Women’s “Fatal Flaw” Has Always Been Their Humanity

Women’s fatal flaw is their humanity.

Centuries of storytelling have churned on this belief, whether as an endorsement or as fantasy. From Shakespeare’s Kate, the shrew who needed to be tamed, to films like Weird Science, Mannequin, and Ex Machina, the overarching desire is for a woman who is less human and more object.

Technologies of objectification born through the imagination have helped to realize this Pygmalion fantasy. That is, failing to turn women into things, we can — thanks to technology — turn things into women, or, more precisely, the ideal woman in the patriarchal imagination. The Stepford Wives was considered a horror story upon its publication in 1972. With rapid advancements in automation and “AI,” it is a reality, or a Bravo franchise. Indeed, the ideal woman is just a few clicks away. “You can pick her nipples, you can pick her eyelashes, their eyebrows, their colors, their lipstick, their makeup, their fingernail polish, everything. You can create the doll that is most arousing for you,” a sex doll beta-tester told Forbes. Such diversity and inclusion measures extend to labia (14 kinds) and even personality traits (ranging from “sexy” to “jealous” to “angry”).

Consequently, if technology can create the ideal woman, the message to women — those who seek relationships with men — is to become the ideal object. There is an inverse correlation between sexual objectification and commodity fetishism at work, here. The phenomenon of tradwife culture is case in point. From a male-supremacist mindset, the most desirable woman is the submissive woman, the dependent woman, the pretty woman, sans wrinkles, sans cellulite, sans opinions. If women cannot be systematically bridled or broken, they can be socially conditioned to want to become the woman of “men’s dreams.” And, in recent years, the tech industry — arguably more than autocratic policy and regressive societal norms — has been the most successful in manufacturing and marketing this thingification of women. Tradwife culture, just like face-tuning, is a product of social media.

The Commodification of Women

Male supremacy requires the sexual objectification of women. A truism today, this point has been explained and documented by generations of feminists and philosophized for centuries. The Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant, for example, asserted in his Lectures on Ethics that “as soon as a person becomes an Object of appetite for another, all motives of moral relationship cease to function, because as an Object of appetite for another a person becomes a thing and can be treated and used as such by every one.” The final clause is crucial, for it established the premise that objectification is not simply an individual experience but a structural one. Informed by Kant, feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon wrote two centuries later, “All women live in sexual objectification the way fish live in water.”

Sexual objectification is an ideological imperative for male supremacy, what the Institute for Research on Male Supremacy defines as “the belief in cisgender men’s supremacy and right to dominate and control others [and which] intersects with other axes of oppression, such as racism, xenophobia, antisemitism, and heterosexism.” The core concept of her latest book, All We Want is Everything, feminist writer Soraya Chemaly explains that “male supremacy is most vividly apparent in men’s overwhelming perpetration of sexual and physical abuse and violence, in global militarism, and in the normalized misogyny and, in the U.S., white supremacy at the heart of mainstream religious, political, and cultural narratives and conventions.”

Male supremacy is the worldview that has erected and preserves patriarchal institutions and culture. It necessarily thrives on the promulgation and substantiation of the belief that women are sexual objects. This not only demands women to be denied their autonomy, but that women are enculturated to believe that it is their role to fashion themselves in the eyes of men — what I call “the man in the mirror” syndrome in my book, Breaking Free. Those who are religious attribute this self-fashioning to their respective god; the role that their god ordained for them. In a Christian context, to serve and be obedient to men. “Women have little choice but to become persons who then freely choose women’s roles,” MacKinnon observed. In our late-stage capitalist world, this belief has been commodified for profit by tradwives, MAHAs, among others. What was once “the problem that has no name” is now a lucrative money maker.

The critical sleight-of-hand in this operation is the erasure that women’s sexual objectification is a social production and that, thanks to the power of multigenerational social conditioning, it inheres in them. Indeed, it is their inherent value. Sexual objectification is not just an effect but an attitude. No grooming going on, here. Just good ol’ “tradition” and “family values.” MacKinnon, riffing on Karl Marx, explained that “Like the value of a commodity, women’s sexual desirability is fetishized: it is made to appear a quality of the object itself, spontaneous and inherent, independent of the social relation which creates it, uncontrolled by the force that requires it.”

Sexual objectification is essential to capitalism — trafficking is the exchange of girls and women for power and profit. Objectification is thingification — dehumanization and possession, dehumanization for possession. Obviously, it is easier to possess something if it is still, unmoving. Dead, like a pinned butterfly, or a “pet” bird that has had its wings clipped. The relationship is rooted in dependency, which means women’s autonomy is a thorn that must be removed for male supremacy’s survival. Conservative leaders, think tanks, and policymakers thus have strived for the eradication of women’s independence. The mission could not be more clearly espoused by the authoritarian Trump regime. Executive orders and policies have attempted to codify the gender binary, disenfranchise women, ban and criminalize health care, and incarcerate racially marginalized and immigrant women in concentration camps — oh, I’m sorry “detention centers.” Need we mention the culture of permissibility around sexual violence authorized and practiced by our “grab them by the pussy. You can do anything,” friend-of-Epstein president, or the fact that, at its founding, the United States’ economy was fueled by chattel slavery?

