{"id":11533,"date":"2015-06-11T16:37:35","date_gmt":"2015-06-11T20:37:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/?p=11533"},"modified":"2015-06-11T16:37:35","modified_gmt":"2015-06-11T20:37:35","slug":"breaking-strains-for-robots-and-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2015\/06\/breaking-strains-for-robots-and-women.html","title":{"rendered":"Breaking Strains for Robots and Women"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p>The ever-excellent cultural critic Alyssa Rosenberg has written a great essay today titled <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/act-four\/wp\/2015\/06\/11\/want-to-understand-what-it-means-to-be-a-woman-look-to-robots\/\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">\u201cWant to understand what it means to be a woman? Look to robots.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 The gist:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I haven\u2019t seen anyone acknowledge the obvious point that so much of pop culture is making, and has been making for more than half a decade: Robots are an excellent metaphor for contemporary womanhood. Women are expected to declare ourselves flawless, but no matter how much we claim our perfection, we\u2019re still forced to offer evidence for our own humanity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>She works through a couple examples, from music videos, to tv, and film about the kinds of strength that women (and robots) are allowed and when those strengths are treated as suspect, and I had two music videos to add as an addendum to that list.<\/p>\n<p>First up, Christina Perri\u2019s \u201cHuman\u201d<\/p>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Christina Perri - Human [Official Video]\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/r5yaoMjaAmE?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<p>It\u2019s gorgeously shot (and the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=6SUyh-hxnpI\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">behind the scenes video<\/a>, where Perri talks about covering her tattoos for taping, and seeing her body as it hasn\u2019t been for years, is pretty interesting). \u00a0And here\u2019s how the lyrics go:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I can turn it on<br>\nBe a good machine<br>\nI can hold the weight of worlds<br>\nIf that\u2019s what you need<br>\nBe your everything<\/p>\n<p>I can do it<br>\nI can do it<br>\nI\u2019ll get through it<\/p>\n<p>But I\u2019m only human<br>\nAnd I bleed when I fall down<br>\nI\u2019m only human<br>\nAnd I crash and I break down<br>\nYour words in my head, knives in my heart<br>\nYou build me up and then I fall apart<br>\n\u2018Cause I\u2019m only human<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The singer is as strong as she needs to be to handle the demands and requirements of others, but the one bonus feature is that she\u2019s not strong enough for herself. \u00a0All the forms of vulnerability described in the last stanza quoted above build up to describing the power that someone else has over her. \u00a0Her strength can\u2019t\u00a0<em>really<\/em> be threatening, since it\u2019s ultimately under the thumb of the person who \u201cbuild[s] me up and then I fall apart.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>And the weird thing about the song is that that\u00a0<em>particular<\/em> form of weakness sounds like a selling point and a promise. \u00a0Even though there\u2019s a mutual dependency alluded to in her character\u2019s ability to \u201chold the weight of worlds\u201d what she describes for herself is breaking\/bleeding\/crashing and what she promises is convenience and companionship. \u00a0Her strength is meant to be so naturally lent and accepted that it would never look like weakness to need it.<\/p>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Beyonc\u00e9 - Why Don&#039;t You Love Me\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/QczgvUDskk0?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<p>The other vid I like on this topic isn\u2019t as obviously robot-related, but, in \u201cWhy Don\u2019t You Love Me?\u201d Beyonce\u2019s costumes and dancing are so aggressively stylized that the come off as on the fembot construction, and, as <a href=\"http:\/\/tigerbeatdown.com\/2010\/05\/15\/welcome-to-the-institute-for-beyonce-related-cultural-studies\/\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">Silvana points out on Tiger Beatdown<\/a>, the lyrics put an emphasis on construction and performance, even if all the circuits involved are wetware. \u00a0Quoth Silvana:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">The video, however, is a lot more interesting since, with Beyonc\u00e9 playing the role of \u201cB.B. Homemaker,\u201d it is openly mocking a lot of the ideals and tenets of womanhood.\u201d\u00a0I\u2019d go much further than that. I\u2019d say that the song and the video together form a radical critique of femininity, full stop. Because this is what femininity is about: making yourself appealing to men by adhering as closely possible to cultural ideals of perfect womanhood. Her lyric is not \u201cwhen I am so damn easy to love,\u201d but \u201cwhen I\u00a0<\/span><em style=\"color: #000000;\">make me<\/em><span style=\"color: #000000;\">\u00a0so damn easy to love.\u201d It\u2019s effort, it\u2019s a construct, it is something she\u00a0<\/span><em style=\"color: #000000;\">does<\/em><span style=\"color: #000000;\">\u00a0and not something that she\u00a0<\/span><em style=\"color: #000000;\">is<\/em><span style=\"color: #000000;\">. It is performative.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u2026<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Which is basically what it\u2019s like to be a modern woman. We perform femininity, and not only does it not succeeding in bringing about the desired result, I think it\u2019s actually\u00a0<\/span><em style=\"color: #000000;\">counter-productive<\/em><span style=\"color: #000000;\">\u00a0to our real goals. Particularly when we\u2019re talking about relationships<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Asking for the wrong kinds of strength, being reassured by strange sorts of weaknesses is, as Silvana points out, the kind of thing that damages a relationship as well as the person facing the odd or contradictory requests. \u00a0It can be hard for guys to figure out what to desire, if they\u2019re working from (pardon the computer metaphor) a training set of bad examples. \u00a0It\u2019s a good idea to highlight positive ones and the kinds of heightened bad ones that make the wrongness of our defaults more apparent.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The ever-excellent cultural critic Alyssa Rosenberg has written a great essay today titled \u201cWant to understand what it means to be a woman? Look to robots.\u201d\u00a0 The gist: I haven\u2019t seen anyone acknowledge the obvious point that so much of pop culture is making, and has been making for more than half a decade: Robots [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":11535,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[164],"class_list":["post-11533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-sex-and-sexuality"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Breaking Strains for Robots and Women<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The ever-excellent cultural critic Alyssa Rosenberg has written a great essay today titled &quot;Want to understand what it means to be a woman? 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