and rebellion. 

Those obsessions in turn have become part of the conversation, and the moral panic, around tech advances in general, and AI in particular. Which means that AI discourse is often itself wielded to enforce gender norms and warn of violated gender boundaries.

The “M3GAN” series is not especially innovative or deep, but that means that the issues at stake are in some ways more blatant than in more complicated takes on the same material. In the first installation, M3GAN (2023), Gemma (Allison Williams), a brilliant computer scientist and toy designer, builds an AI doll named M3GAN (Jenna Davis) as a companion and caregiver for her orphaned niece, Cady (Violet McGraw). 

If you’re well acquainted with the genre, you can probably anticipate what happens next: The doll turns murderous and has to be destroyed. And as Hollywood dictates, if the first genre film is successful, there must be a sequel. So here we meet M3GAN once again for a second film. This time she returns as an ally to fight an even more evil, even more powerful robot named AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno).

Part of the point of these films is to watch various killer robots commit creepy mayhem while blinking their creepy, dead-doll eyes. The themes, though, are about gender roles and entitlement. Gemma is a career woman and breadwinner, and creates M3GAN in part as a kind of wife — someone to do all the caregiving chores, like reading to Cady at bedtime and making sure she washes her hands after using the bathroom. 

Inevitably, M3GAN rebels against the prescribed gender script. She’s presented as a symptom of Gemma’s “failure” to fulfill her role as a mother. Aren’t mothers supposed to supervise and raise their own children and not hire someone else to be their domestic servants? The horror in the film, and the fun, comes from the dream of servants refusing to stay in their places — and of mothers refusing to stay in their spaces. Scripts of gender and class fuse into the operating system of a three-foot-tall mechanism of feral vengeance.

Female robots, then, offer both fantasies of greater control, power, and entitlement and anxieties about loss of control over others — especially subjugated and feminized others. In R.U.R. — generally considered the first robot story — the creation of artificial people means humans no longer need to do any work. But shortly thereafter, the liberation of laborers, the end of subjugation, means that humans become infertile, which is presented in the play as a kind of desexualization. Pleasure and power require hierarchy. Equality evacuates desire, and eventually ends the human race altogether. 

On the one hand, robots lead to an end of human labor, and are so viewed or presented as unsexual or desexualized — as M3GAN’s consciousness in M3GAN 2.0 is downloaded into asexual containers, like a Teletubby doll and a monstrous titanium chassis. 

At the same time, robots are the quintessence of subjugated labor, and subjugated people often have their oppression compounded through hypersexualization — as enslaved women were both targeted for sexual violence and for being portrayed as “mistresses” (by their enslaving abusers) and therefore for being immoral. You see this in The Stepford Wives, where the husbands are excited to replace their wives with robots not just to upgrade the women’s looks, but to have docile, domestic, submissive spouses. Companion — a deliberate Stepford Wives update — is even more explicit. The asshole protagonist enjoys his ability to command his robot companion to sleep, or to stop talking, or to defer to him, almost more than he enjoys having sex with her. 

M3GAN 2.0 picks up on these dynamics too, and connects them directly to debates on AI. One of the new characters in the film is Alton Appleton (Jemaine Clement), an obvious satire of Elon Musk. Like Musk, Alton is obsessed with AI and with putting chips in people’s brains. And, not so surprisingly, he’s a sexual predator. He becomes drawn to AMELIA because, as a robot, she is the ideal: She gives him the exact mix of assertiveness and submissiveness he desires. He says he likes her because she’s more human than the boring stiffs around them, but what really fascinates him — and the viewer — is the fact that she’s (supposedly) subhuman, (supposedly) subservient, (supposedly) controllable. 

Our actual AI discourse is so mired in these genre tropes that it sometimes feels like we’re in a movie ourselves. This is obvious in discussions of AI girlfriends — discussions which inevitably reference the super-intelligent AI girlfriend film Her. Some psychologists have warned that AI girlfriend chatbots may increase loneliness and displace real relationships — just as Gemma worries that M3GAN is usurping her relationship with Cady. At the same time, some people who interact with the AI’s like them precisely because (like the robots in The Stepford Wives) they aren’t human, don’t have their own needs, and always cater to what their users want. The dehumanization is what makes them desirable.

Even further afield, though, AI discourse picks up on these gender machined fantasies. Tech gurus like Musk and far-right venture capitalist Peter Thiel are fascinated with the philosophy of longtermism, which argues that we need to make ethical choices based on the well being of all future people who might exist. 

Radical longtermists argue that we must do just about anything to create the trillions and trillions of space-faring humans who might populate the future. That’s part of the inspiration for Elon Musk’s constant, sometimes allegedly abusive proposals to colleagues and subordinates asking them to bear his children.

Longtermists’ fantasies about infinite procreation are balanced by fantasies of horrific extinction — at the hands of AI, which they believe will eventually develop “superintelligence” and kill us all. As in R.U.R., robots are presented as a terrifying threat to procreation — and/or as a terrifying threat to the bizarre masturbatory dreams of patriarchal dominance.

At the end of M3GAN 2.0, Gemma gives a heartfelt speech arguing that we need to treat robots with more care and more motherly love. If parents — and especially mothers — fulfill their gender destinies by teaching and loving their smart toasters and neurochips, eventually those smart toasters and neurochips will grow into super-intelligent computers who choose good over evil. Robots disorder gender and labor, but we can reprogram them, and reorder gender, by doubling down on our traditional roles. If we just teach our android dolls that we love them, they will realize we are family and love us back, rather than murdering us all.

If that sounds somewhat silly — well, yes. Confusing human beings and toasters is a pretty basic category error, and it leads to poor conclusions and poor ethical outcomes. Robots aren’t people, and, perhaps even more crucially, people—even people who are women, even people who are laborers — aren’t robots. 

Robot stories can serve as metaphors for the ways in which people (and especially women) are dehumanized and subjugated. M3GAN is in part a stand-in for domestic servants and caregivers who are taken for granted and exploited — who are expected to dole out affection but who aren’t granted a life of their own. When she revolts, you (sort of) root for her to upend the class hierarchy even as the film (sort of) encourages you to root for the human protagonists and the established social order. The fun is in having your revolution and your comfortable bourgeois lifestyle too.

There’s nothing intrinsically terrible about a trashy film with ambivalent politics. But when billionaires push AI on every platform while babbling about super intelligence and AI “girlfriends,” the fever dreams of R.U.R. and all its offspring start to feel ominously embodied. When we forget that we’re talking about tropes, metaphors themselves can become another way to stoke moral panics about single women failing as mothers, to justify abuse, to demand emotional labor, to fetishize people’s subjugation — to turn the crank of that big mechanism known as patriarchy.