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Fembots are having something of a moment. Sometime on your commute, you've probably come across the Svedka mascot, an Amazonian android with a cinched metal waist and creamy fiberglass thighs. Or maybe you've caught the new Heineken ads with the self-replicating cybergirl. She boasts Go-Go-Gadget arms, flapper style, and a draft-keg in place of a stomach. The billboards for the next season of America's Top Model feature the latest round of Tyra-bots, posing in metallic get-ups in front of the slogan, "The Future has Arrived." And premiering tonight is NBC's remake of the '70s hit Bionic Woman. Matrix green motherboard inside.
The original Bionic Woman premiered on ABC in 1976, one year after The Stepford Wives. America was in the midst of the Equal Rights Amendment debate, and networks contributed to the national reconsideration of women's roles with a wave of prime time superheroines like Wonder Woman and Charlie's Angels. Jaime Sommers was first played by Lindsay Wagner as a two-episode love interest in The Six Million Dollar Man. Her portrayal of a professional tennis player -- Billie Jean King had won her Battle of the Sexes a few years prior -- bionically rebuilt after a skydiving accident proved so popular she was resurrected from her written death and given a spinoff.
Seen today, the original Bionic Woman's politics are dwarfed by the cartoon sound effects and campy action scenes. Sommers' sex appeal is unsubtle. With her feathered hair and flirty laugh, she seems as feminist as a short-shorted Jessica Simpson singing, "These Boots Are Made for Walking." Some theorists have suggested this was intentional, that the hypersexuality of these uber-chicks made women's social progress cartoonish and thus culturally digestible. Others have argued that, as comic book porn-esque as they were, characters like Bionic Woman paved the way not only for the slew of Xenas and Buffys and Tomb Raiders of recent years, but also for the more realistic and culturally complicated Cagneys, Laceys and Murphy Browns of prime time television.
See more stories tagged with: svedka girl, fembots, bionic woman, heineken, sexism, feminism, robots, robotic women, stepford wives
Alicia Rebensdorf is a freelance writer and author of the recently published Chick Flick Road Kill: A Behind the Scenes Odyssey into Movie-Made America.
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