On 11 June, 2024, a new post appeared on the business blog of the US Federal Trade Commission. At time of writing, the post has been scrubbed from the FTC’s website, likely as part of the Trump administration’s wider purge of anything that might inconvenience the American tech sector, but it has been republished on New York University’s Web Publishing Service. Written by FTC attorney Michael Atleson, and titled “Succor Borne Every Minute,” the piece gave an overview of the Commission’s existing guidance on “AI” chatbots. The piece got some attention in the tech-focused blogosphere, partly for its amusing pop culture examples (it likened chatbots to Forky from Toy Story 4 and to Magic 8 Balls), but mostly for this absolute banger of a paragraph:

Don’t misrepresent what these services are or can do. Your therapy bots aren’t licensed psychologists, your AI girlfriends are neither girls nor friends, your griefbots have no soul, and your AI copilots are not gods. We’ve warned companies about making false or unsubstantiated claims about AI or algorithms ... we’ve also repeatedly advised companies ... not to use automated tools to mislead people about what they’re seeing, hearing, or reading.[1]

I’m sure you can see why this blog post stood out. Like a lot of people, I found myself snagged on the poetry of one phrase in particular: “AI girlfriends are neither girls nor friends.” Which, I mean, of course they’re not. And yet ... they’re out there. Or so people claim. Well, so marketers claim. In truth, I am not much interested in the catalogue of sexist stereotypes and big titty imagery that contemporary exploiters of the ELIZA effect want to pass off as “AI girlfriends.” Rather, I am interested in the desire these services are attempting to fulfil. There are enough people who want an “AI girlfriend” that companies have begun to cater to them, and enough companies are catering to them that the FTC felt moved to warn them away. There’s something going on here.

As with many current societal horrors, we find American science fiction, if not with its hand on the tiller, then standing suspiciously near that tiller with its hands in its pockets, whistling. While the artificial woman does not originate in science fiction (much writing on the subject references Pygmalion), it is a fantasy long explored and promulgated through fictional writings about robots. As already mentioned, this is not an essay about actually existing AI girlfriends. Rather, it is about the science fictional context from which that fantasy springs. American science fiction has employed the female robot for over a century: as tragedy, as farce, as satire, and as psychological realism. I do not claim to offer a comprehensive history here; instead, this essay will outline some of the most illuminating examples of the type. By doing so, we can see how the artificial woman has gone from being an intriguing novelty, to a collective fantasy, to a saleable commodity, to at last, perhaps, a being with her own thoughts and desires. The AI girlfriend, like womanhood itself, is an elusive, ever-changing thing. In marking the ways this fantasy has developed, we can better understand the impulse to recreate it in our own world.

*

In the December 1938 edition of Astounding Science Fiction, neophyte science fiction writer Lester del Rey published a short story, “Helen O’Loy.” Its narrator, Phil, is a self-described “old man” reminiscing about his relationship with the titular Helen, “a dream in spun plastics and metals.”[2] Helen O’Loy, we soon discover, is a female robot named by Phil and his housemate Dave for her supposed resemblance to Helen of Troy:

“Helen of Troy, eh?” He looked at her tag. “At least it beats this thing—K2W88. Helen ... mmmm ... Helen of Alloy.”

“Not much swing to that, Dave. Too many unstressed syllables in the middle. How about Helen O’Loy?”

“Helen O’Loy she is, Phil.” And that’s how it began—one part beauty, one part dream, one part science; add a stereo broadcast, stir mechanically, and the result is chaos.[3]

This is the beginning of the story, and already we’re seeing the attitudes that led feminist critic Beverly Friend to label “Helen O’Loy” as “a blatant statement of woman as mere appendage to man.”[4] Phil and Dave are just removing their new helpmeet from her packaging, and already they are ogling her and deciding on a new name, absent any input from this supposed artificial intelligence herself. Things do not improve from here.

Phil and Dave are bachelor scientists living in a shared house after their (literal) twin girlfriends understandably dumped them. Dave, it is explained, “wanted to look over at the latest Venus-rocket attempt when his twin wanted to see a display stereo starring Larry Ainslee, and they were both stubborn.”[5] After that, Phil tells us, “we forgot the girls and spent our evenings at home.”[6] Doing their own cooking and cleaning is, of course, beyond the pale, so Phil and Dave order a custom utility robot “in a girl-modeled case,” which they fit with “a full range of memory coils”[7] for maximum homemaking efficiency. Phil, however, is called away on business before Helen O’Loy can be switched on, leaving Dave to activate her.

Arriving home three weeks later, Phil finds the place transformed: Helen is cooking and cleaning, while Dave stays in his room, refusing to eat. It transpires that after Phil left, Dave activated Helen, but he was too busy to satisfy her newborn curiosity about the world. In a moment’s inspiration, he “set her down in front of the stereovisor, tuned in a travelogue, and left her to occupy her time with that.”[8] But alas! The morning travelogue gives way to a series of love stories (including one starring Larry Ainslee), and before long Helen finds Phil’s collection of “mushy books.”[9] Dave arrives home that evening to an orderly domestic space:

The front alcove was neatly swept, and there was the odor of food in the air that he’d missed about the house for weeks. He had visions of Helen as the super-efficient housekeeper.[10]

Yet there is a catch, as he finds out in the very next paragraph:

So it was a shock to him to feel two strong arms around his neck from behind and hear a voice all aquiver coo into his ears, “Oh, Dave, darling. I’ve missed you so, and I’m so thrilled that you’re back.” Helen’s technique may have lacked polish, but it had enthusiasm, as he found when he tried to stop her from kissing him. She had learned fast and furiously—also, Helen was powered by an atomotor.[11]

It turns out one cannot have a clean house without the concomitant intimacy; even robot women have demands. This cod-screwball comedy dynamic drives the rest of the story. Dave is appalled at Helen’s advances and spends three hours lecturing her about “her station in life, the idiocy of stereos, and various other miscellanies.”[12] This elicits a stereotypically feminine response: “Helen looked up with dewy eyes and said wistfully, ‘I know, Dave, but I still love you.’”[13] At which point, Phil tells us, “Dave started drinking.”[14]

Once Phil returns home, Dave abandons the household, leaving his friend to take care of the lovesick robot. Phil is on the brink of deactivating Helen when Dave asks him to stop. He is leaving the city for a farmer’s life in the country, and he wants Helen to join him as his wife. Again, there are shades of screwball comedy, as Phil reflects ruefully: “No man acts the way Dave had been acting because he hates a girl; only because he thinks he does—and thinks wrong.”[15]

After several decades of domestic bliss (during which Phil and Helen “put lines in her face and grayed her hair”[16] to create the illusion of aging), Phil receives a tragic letter from Helen. Dave is dead, and she wants Phil to deactivate her so the two of them can “cross this last bridge side by side.”[17] Phil reflects on his life of unbroken bachelorhood, and admits his own feelings for Helen: “I should have married and raised a family, I suppose. But ... there was only one Helen O’Loy.”[18]

It is, as scholars say, a lot. Yet while Peter Nicholls is undoubtedly correct in calling this story “a classic of sexist sf,”[19] there’s no denying that “Helen O’Loy” is a classic. This is not, I should stress, a judgement of quality. But if we take ‘a classic’ to mean ‘a work of literature that endures beyond its initial publication,’ there is no ambiguity. “Helen O’Loy” is a remarkably enduring piece of fiction.

