From Pygmalion to Ex Machina, the idea – and the ideal – of building a ‘perfect woman’ has come down through history. A new book explores why

From mechanical dolls to the eponymous Coppélia, the Jetsons’ Rosie to Ex Machina’s beguiling Ava, the lure of technology to create a manifestation of “the perfect woman” has long proved seductive.

But just why are automatons so attractive? And just what is this “perfect woman” anyway? Rounding up a veritable sorority of artificial Eves, Julie Wosk delves into the issues in her latest book My Fair Ladies, casting an analytical eye over female depictions, both physical and fictitious, to explore the history and the future of Woman 2.0.

For Wosk, the notion of artificial women has long been intriguing – fresh from her studies she worked as a copywriter on Playboy magazine before returning to academia. “I had just gotten out of Harvard [and] the salesman would come down the [corridor] selling false eyelashes and you were totally expected to buy them,” she says. The stint was enlightening. “I didn’t find it appalling – I thought there was something intriguing about it.” But, as her book reveals, technology has offered more than synthetic lashes – it unleashed the tantalising possibility of a bespoke woman, moulded to the mind of its creator who more often than not has been male.

The fantasy is far from a modern phenomenon. Even in Ancient Rome, poets were toying with the notion of crafting their ideal partner. “In Ovid’s myth of Pygmalion [he’s] dissatisfied with real women so he creates a beautiful sculpture,” explains Wosk. Since then the “perfect woman” has found herself depicted in myriad forms, from physical automatons to slick celluloid creations. But whatever their form, the underlying traits are often strikingly similar. “I think the notion of perfection has long been imbibed with this idea of a woman who is docile and easily controlled, compliant and unthreatening and that she is somehow superior to real women because of that,” says Wosk. “And almost always they love to cook, are sexually available and they share men’s interests.” Silence, it would seem, is also perceived as golden: “In a lot of [the films] the woman doesn’t talk,” says Wosk.

As technology has evolved, so too has the depiction of these android woman. “One of the technologies that came out early in these films are push buttons and remote controls and those really tie in with the idea of controlling women,” explains Wosk. “The technology made it possible to create fantasies about control.”

Yet despite the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics becoming ever more sophisticated, and the theme of undetectable androids blossoming, there is still some way to go before we end up with a plethora of Stepford wives. “[Technologists] are still working out all the issues to create a seamless virtuality – so you don’t go into that uncanny valley where you become aware that it’s artificial,” Wosk explains. Not that everyone is too bothered whether their synthetic woman is really and truly perfect – as Wosk points out the market for high-tech silicon sex dolls is already burgeoning.

But while synthetic women offer their creators the temptation of power, a recurring trope is the possibility of malfunction, defiance or loss, be it the tragic consequences wrought by the titular android of EE Kellett’s 1901 story The Lady Automaton, or the poignant retreat of the smooth-talking Samantha in Spike Jonze’s Her. And with the feminist movement, rise of women in STEM and technological progress pushing those concepts further, Wosk believes filmmakers, whatever their gender, have a rich and complex terrain to explore. “On the one hand it is empowering for women in film, a [synthetic] female character, to be able to resist the stereotype and the role she has been cast in and go off on her own,” says Wosk.

“But then these films are imbedded with the old Frankenstein anxiety about what happens when what we create eludes our control and that is such a huge topic in any discussion of robots these days.”

And not every film embraces tech, As Wosk reveals, films like Cherry 2000 turn the fantasy on its head: “The real woman ultimately turns out to be the perfect woman,” she says.

My Fair Ladies: Female Robots, Androids and Other Artificial Eves is published by Rutgers University Press, paperback price $29.95