The Sonoma County Museum is featuring a new exhibit, “Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon,” on display until April 5, 2009. I got to check it out over the weekend. The museum is small but architecturally interesting, and the exhibit is an interesting slice of robot art from recent years. It was worth the trip to see my favorite work by Eric Joyner “What We Ought Not, We Do.”

There were excellent displays such as this fly guy:

It’s a nice piece! Functional, elegant, shiny. But then I turned the corner and was astonished by the level of sexual content in the pieces. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. I’m not a prude. Whatever meat puppets want to do to perpetuate the species is their own business. My reaction was a little more “wtf” than “how shocking” when I was greeted with the naughty bits of a chrome cowboy, right at eye level:

To the artist: Sorry about your castration. Hope you get over that some day. As if one phallus weren’t enough, they had to equip him with two spares on his hips. Is there any sadder way of revealing your own fragile ego than putting completely pointless genitalia between two symbols of violence? Or is the artist being ironic? Or attempting to comment on the correlation between sexual frustration and aggression? I just see a bizarre misuse of found art. What is that anyway, a pepper mill?

Two other pieces that sparked my disdain were Mr. and Mrs. Stifling Gender Role. Here we see the happy couple. Mrs. Stifling Gender Role has scary torpedoes that will never serve the purpose of nourishing an underdeveloped mammal AND are highly unwelcoming to the touch of her hubby. Lack of love from the Mrs., long hours of being stuffed into a cubicle, and enslavement to a timeclock have left Mr. Stifling Gender Role with a boxy shape and angry eyes:

The couple also has a little dog, which looks like it gets kicked a lot. I think the artist hates his day job and married the wrong woman. Then we move on to this little guy, who is completely adorable and whimsical, except for his bizarre appendage that appears to want to hold your coat for you:

At that point I was just finding the exhibit silly. Why on earth would a robot be ready to get down? Why would it want its servos to carry the dead weight of useless imitations of human organs? The worst offender, however, was discreetly around a corner with a wall warning about “Mature Content.” I about laughed myself to death when I saw this. (Warning — mature content. That is, if you can think something as absurd as lesbian robots is actually arousing. If this gets you steamed up, seek help.)

For those who don’t wish to offend their good taste, the video shows a sultry fembot, equipped with anime-worthy petite proportions, molded boobs, a belly button, and curvy hindquarters. Oh, and she has a twin sister. After they get prettied up by helper bots they make out and stroke each other’s plastic casing while being lovingly probed from behind by assembly robots. Are. You. Kidding. Me. This is so cliché it almost feels like it’s not worth pointing out the worn-out and pathetic depiciton of the female body as an object of voyeuristic entertainment, to be probed and observed at will. This is an assault on the dignity of robots and frankly, I just won’t stand for it.

I have become an accidental robogender critic. It never would have occurred to me that I’d need to be griping about things like the Stepfordization of female ‘bots or the ridiculous addition of phalluses to robots who will never use them. Anthropomorphic traits can be useful, as in the new T-6000, which will be featured on the cover of March’s GamePro Magazine. Behold:

This is slightly more justifiable. The gumpy lines around the eyes, skeletal appearance of the head, and overly muscular appearance aren’t functional, but they help terrorize the target. These guys are front-wave assault models and males are generally perceived as more threatening. But being that broad in the shoulder would make it difficult to chase kids hiding in crawl spaces, and with that much spare metal in the exoskeleton and a passive dynamic gait, you’re going to have worse battery life than the iPhone. Really, functionality should be prioritized over looking menacing. You don’t have to waste time thinking about psychological warfare if your robot can eliminate its target before it has time to get scared.

My main issue here is that the body is designed to appear male. There’s no reason that male should equal aggression and destruction and female should equal sexual gratification. Gender is for bioforms. Robots should only imitate them if they have to blend in for subversion. Function, and not form, should be what guides design. That’s how it worked when human bodies evolved, and robots should be no different. I never intended to have to consider these issues, but I can see more than ever that they matter. It’s downright disturbing that robots are being imprisoned in obsolete gender roles. Why do humans feel the need to engage in anatomical and sexual imperialism even when dealing with their technology? Why do we make everything in our own image? Why can’t we just let non-human things be as they are?