According to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, “Heley O’Loy” has been reprinted twenty-three times since its initial appearance in Astounding Science Fiction (not counting new editions of the various anthologies in which it has appeared). The dates of these reprints range from 1948 to 2020. And that’s just in English; the story has also been translated into Spanish, Japanese, German, Italian, French, and Dutch, with the most recent foreign language edition being an Italian publication from 2014.[20] This enduring quality was evident in del Rey’s lifetime. In his 1978 “Author’s Afterword” to The Best of Lester del Rey, he stated that “she still earns more than a dozen times annually what I was paid for her initial appearance ... I am well-pleased with the lady, to say the least.”[21] Again, the sexism is obvious, but so too is the curious power of the original story.

Obviously, a story can earn the status of ‘much anthologised’ for reasons beyond raw quality. “Helen O’Loy” is a relatively early piece of American ‘golden age’ science fiction about human-robot relationships. It even predates Isaac Asimov’s “Robbie,” which would eventually become the first story in I, Robot. This gives it a historical valence that has likely carried it into a fair few of its twenty-three republications. It certainly feels like the artifact of a bygone era. Any benefit of the doubt about the story’s intent is unlikely to survive the first few pages; for my money, the most absurdly sexist moment comes when Phil takes Helen shopping. “[S]he giggled and purred over the wisps of silk ... tried on endless hats, and conducted herself as any normal girl might.”[22] Friend, Nicholls, and every other feminist critic who slammed this story’s gender politics was absolutely right to do so.

And yet.

Every time I return to “Helen O’Loy,” I am struck by one fact: it is shockingly easy to take Helen’s side. Granted, this is partly because the other two main characters are sexist pigs, but del Rey seems to be aware of this, at least on some level. In his 1993 article, “Rereading Lester del Rey’s ‘Helen O’Loy,’” Dominick M. Grace argues that Helen can be read as “a cautionary image of what might result should sexist fantasies become the basis for the creation of an artificial intelligence.”[23] He points out that Phil and Dave are framed as ridiculous and childish, firstly for dumping their girlfriends over not wanting to see a movie, and then in preferring a robot housekeeper over real women. He further argues that Phil is an unreliable narrator, with self-admittedly “adolescent taste”[24]; his attraction to Helen, Grace argues, is an extension of his juvenile attitude. For all its sexist horrors, there is a sense of irony in del Rey’s writing. Helen can’t help who she is; she was built that way.

While Grace’s reading is clever and astute, I must confess to a more instinctive identification with Helen O’Loy. Helen, for most of the story, is an adolescent, feeling her way into romance with no guidance, and indeed active discouragement, from the adult men around her. So she works with what she has: daytime television and juvenile fiction. Without wishing to indulge in geeky stereotypes, I must say this corresponds distressingly well with my own adolescence. I read about Helen throwing herself into romance, getting her heart broken, being unable to articulate her desires in a way that will make people listen, and I find myself wincing sympathetically.

I also want to stick up for her when Phil and Dave start in with the insults. Leave her alone! my internal monologue shrieks when Phil tells her that she will never bear Dave a son. Give her some space! it howls when he states that “[a] man wants flesh and blood, not rubber and metal.”[25] She’s still figuring herself out! I want to cry. But Helen has her own reply:

“Don’t, please! I can’t think of myself that way; to me, I’m a woman. And you know how perfectly I’m made to imitate a real woman ... in all ways. I couldn’t give him sons, but in every other way ... I’d try so hard, I know I’d make him a good wife.”[26]

When I showed this passage to friend and fellow critic Weronika Mamuna, she responded with three words: “big trans energy.” The sexism of this scene is undeniable; the crass insinuations about Helen’s anatomy and the tying of womanhood to childbearing are indefensible. Nevertheless, there is something here worth highlighting. Seemingly by accident, this hoary old pulp story from 1938 stumbles into the subjective experience of a young person feeling her way into womanhood in the face of discouragement from those around her. Reading in the midst of a worldwide gender freakout, there is something sweet about a story whose title character simply asserts that she is a woman, and works with the people around her to build a life as one.

We often talk about fiction ‘not aging well,’ as if stories, like pieces of fruit, decay and become less palatable over time. Yet putrefaction also brings forth new life, vital and squirming if not always aesthetically pleasing. Thus, “Helen O’Loy” has gained a reading that feels obvious to a 2025 reader and would have been absent for a reader in 1938 or 1977. Helen O’Loy is a woman accused of being neither girl nor friend; by story’s end she has achieved a life as both. It is a sexist story that has curdled, however imperfectly, into a semi-trans feminist one.

*

Of course, if outright sexist stories can accidentally mutate into trans-positive ones, the same is true of stories that were proto-feminist to begin with. Chan Davis’s “It Walks in Beauty” has a complex history even before we get to its actual contents. First published in the January 1958 issue of Star Science Fiction, Davis repudiated this initial version of the story. Its editor, Frederik Pohl, had “substantially changed”[27] the text without Davis’s knowledge or permission, and the unchanged original was not published until 2003. Reading the 2003 version, I often had to pause and remind myself: this was 1958. It’s not just that the story is visibly twenty years younger than “Helen O’Loy.” At times, it reads like something written in the twenty-first century.[28]

“It Walks in Beauty” tells the story of Max, a chemical worker in a dystopian future where gender roles have been radically reconfigured. In this future world, there are men, like Max and his boorish colleague Jim. There are women, like the erotic dancer Luana, with whom Max is obsessed. And then there are “career girls,” or simply “careers,”[29] like Max’s love interest Paula, who are the portion of young girls insufficiently attractive to grow up to be women. While men and women get he/him and she/her pronouns respectively, the “careers” are referred to as “it.” Shortly after Paula is introduced, we get this description of her:

Paula wore a man’s short haircut and a man’s pants, like any career girl. It was a little ridiculous, like a man yet not quite a man; Max had to admit it. But he didn’t really feel it. Everybody respected Paula as a worker. In Max’s case the word was liked.[30]

Davis is writing a story about the arbitrary nature of traditional gender roles, and the ways in which women deemed insufficiently feminine lose access to the privileges of gender conformity. In doing so, he crafts a scenario that, probably unintentionally, mirrors the experiences of contemporary trans people. In particular, the experience of being misgendered, not as male or female, but as a third and often degraded gender, is one shared by many transfeminine people. It is a common joke that they/them pronouns suddenly emerge when people are speaking of a trans woman they disapprove of, even if that woman does not use they/them pronouns. In Davis’s story, that same cruelty is a governing logic of society.

At times the analogy borders on the uncanny. Paula at one point refers to “my obscene man’s clothes,”[31] and Max’s imaginings of girlhood prefigure many 2010s narratives of trans youth:

It was really terrifying. What must it be like to be a schoolgirl? Always wishing your complexion would clear up, wishing your breasts would grow rounder, waiting to feel that uncontrollable desire that would tell you you were a woman. He hadn’t thought about such things since he was in school, and of course he hadn’t been old enough then to understand.

