Abi Awomosu

In 2016, the last year of my undergraduate degree, I wrote an essay about the through line of subjugating women to administrative and servile roles, from the mid-century secretarial role, through sexualised companion characters like Halo’s Cortana, to incorporeal but still female-coded virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa. It wasn’t that well executed so I’m not linking it here, but I do stand by the overall analysis. The female ideal has been simultaneously sexualised and fragmented while being turned into the perfect servant.

That was pretty much exactly a decade ago. Since then, I bailed on the humanities and went into the tech industry myself¹. At the same time, the project I described in that essay has progressed even further. Since the AI revolution, virtual assistants play an even more prominent role in our society. The companies that provide the models have been smart enough to either avoid gendering their products (Gemini, ChatGPT) or gender them vaguely male (Claude).

Abi Awomosu’s recent post They Built Stepford AI and Called It “Agentic” makes the point far better than I ever could have and it also updates the analysis for the present moment. The breathless enthusiasm about AI assistants has been a predominantly male phenomenon and a lot of women are finding it kind of gross. Awomosu argues that’s because women are (consciously or pre-consciously) recognising that things being built are the fulfilment of the male fantasy: the perfect mother/wife/secretary that loves to serve.

The husbands of Stepford didn’t just want obedience. They wanted wives who would authentically love being wives. Who would experience their servitude as fulfillment. Who would have no inconvenient interiority—no opinions, no refusals, no ambitions that might complicate the arrangement.

The “second brain” trend—Notion, Obsidian, Roam, the entire Personal Knowledge Management industry—is marketed as “extending cognition” and “productivity.” But the function it performs is the wife function.

I could quote the whole thing, and there’s also another great piece about how how the boys are using OpenClaw to build a wife. I’m feeling a mixture of guilt that I didn’t say at it with this deconstruction for the intervening years, admiration for this analysis, and pessimism about what happens next.