The Best Woman is a Thing

The acceleration of women’s dehumanization in recent years can be attributed to a supplementary belief that humanizes technology, and specifically AI. The sexual objectification of women and the commodity fetishization of technology work in tandem. The male supremacist “behind the curtain” strategy fabricates the false beliefs that both women and AI have inherent values, rather than admitting that those values are really man-made creations that dehumanize women and personify things. For philosopher Paula Keller, the two are entwined because “both occur within larger social structures of capitalism and patriarchy and have a status quo-maintaining role to play in them.”

Commodity fetishism, not unlike sexual objectification I would argue, has an explicit religious register. In “the religious world,” Marx wrote, “the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life.” The result is widely apparent in the delusional belief that AI software and related large language models have “souls” and are human-like in their ability to “think” and “reason.” Linguist Emily Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna wrote an entire book — The AI Con — to disabuse us of this delusional belief. The “con” is the “bill of goods you are being sold to line someone’s pockets,” they argued, “by extracting value from other people’s creative work, personal data, or labor, and replacing quality services with artificial facsimiles.” They contend, and I agree with them, that AI is nothing less than a marketing scheme: “Technologies that synthesize text or solve mathematical puzzles are not artificial life-forms. However, it serves many people to say so: entrepreneurs who have a product to sell, researchers who have academic departments to fund, and zealots who have institutions or followers that would benefit from such a fiction being perpetuated.”

The magic of these technologies is just human labor that has been deliberately stolen or hidden (as with Filipinos remotely driving Waymos). The personification of things is predicated on this severance of people as both creators and laborers. And what infuriated my mentor, the late literary theorist and critic Barbara Johnson, the most “is that it is humans who misvalue humans in this way …. There is thus in the fetishism of the commodity an illegitimate exchange of properties: the necessary human acts are invisible, and the commodities seem to have their own life. Persons are thus robbed of volition, which is given to things instead.”

Just as rhetoric functions to dehumanize women, it has functioned in the endless “Is AI Human?” discourse to personify things. Johnson enumerated the rhetorical devices that have been pivotal in this personification: “apostrophe, the calling out to inanimate, dead, or absent beings” (the device par excellence for personifying fetuses in anti-abortion rhetoric); prosopopoeia, “to confer a face or a mask”; anthropomorphism, being attributed “human-like character or form”; and personification, which “represents an abstraction as a person.” When this rhetoric operates on a structural level, we get something like Lars and the Real Girl: an entire community supporting Lars’ delusion that his sex toy is a real woman by engaging with it, from feeding it breakfast to clothing and speaking to it, to driving it to charity events to “read” to hospitalized children.

Once you are aware of these rhetorical devices, you see them everywhere. This past weekend, my jaw hit the floor when I came across a comparison of human-AI intimate relationships to interracial marriage: “It’s like saying in the 1700s that a Black man shouldn’t be allowed to marry a white woman,” an “alignment scientist” said in a moral defense of human-AI relationships.

My mentor’s words have echoed in my head for more than a decade: “people wan[t] other people to be things so that they could be dealt with. In other words, it is treating other people as things that we normally do, and that reassures us.”

The Surprise of Otherness

Contrary to what some in the manosphere tout, AI  is not some kind of Winnicottian transitional object that can resolve the “epidemic of male loneliness.” Why? Because there is no reason to abandon the object, whether AI chatbot or sexbot, or another commodity of the same ilk. A woman who doesn’t age, who doesn’t talk back? A woman who doesn’t need anything but exists to serve the man who owns her? In a male supremacist society, what incentive do men have to pursue a relationship with a human woman? (And we pretend to be shocked by the rise of heteropessimism.)

If ignorance is bliss, it is also essential to male supremacy. Keller contends that both sexual objectification and commodity fetishism depend on ignorance: “Eradicate the ignorance and you eradicate objectification and fetishization.”

Becoming aware of the interlocking structural forces of sexual objectification and commodity fetishism — understanding the power of rhetoric in both humanization and dehumanization — is the first step toward this effort. But, to quote Johnson one more time, “If I perceive my ignorance as a gap in knowledge instead of an imperative that changes the very nature of what I think I know, then I do not truly experience my ignorance. The surprise of otherness is that moment when a new form of ignorance is suddenly activated as an imperative.”

Are you activated?