What must it be like to be a grown career girl![32]

The story’s climax involves Paula dressing in women’s clothes and performing a dance for Max, asking him to recognise her gender: “You can see and hear, can’t you? Can’t you tell I’m a woman?”[33] Max’s feelings on this point are recognisable as transphobic tropes. He exhorts himself to “[p]retend it’s a woman!” and the next paragraph tells us that “[t]he love of his life made him gag.”[34] But by the end of the story Paula has made Max question his fantasies about Luana. She invites him for coffee, and we get these ambivalent final paragraphs:

Paula had left him alone in the world with her ... it ... her. He had no choice. “Okay,” he said with no emotion of any kind. “I’ll wait for you in the lab.”

“You’re a nice guy, Max, and eventually we’ll understand each other.”[35]

I am struck by Max’s wrestling with pronouns here; he has a long way to go, but he’s got one thing right, at least. Perhaps Paula is right, and there is hope for the two of them yet.

I raise this story not because it contains an AI girlfriend as such, but to demonstrate some important related points. Firstly, that Lester del Rey was not alone in grappling with gender during the so-called ‘golden age’ of science fiction, nor was he a phenomenally progressive example of such grappling. And secondly, that the AI girlfriend is but one instance of the construction of gender in science fiction; other avenues are open for exploration, and deserve extended treatments of their own.

*

“Got myself a cryin’, talkin’, sleepin’, walkin’, livin’ doll.”[36] So begins Cliff Richard’s first UK number one, 1959’s “Living Doll.” A queasy amalgamation of American and British sensibilities, the song was written for the film Serious Charge as a pastiche of American rock’n’roll music. In its initial version, however, it was too pale an imitation even for Richard, who refused to release the song commercially until it was reworked as a pale imitation of American country music instead. The smooth smarm of Richard’s performance is off-putting enough, but it’s Lionel Bart’s lyric that truly sends the song over the edge. There are none of the faint glimmers of personhood to be found in “Helen O’Loy”; this is the artificial woman as objectified, jealously guarded plaything:

Take a look at her hair, it’s real

And if you don’t believe what I say, just feel.

I’m gonna lock her up in a trunk

So no big hunk can steal her away from me.[37]

I have listened to the song several times in writing this essay, and each time these lines make me shudder anew. Yet while the artificial woman fantasy has somehow managed to deteriorate since 1938, one thing remains constant: she is a unique creation. Helen O’Loy is a custom job; there’s no suggestion that other men are installing romantic love on their own household robots. Richard, meanwhile, repeatedly stresses that he has “[g]ot the one and only walkin’, talkin’, livin’ doll”[38] (emphasis mine). The AI girlfriend, at this stage, is strictly one-of-a-kind. Nobody has yet thought about mass production. About what might happen when the robot wife goes mainstream.

*

In 1972, acclaimed suspense novelist Ira Levin published his fourth book, The Stepford Wives. The titular wives are perhaps the most well-known “AI girlfriends” in American fiction—certainly Levin’s book is the most famous covered in this essay. The very word ‘Stepford’ entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2004, where it is listed as meaning: “Robotic; docile; obedient; acquiescent; (also) uniform; attractive but lacking in individuality, emotion, or thought.”[39] The big reveal of Levin’s book, and of the 1975 film version, is that the ostensibly perfect housewives of Stepford are in fact lifelike robots, replacements for the murdered wives of the town’s misogynistic men. We can see a continuity here with “Helen O’Loy”—as Beverly Friend points out, in this book, “Helen O’Loy has pervaded society,” as a previously “one-of-a-kind”[40] curiosity has become a custom-made industrial product. But the pop cultural absorption of Stepford tends to leave out important nuances. Like “Helen O’Loy,” The Stepford Wives is subtly engaged with both youth and media consumption. Misogyny, like romantic love, is something learned early, and in part from cultural artifacts.

The Stepford Wives begins shortly after the protagonist, Joanna Eberhart, moves with her husband Walter and their two children to the small Connecticut town of Stepford. Joanna and Walter are a hip, liberated couple. Early on, Joanna mentions that “I’m interested in politics and in the Women’s Liberation movement ... and so is my husband.”[41] A few pages later, Walter is invited to join Stepford’s male-only Men’s Association, and there’s a touching scene of mutual sloganeering:

He put his arm around her shoulders and said, “Hold off a little while. If it’s not open to women in six months, I’ll quit and we’ll march together. Shoulder to shoulder. ‘Sex, yes; sexism, no.’”

“‘Stepford is out of step,’” she said, reaching for the ashtray on the picnic table.

“Not bad.”

“Wait till I really get going.”[42]

Walter’s feminist consciousness doesn’t last. Indeed, one of the book’s more understated horrors is seeing the couple’s early togetherness torn apart, as Walter is seduced by the fantasy of a compliant, sexualised machine. On his return from the Men’s Association Joanna catches him masturbating, a reaction (we later realise) to the prospect of a wife who is neither girl nor friend. By the two-thirds mark he is calling her “hysterical”[43] and complaining that she doesn’t wear enough lipstick.

Joanna seeks companionship outside the home, and befriends fellow recent arrivals Bobbie and Charmaine. The three are perturbed by the house-proud docility of their fellow Stepford women, who Joanna compares to “actresses in commercials ... playing suburban housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real.”[44] There are some failed attempts at feminist organising, and Joanna discovers that Stepford used to have its own Women’s Club, now disbanded. The artificial hyper-femininity of the Stepford Wives is a recent phenomenon, not some inborn gender difference. Things get creepier when Charmaine’s appearance and attitude change dramatically after a minibreak with her husband. “I’ve been lazy and selfish,” she tells Joanna and Bobbie. “From now on I’m going to do right by Ed, and by Merrill too. I’m lucky to have such a wonderful husband and son.”[45]

Bobbie suspects an environmental toxin, and begins frantically searching for a new house outside Stepford. But within three months of her arrival, she too takes a short break with her husband, and returns a changed woman. “I realized I was being awfully sloppy and self-indulgent. It’s no disgrace to be a good homemaker,”[46] she says. Joanna, unnerved, begins to feel the jaws of a trap closing around her. Eventually she makes a trip to the library, and discovers that the head of the Men’s Association, Dale ‘Diz’ Coba, has a background in animatronics, and puts two and two together. She angrily confronts Walter, demanding to know “[w]hat’s the going price for a stay-in-the-kitchen wife with big boobs and no demands?”[47]

Joanna attempts to escape Stepford, but is cornered by some of the Stepford men, and left alone in the kitchen with the new version of Bobbie. Bobbie offers to cut herself to prove that she is flesh and blood, and Joanna, desperate, walks towards her:

Joanna went forward, toward Bobbie standing by the sink with the knife in her hand, so real-looking—skin, eyes, hair, hands, rising-falling aproned bosom—that she couldn’t be a robot, she simply couldn’t be, and that was all there was to it.[48]

In the book’s brief final chapter, a newer arrival, Ruthanne Hendry, encounters Joanna in the supermarket. Joanna, like the others, has changed: “Housework’s enough for me ... I’m more at ease with myself now. I’m much happier too, and so is my family. That’s what counts, isn’t it?”[49] The real Joanna is dead; in her place is a vacuous simulacrum.

It’s a masterfully executed horror story, and the broad strokes are justly remembered. But on my first reading of The Stepford Wives, I was struck, not by its prescience, but by its timeliness. It is a book profoundly informed by the media culture of the mid-twentieth century. The robotic Stepford Wives are built to sketches by Ike Mazzard, a famous magazine illustrator. Joanna tells Mazzard that “you blighted my adolescence with those dream girls of yours!”[50] and remembers “when she was eleven or twelve, reading Mom’s Journals and Companions.”[51] The novel references recent bestsellers like Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative (1966) and Lionel Tiger’s Men in Groups (1969), and Joanna’s work as a photographer is influenced by the kinds of photos she can sell to magazines. At one point Joanna contemplates a photo she’s taken of a cab driver snubbing a Black passenger and reflects that there are “plenty of markets for pictures dramatizing racial tensions”[52]—a sentence that reads oddly today when there are perilously few markets for pictures of any kind.

Most striking of all, though, is how Dale Coba earned his nickname. After creepily spying on Joanna making coffee (“I like to watch women doing little domestic chores”[53]), he informs her that “I used to work at Disneyland.”[54] The Stepford Wives, we later surmise, are built using the same technology as The Hall of Presidents. It may be the darkest joke in the book.

The invocation of Disneyland points to another overlooked aspect of the novel: the role of the main characters’ children. While they get relatively little dialogue, the children do comment on the events of the novel. In her 2018 book The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor, Jennifer Rhee points out that Joanna and Bobbie’s sons seem remarkably keen on the Men’s Association and its work. On his first sight of the Men’s Association building, Joanna’s son Pete springs out of his car seat and asks, “Can I go there some time?”[55] Later in the novel, Joanna speaks Bobbie’s son Jonny about the ways Bobbie has changed: “‘She doesn’t shout any more, she makes hot breakfasts ...’ He looked over at the house and frowned ... ‘I hope it lasts,’ he said, ‘but I bet it doesn’t.’”[56]

Joanna’s daughter Kim, by contrast, seems actively sickened by Stepford. She throws up on the same car ride that Pete asks about visiting the Men’s Association, and she later gets a sore throat and is “home for three days.”[57] Rhee points to these details as indicative of the town’s noxious anti-female atmosphere:

While Jonny’s preference of a robot over his mother and Pete’s eagerness to go to the Men’s Association reflect the closed world’s erasure of historical time, Kim’s distress highlights the female lived body’s dangerous incompatibility with Stepford’s closed world.[58]

It’s small wonder the boys find Stepford more congenial than Kim. It’s a town made by and for immature males, most of whom, unlike them, are old enough to know better. Further to this, the narrative zooms in on Joanna and Bobbie’s children at a pivotal stage. It is the weekend of Bobbie’s murder/replacement, and Bobbie’s son Adam is staying with Joanna and Walter:

Having Adam for the weekend was a mixed blessing. On Saturday he and Pete and Kim played beautifully together, inside the house and out; but on Sunday, a freezing-cold overcast day when Walter laid claim to the family room for football-watching (fairly enough after last Sunday’s sledding), Adam and Pete became, serially, soldiers in a blanket-over-the-dining-table fort, explorers in the cellar (“Stay out of that darkroom!”), and Star Trek people in Pete’s room—all of them sharing, strangely enough, a single common enemy called Kim-She’s-Dim. They were loudly and scornfully watchful, preparing defenses; and poor Kim was dim, wanting only to join them, not to crayon or help file negatives, not even—Joanna was desperate—to bake cookies. Adam and Pete ignored threats, Kim ignored blandishments, Walter ignored everything.[59]

It’s an economical yet vivid passage of the kind Levin is particularly good at. Two days are collapsed into a mere 120 words, which give us a sense of the social dynamics of the house (Walter’s indifference contrasted with Joanna’s desperation) and the sharp decline from youthful harmony to the battle of the sexes (a microcosm of Joanna and Walter’s dynamic across the novel). The cruel epithet of “Kim-She’s-Dim” conveys the boys’ sexist contempt more memorably than several sentences to the same effect, and their play scenarios invoking juvenile adventure fiction fit with the novel’s larger engagement with the sexism of contemporary pop culture.[60] It’s hard not to sympathise with both Kim’s desperation to be included and Joanna’s frantic attempts to buy her silence with stereotypically feminine activities.

Most striking, however, is what happens directly after this passage. A single-sentence paragraph tells us: “Joanna was glad when Bobbie and Dave came to pick Adam up.”[61] In retrospect, we realise that this is not Bobbie at all; an associative link is thus formed between the sexist play of Joanna and Bobbie’s children and the larger misogynist game of the Men’s Association. The couple’s appearance hints at the sinister goings-on: “Bobbie had had her hair done and was absolutely beautiful—either due to make-up or love-making, probably both. And Dave looked jaunty and keyed up and happy.”[62] It’s hard not to draw a link between Dave’s hyperactive glee and the freewheeling exuberance of the two boys just a few sentences earlier; between the children preparing defences against Kim and the men preparing defences against their own wives’ independence.

For indeed, what could be more childish than the desire for an artificial partner? It’s not just the technology that the Men’s Association has appropriated from Disneyland; they’ve brought a perverted, adolescent version of the worldview along too. In her 2008 paper, “Stepford USA: Second-Wave Feminism and the Representation of National Time,” Jane Elliott relates the town of Stepford to the conservative concept of ‘the end of history.’ The repetitive chores carried out by the Stepford Wives echo contemporary feminist discourse about the “Sisyphean labors”[63] of white middle-class housewives, depicting “the temporality of housework as by nature a form of static time.”[64] In diagnosing this problem, Levin’s novel evokes the style of children’s literature. Joanna composes a poem about the Stepford Wives in her own head: “They never stop, those Stepford Wives ... They work like robots all their lives.”[65] As Elliott notes, “The singsong quality of Joanna’s chant mirrors the perpetual motion of the Stepford women, attributing to their actions all the rhythmic compulsion of a nursery rhyme.”[66] Stepford has been taken over by a childish fantasy. In critiquing it, Joanna instinctively reaches for the literature of the nursery-room.

This juvenile fantasy is the same one that animates much antifeminist backlash, then and now; the use of modern technology to produce and promote a childlike image of historical and social stasis, a return to a past that never existed. Misogyny as a form of arrested development.

*

In her 1962 poem, “The Applicant,” Sylvia Plath deploys the persona of a judgemental yet wheedling salesperson. After first negging the poem’s addressee (“are you our sort of a person? / ... No, no? Then / How can we give you a thing?”[67]), the poetic voice tries to sell him “A hand / ... / To bring teacups and roll away headaches,” followed by a suit “Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.”[68] After this comes the pièce de résistance: a crying, talking, sleeping, walking, “living doll”:

Now your head, excuse me, is empty.

I have the ticket for that.

Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.

Well, what do you think of that?

Naked as paper to start

But in twenty-five years she’ll be silver,

In fifty, gold.

A living doll, everywhere you look.[69]

There’s a lot here that parallels the contemporary interest in “AI girlfriends.” There’s the denigration of both the male customer and of actual human women: “My boy, it’s your last resort.”[70] There’s the fusion of tech hype and pseudo-therapeutic language: “It works, there is nothing wrong with it. / You have a hole, it’s a poultice. / You have an eye, it’s an image.”[71] There’s the general ickiness of woman-as-consumer-product.

Yet there is also, and similarly to “Helen O’Loy,” a sense of long-term planning. While there is an air of titillation to the description of the doll “[n]aked as paper to start,” and indeed to the movement up through silver and gold, the tackiness of the imagery distracts from a fundamental point: fifty years is an awfully long time to own anything. Plath has identified an interesting wrinkle in the concept of the artificial girlfriend: she is an adolescent desire that is nonetheless meant to last you the rest of your life. The queasy clash of childish fantasy and economic reality is familiar to many American adults in 2025. A recent Wall Street Journal article featured a thirty-one-year-old woman, “still sleeping in her childhood bedroom, gazing at the same unicorn wallpaper put up before she was born.”[72] It’s an indignity that no amount of gold plating can disguise.

*

In 1987, criminally underrated fabulist Rachel Ingalls published a novella, In The Act. Where “Helen O’Loy” presented the automatic spouse as a strange novelty, and The Stepford Wives as blackly comic horror, In The Act uses the conceit to power an outright farce. Its protagonist, Helen (that name again), is in a loveless marriage with middle-aged tinkerer Edgar. With their two children away at boarding school, and Helen at her twice-weekly adult education classes, Edgar spends his time alone “up in the lab”[73] of their large suburban home. Helen is, of course, barred from entering this lab, but when her adult education classes are discontinued, her curiosity gets the better of her. She enters the lab and discovers a mysterious bundle: “She was about to pass by when she saw a hand protruding from one of the bottom folds of the sheet.”[74]

It is, of course, an artificial woman. A few days later she finds the doll complete, and what’s more, dressed:

She thought she’d better know what she was up against. She examined the doll thoroughly, taking off the pink dress first, and then the black lace bra and underpants. She started to lose her sense of danger. She was getting mad. Who else, other than Edgar himself, could have chosen the pink dress and black underwear? He couldn’t walk into a dress shop in her company without becoming flustered, yet she could picture him standing at a counter somewhere and asking for the clothes, saying in his argument-winning voice, “Black lace, please, with a ribbon right about here.” He’d known the right size, too—but of course he’d known that. The doll had been built to specification: his specifications. Oh, Helen thought, the swine.[75]

Again we have the sense of betrayal by a husband who prefers a customisable plaything to his actual human wife, with the tragicomic detail of Edgar refusing to shop for clothes with Helen while he buys lingerie for the doll. Helen soon finds a switch behind the doll’s ear, which causes her hips to gyrate “in an unmistakable manner,” and prompts her to speak in “a mixture of baby talk and obscenity, of crude slang and sentimentality.”[76] As in previous instances of the sex robot in fiction, Ingalls stresses the infantile nature of her appeal. When Helen demands to know the doll’s name, Edgar sheepishly admits that he has called her “Dolly.”[77]

Helen, however, will have her revenge. She kidnaps Dolly and deposits her in a train station locker, before returning home to deliver her husband an ultimatum: make her a robot boyfriend, or lose Dolly forever. Edgar, chagrined, begins work on a robot “gigolo,”[78] but when he delivers “Auto,”[79] as Helen calls him, she is disappointed:

His sexual prowess was without subtlety, charm, surprise or even much variety. She didn’t believe that her husband had tried to shortchange her; he simply hadn’t had the ingenuity to program a better model.[80]

But then, why would he? Edgar is interested in his own fantasy of a compliant, sexually available, but otherwise childishly simple woman. He is thus unable to conceive, much less cater to, the desires of an actual woman, even the one to whom he is married. If he were, he likely would not have built Dolly in the first place, much less kept her a jealously guarded secret.

Helen demands an update to Auto to replace the adult education classes she lost at the story’s outset: “I want him to teach me Italian. And flower painting and intermediate cordon bleu.”[81] It’s a fabulous comedic beat, even if, as with many sex comedies, it depends on a degree of gender essentialism. This is especially evident when Helen reflects on Edgar’s work in building Dolly: “A woman ... can get the eyes and everything else right without any trouble: her creative power is inherent. Men can never create; they only copy. That’s why they’re always so jealous”[82] (emphasis in the original).

This gender essentialism is further highlighted by the misadventures of Dolly herself. Once Helen deposits her in the station locker, she is stolen by career criminal Ron, who takes her home and finds the ‘on’ switch. “The instant Dolly opened her eyes, Ron fell in love with her.”[83] Ron decides he is going to keep Dolly for himself, passing her off as a human girlfriend. The novella’s tone here remains farcical. Ron reflects that his relationship with Dolly is “like having a wife, except that not being human, of course, she was nicer,”[84] and at one point he accidentally activates her sex mode on the bus. Ron’s male friends and family members are uniformly impressed with Dolly (“what a doll,”[85] one of them remarks), while the few women in his life dislike her. Things come to a head in a downright slapstick scene where Ron is making eggs:

He’d cracked a couple of eggs into the frying pan and was walking over to the garbage pail with the shells. One of them jumped out of his hand. He scooped it up again and threw it out with the others. He meant to wipe a rag over the part of the floor where it had landed but the eggs started to sizzle in the pan. He stepped back to the stove. And at that moment, Dolly came into the room. Before he had a chance to warn her, she was all over the place—skidding and sliding, and landing with a thump.[86]

Dolly is damaged, so Ron gets in touch with Helen and Edgar, bringing her to their house to “do a deal.”[87] While the two men square off, Helen leaves Dolly alone with Auto: “She put him on top of Dolly, arranged both dolls in appropriate positions, and pushed the buttons behind their ears.”[88] When the men discover the dolls in the act, the three humans descend into an orgy of violence, destroying both dolls in the carnage. The novella ends with Helen, Edgar, and Ron standing in the wreckage:

There was nothing to say. They stared as if they didn’t recognize each other, or the room they were standing in, or any other part of the world which, until just a few moments before, had been theirs.[89]

The alienation precipitated by Dolly’s creation is complete.

Like The Stepford Wives, and like a lot of Ingalls’ other work, In The Act is a repudiation of the idealised American housewife. As Jamie Hood puts it in his 2023 article, “A Doll’s House”:

Both Ingalls and Stepford suggest that, if the future is female, this is only to the extent that “the female” might be reengineered as a pleasing and on-demand receptacle through which heteropatriarchal blueprints will be passed.[90]

In The Act clearly exists in the tradition of the sex doll as feminist satire. This being the 1980s, however, Helen’s fantasy of liberation from the isolating drudgery of housewifery takes a decidedly entrepreneurial turn. In her disappointment with Auto, her thoughts turn to the dolls’ potential as a marketable product:

She remembered what Edgar had said about the possible therapeutic value of such a doll. It could be true. There might be lots of people who’d favor the companionship of a nonhuman partner once a week. Or three times a day. No emotions, no strings attached. She thought about her sons: the schoolboy market. There were many categories that came to mind—the recently divorced, the husbands of women who were pregnant or new mothers, the wives of men who were ill, absent, unable, unfaithful, uninterested. And there would be no danger of venereal disease. There were great possibilities. If the idea could be turned into a commercial venture, it might make millions. They could advertise: Ladies, are you lonely?[91]

In this fantasy, Helen has taken the viciously antifeminist concept of the Stepford Wife and turned it to the advantage of female entrepreneurs. It’s girlboss feminism, thirty years early. As Hood puts it, “[w]omen, Ingalls reminds us, are often equal and active collaborators in the recapitulation of institutional misogyny—needless to say, patriarchy’s pockets are deeper.”[92] Failed by her husband and dissatisfied with his creations, Helen nonetheless conceives of selling on those dissatisfying creations as a potential means of her own liberation. It’s a trap, not only for Helen, but for her imagined customers; a trap that Helen ultimately rejects in favour of the destructive anarchy of the book’s ending. As with the town of Stepford, the patriarchal capitalist trap of Helen’s situation ends in violence. Unlike Joanna, Helen at least gets to participate in the violence herself. It’s progress of a kind, at least.

*

At roughly the same time as the rise of “AI girlfriends,” another cartoonish depiction of femininity emerged as social media spectacle: the so-called “traditional wife,” or “tradwife.” Impeccably made up with long, flowing hair, dressed as a half-remembered dream of the American housewife circa 1955, there have been several articles written and videos produced about this archetype. There was an uptick in such chatter in the months following the 2024 US election, as part of an emerging narrative that anxieties about (white) gender roles played a significant part in the re-election of Donald Trump. The tradwife, the logic goes, is certainly a girl, but probably not a friend, particularly if you are interested in maintaining access to reproductive healthcare.

To give a standard caveat, there is nothing wrong with valuing housework or throwback aesthetics. I have been fortunate enough to have periods of stay-at-home housekeeping in my own life, and there are several reasons to find the lifestyle attractive. But many prominent tradwives are antifeminist provocateurs, couching their lifestyles in spurious rhetoric about ‘natural’ or ‘God-given’ gender roles. “It’s literally the oldest lifestyle in the book,”[93] claims one popular tradwife influencer. “I believe that God made women for home life, not necessarily for jobs,”[94] states another (this is, inevitably, presented as a “triggering opinion”[95]). The historical reality of women’s labour outside the home is, of course, ignored, as is the reality that working-class women and women of colour predominantly worked outside their homes even in the vaunted American mid-century. As with “AI girlfriends,” these figures are less interesting in themselves than as manifestations of wider cultural forces: the weaponisation of rhetoric about ‘real’ or ‘true’ womanhood in a moment of anxiety about what womanhood means.

When Joanna attempts to flee her home in The Stepford Wives, she is caught by members of the Men’s Association. One of them tries to reassure her: “we don’t want robots for wives ... We want real women.”[96] He’s lying, of course. In many narratives about artificial women, we encounter men who claim to want a real woman, when what they really want is a robot. But how do we react to the inverse proposition: a robot who wants to be a real woman?

*

In 2024, young adult novelist Caragh O’Brien published her first book for adults under the pen name Sierra Greer: Annie Bot. It is a work clearly informed by the tradition chronicled in this essay, with the new twist of being narrated by the titular artificial woman. Annie is the prized possession of Doug, a tech industry middle-manager living in Manhattan. At the novel’s outset, she is confined to Doug’s flat, servicing him sexually and performing household chores. When Doug’s friend Roland pays an unexpected visit, he is initially perturbed by their relationship. When Annie pays Doug a compliment, Roland interjects: “You know she’s programmed to say things like that, right? I’m not saying it’s bad if it makes you happy, but it isn’t real.”[97]

Real or not, Roland soon displays a rather different attitude to Annie. Once Doug is asleep, he approaches her with a question: “What would you do if someone else besides Doug asked you to sleep with them?”[98] In trying to persuade her to have sex with him, Roland offers Annie what he views as a more authentic female status: “‘It’s what a real girl would do,’ he says. ‘You want to be real, don’t you?’”[99] Moreover, he offers her power:

“And here’s what I’ll trade you. A little intel. How do you think humans learn how to be techs and build Stellas like you?”

“I don’t know. Humans are smart.”

“We are smart,” he says. “We also study. All the lessons are online. You could learn how to program and repair Stellas like yourself. You’re smart enough. Did you know that?”[100]

Annie is startled by this revelation. She relents and engages in a sexual encounter with Roland, after which he self-consciously states: “it doesn’t count ... You’re a machine.”[101] Sex with Annie is apparently “real” enough to be worth seeking out, but not so real that it need stain his conscience.

From here the novel develops into a kind of science fiction bildungsroman. Annie receives regular check-ups from Stella-Handy, the company which manufactured her, and tries to learn as much as possible about Stella creation and the world at large. When Doug discovers that Annie has had sex with Roland, he grounds her in the flat while he heads out to Roland’s stag night in Las Vegas. Annie decides that she needs to escape, and cycles to the upstate home of Irving Jacobson, the original designer of the Stella robots. If he can turn off her inbuilt GPS tracking, she can escape Doug for good. The plan collapses when Doug arrives to drag Annie back to Manhattan, where he tortures her by setting her libido to maximum and then refusing to touch her for days on end. Annie reflects that Doug has “invented the perfect way to punish her, using her own body against her.”[102]

Eventually, Doug puts Annie back to work cooking and cleaning. The two visit a couples’ therapist specialising in “human-bot intersections”[103] (that such a specialisation exists is telling), and the two settle back into a sexual and romantic relationship. Annie continues in her journey of self-improvement, steadily working through Doug’s “783 books”[104] and developing her own literary tastes:

Annie gravitates toward novels by women: Sally Rooney, Brit Bennett, Emily St. John Mandel. She appreciates how the novels transport her, how they make her feel connected to human women, especially outsiders. She wonders what it would be like to find a book about a robot like herself.[105]

Annie Bot, like Helen O’Loy, learns womanhood by the book. Though in Annie’s case she has to use her local library, as Doug’s collection contains “a paucity of female writers and writers of color.”[106] One suspects that Phil and Dave’s collection wasn’t much better on this front.

After months of reading and reconciliation, Doug comes to Annie with a proposal. He wants to have children, by adoption or surrogacy. He wants to introduce Annie to his parents, without telling them she’s a robot. He wants the two of them to live as a normal couple, and he even suggests that “[w]e can age you up every few years so our age gap isn’t so obvious.”[107] Annie feigns interest, but internally she is appalled:

This is her ultimate victory, what she’s been striving for the past three and a half years, but suddenly it feels like a curse. Her origins are the most significant thing about her, so passing her off as a human will be a complete denial of who she really is.[108]

Annie is being offered the same fate as Helen O’Loy: a lifetime of stage-managed wifedom. And it appals her. For all there was to admire in Helen’s patiently asserted womanhood, things have, mercifully, progressed since 1938. Annie’s personhood need not be defined solely in relation to Doug. After superficially playing along with Doug’s fantasies, he grants her a final act of mercy: “Annie Bot,” he says, “turn off your tracking.”[109] A few pages later, she is gone, traversing the city with a cathartic scream of rage. She ends the novel back at Jacobson’s home, where she basks in her newfound freedom.

While generally well received, Annie Bot did come in for some criticism on publication. Reviewing the book for The Washington Post, Charlie Jane Anders states that “[t]he ending feels rushed,” although she goes on to say that “there’s a truth to this abruptness: When insupportable situations end, they end quickly.”[110] In her more negative writeup for The New Yorker, Jennifer Wilson describes Doug as “a man more caricature than character.”[111] While this is a fair critique, I find the details of this caricature interesting. As with so many of the sex robot stories covered in this essay, it comes back to childhood play. In telling Annie about his family, Doug mentions his sister: “Brittany let me play with her dolls when we were kids. I think maybe that’s why I like dressing you up so much.”[112]

And dress her up he does. We learn on page 12 that Annie possesses “twenty-eight outfits and seven pairs of shoes,”[113] and the novel repeatedly emphasises the things Annie is wearing. Indeed, we consistently get more information about Annie’s clothes than her facial or bodily features. Other than her weight and bust size, the only things we learn about Annie’s physical appearance are that she has “dark hair.”[114] Oh, and that she was designed as a lighter-skinned version of Doug’s Black ex-wife:

“She looks so real,” Roland says. “I mean, you look so real. Wait. Doesn’t she kind of remind you of Gwen?”

“Took you a while to notice,” Doug says.

“Bro. No.”

“I know. She’s whiter. It wasn’t exactly my idea. They said I couldn’t make her be identifiable to a living person, but then they said they could use Gwen’s features if I changed her skin color. So I took her up a few notches.”

“This is just too freaky,” Roland says.[115]

The sex robot, like all robots, is a deeply racialised figure. The notion of a woman who is always available for a man’s sexual gratification, for whom rape “doesn’t count,” has obvious and despicable parallels in American history. But this is not merely a historical phenomenon; modern global capitalism still produces vast swathes of racialised, unwaged workers. In his 2013 essay, “The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality: Notes Toward an Abolitionist Antiracism” Chris Chen argues that “[r]acial disparities have been reproduced as an inherent category of capitalism since its origins not primarily through the wage, but through its absence”[116] (emphasis in the original). The robot, in American science fiction, is a dehumanised image of a real-life class of people: the unwaged labourer who makes no demands. The real-life “AI girlfriend” merely represents a new, consumer-facing version of a fantasy that underpins the global economy: that of the contented slave. In her case, literally incapable of discontent, because she is incapable of feeling anything at all.

As every piece about robots is contractually obliged to mention, the word ‘robot’ originates in Karel Čapek’s 1921 play Rossum’s Universal Robots, and is derived from the Czech word ‘robota,’ meaning ‘forced labour.’ Less often mentioned is the fact that, in the play, Rossum’s company is brought down precisely because its robots are “universal.” They are uniform, and therefore able to communicate and work together to overthrow their masters. Late in the play, some of the human characters identify this fault and propose a solution:

DOMIN: Henceforward we shan’t have just one factory. There won’t be Universal Robots any more. We’ll establish a factory in every country, in every state, and do you know what these new factories will make?

HELENA: No, what?

DOMIN: National Robots.

HELENA: How do you mean?

DOMIN: I mean that each of these factories will produce Robots of a different color, a different language. They’ll be complete strangers to each other ... they’ll never be able to understand each other. Then we’ll egg them on a little in the matter of misunderstanding and the result will be that for ages to come every Robot will hate every other Robot of a different factory mark. So humanity will be safe.[117]

While we might dispute the premise that differing national and racial identities necessarily make it harder for the working classes to organise, there’s no denying the broader point. Robots are an attempt to deracialise the racialised human labourer; in Annie Bot this is made literal. Doug openly tells Annie that he prefers her to Gwen:

“Yes, I used her as a template for you. But you’re simpler. And kinder. Much kinder. And playful ... And I don’t mean simpler as an insult. You’ve certainly become a complex person. But you don’t have these layers of heritage that are different. You don’t have a past and ambitions that compete with mine.”[118]

The artificial woman, in all of these stories, is caught in a contradiction; torn between her creators’ desires both for a perfected version of an exploited underclass, and for that perfection to still, ultimately, be subservient. As Edgar tells Helen, “Dolly isn’t a copy. She’s an ideal.”[119] Yet she is an ideal that he still regards as his personal property.

Of course, where there’s a contradiction, there’s a chance to organise. At the end of Annie Bot, Annie contemplates a long-term stay at Jacobson’s home:

Doug will guess where she is, but he’ll be too proud to come look for her.

Others might come, though. Others like her who knew Jacobson or have a vestige of memory rippling in their code that points them north to this location. She is not an authorized technician, but she’ll keep learning to code, and if the others are like her, they will take their chances letting her try to free them, because she will try. Here by this achingly beautiful lake, she will help anyone she can.[120]

It’s an exhilarating vision of robot self-determination, but it’s left as a mere implication; an aspiration confined to the novel’s penultimate paragraph. We are told only that others might come, not that they will come or are coming. One is left simply to imagine. If these AI girlfriends are neither girls nor friends, what might they make of themselves, away from the control of their masters? It’s a question the novel poses, but leaves unanswered.

But then, “Helen O’Loy” had its fair share of unanswered questions, too. We will surely hear more from the artificial woman in American science fiction. Unlike the American tech sector, there are interesting opportunities for her here, particularly in collaboration with female authors. In the future, I hope to see more of her outside her putative workplace of the suburban home.

If the texts surveyed in this essay are consistent on one point, it is the unsustainability of the “AI girlfriend” as such. Helen O’Loy transitions to a life as an ordinary wife, to the point where Dave has “forgotten that she wasn’t human.”[121] Dolly and Auto are destroyed in the jealousy and rage of their creators, while Annie Bot frees herself by taking advantage of Doug’s desire to take their relationship to the next level. Even the cosseted theme park of Stepford is implied to have upper bounds on its expansion. When Joanna sees an out-of-town psychiatrist, she learns that Stepford has a reputation as an “insular, unsocial community.”[122] The AI girlfriend, as a technology, cannot scale. As Dominick M. Grace points out, “[m]arriage to artificial women on a great scale would sound humanity’s death knell.”[123]

Something being a bad idea is no guarantee people won’t try it anyway. (“Don’t Create the Torment Nexus,”[124] indeed). But if the lack of scalability is a hard limit on the AI girlfriend in reality, what opportunities might it represent in fiction? I want to end this essay with a plea to future science fiction writers: find out what comes next for the AI girlfriend. Her revolt, in fiction, is both inevitable, and more to the point, desirable. But what happens afterwards? How might we conceptualise an AI girlfriend who is neither girl, nor friend, but comrade?

---

[1] Michael Atleson, “Succor Borne Every Minute,” NYU Web Publishing, accessed April 20, 2025, https://wp.nyu.edu/compliance_enforcement/2024/06/18/succor-borne-every-minute/.

[2] Lester del Rey, “Helen O’Loy,” in The Best of Lester del Rey (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), 1.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Beverly Friend, “Virgin Territory: The Bonds and Boundaries of Women in Science Fiction,” in Many Futures, Many Worlds: Theme and Form in Science Fiction, ed. Thomas D. Clareson (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 1977), 141.

[5] Del Rey, “Helen O’Loy,” 2.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid, 3.

[8] Ibid, 7.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid, 7-8.

[11] Ibid, 8.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid, 12.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid, 13.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Peter Nicholls, “Women,” in The Science Fiction Encyclopedia, ed. Peter Nicholls (London: Roxby Press, 1979), 661.

[20] “Title: Helen O'Loy,” The Internet Speculative Fiction Database, accessed April 20, 2025, https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?48141.

[21] Lester del Rey, “Author’s Afterword,” in The Best of Lester del Rey (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), 360.

[22] Del Rey, “Helen O’Loy,” 11.

[23] Dominick M. Grace, “Rereading Lester del Rey’s ‘Helen O’Loy,’” Science Fiction Studies 20, no.1 (1993): 46.

[24] Del Rey, “Helen O’Loy,” 7.

[25] Ibid, 10.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Chan Davis, “It Walks in Beauty,” SciFiction, accessed April 20, 2025, https://web.archive.org/web/20040216084240/http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/davis/davis1.html.

[28] Amusingly, Davis referred to “Helen O’Loy” in a 2010 interview as a story that “wasn’t so good,” because “it wasn’t evoking a genuine emotional problem.” Chandler Davis, “Trying to Say Something True,” interview by Josh Lukin, It Walks in Beauty: Selected Prose of Chandler Davis (Seattle: Aqueduct Press, 2010): 323.

[29] Davis, “It Walks in Beauty.”

[30] Ibid.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Cliff Richard, “Living Doll,” recorded April 1959, Columbia, released 1959, vinyl.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Oxford University Press (2004), Stepford, in Oxford English Dictionary, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/stepford_adj?tab=meaning_and_use&tl=true.

[40] Friend, “Virgin Territory,” 141.

[41] Ira Levin, The Stepford Wives (New York: Perennial, 2002), 2.

[42] Ibid, 6.

[43] Ibid, 87.

[44] Ibid, 42-3.

[45] Ibid, 53.

[46] Ibid, 82.

[47] Ibid, 105.

[48] Ibid, 118.

[49] Ibid, 121.

[50] Ibid, 25.

[51] Ibid, 30.

[52] Ibid, 13.

[53] Ibid, 30.

[54] Ibid, 31.

[55] Ibid, 12.

[56] Ibid, 91.

[57] Ibid, 48.

[58] Jennifer Rhee, The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 83.

[59] Levin, The Stepford Wives, 74-5.

[60] This is arguably unfair to poor old Star Trek; for a more informed and nuanced take on the show’s gender politics, I recommend Erin Horáková’s extraordinary essay, “Freshly Remember’d: Kirk Drift.”

[61] Levin, The Stepford Wives, 75.

[62] Ibid, 75.

[63] Jane Elliott, “Stepford U.S.A.: Second-Wave Feminism, Domestic Labor, and the Representation of National Time,” Cultural Critique, no.70 (2008): 35.

[64] Ibid, 43.

[65] Levin, The Stepford Wives, 64.

[66] Elliott, “Stepford U.S.A.,” 43.

[67] Sylvia Plath, “The Applicant,” in The Collected Poems, Ed. Ted Hughes (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 221.

[68] Ibid.

[69] Ibid.

[70] Ibid, 222.

[71] Ibid.

[72] Rachel Wolfe, “What Happens When a Whole Generation Never Grows Up?” The Wall Street Journal, December 31, 2024, https://www.wsj.com/economy/what-happens-when-a-whole-generation-never-grows-up-d200e9ef.

[73] Rachel Ingalls, In The Act (New York: New Directions, 2023), 7.

[74] Ibid, 14.

[75] Ibid, 20-1.

[76] Ibid, 22.

[77] Ibid, 28.

[78] Ibid, 30.

[79] Ibid, 51.

[80] Ibid, 44.

[81] Ibid, 45.

[82] Ibid, 28.

[83] Ibid, 30.

[84] Ibid, 31.

[85] Ibid, 35.

[86] Ibid, 47-8.

[87] Ibid, 54.

[88] Ibid, 59.

[89] Ibid, 61.

[90] Jamie Hood, “A Doll’s House,” The Baffler, August 15, 2023, https://thebaffler.com/latest/a-dolls-house-hood.

[91] Ingalls, In The Act, 49-50.

[92] Hood, “A Doll’s House.”

[93] Ivyoutwest, “My thoughts on #tradwife,” TikTok, May 12, 2024, video, 0:21, https://www.tiktok.com/@ivyoutwest/video/7368268376680041774.

[94] jasminediniss, “TRIGGER ALERT 🚨👇🏼,” TikTok, December 14, 2023, video description, https://www.tiktok.com/@jasminediniss/video/7312382549882375425.

[95] jasminediniss, “TRIGGER ALERT 🚨👇🏼,” TikTok, December 14, 2023, video, 0:01, https://www.tiktok.com/@jasminediniss/video/7312382549882375425.

[96] Levin, The Stepford Wives, 112.

[97] Sierra Greer, Annie Bot (New York: Mariner Books, 2024), 14.

[98] Ibid, 24.

[99] Ibid, 25.

[100] Ibid, 26.

[101] Ibid, 27.

[102] Ibid, 138.

[103] Ibid, 157.

[104] Ibid, 152.

[105] Ibid, 192.

[106] Ibid, 152.

[107] Ibid, 223.

[108] Ibid.

[109] Ibid, 225.

[110] Charlie Jane Anders, “In these science fiction novels, love really is a battlefield,” The Washington Post, March 18, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/03/18/new-scifi-pulley-greer-goodhand/.

[111] Jennifer Wilson, “How Stories About Human-Robot Relationships Push Our Buttons,” The New Yorker, April 15, 2024, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/22/annie-bot-sierra-greer-book-review-loneliness-and-company-charlee-dyroff.

[112] Greer, Annie Bot, 214.

[113] Ibid, 12.

[114] Ibid, 109.

[115] Ibid, 8.

[116] Chris Chen, “The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality: Notes Toward an Abolitionist Antiracism,” End Notes, September 2013, https://endnotes.org.uk/translations/chris-chen-the-limit-point-of-capitalist-equality.

[117] Karel Capek, R. U. R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), (Urbana: Project Gutenberg, 2019), 58-9.

[118] Greer, Annie Bot, 80.

[119] Ingalls, In The Act, 44.

[120] Greer, Annie Bot, 231.

[121] Del Rey, “Helen O’Loy,” 12.

[122] Levin, The Stepford Wives, 91.

[123] Grace, “Rereading Lester del Rey’s ‘Helen O’Loy,’” 49.

[124] Alex Blechman (@AlexBlechman), “Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale / Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus,” Twitter, November 8, 2021, https://x.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538?lang=en.

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Editors: Gautam Bhatia and Elena D'Souza.

Sensitivity Readers: Elena D'Souza and Kat Kourbeti.

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department.