fembot (n.): a vociferous, radical, or militant feminist

I’m sick with some sort of gross, brothy sinus thing, and I left work around noon to go home (after a brief stopover to go shoe shopping — how often do I end up at 5th and 34th in the middle of the day?). Consequently, instead of going out and having fun, I’m staying in and blogging incoherently. Apparently, Blogger informs me, I can now blog in Hindi, though, so at least I’ve got that going for me.

So far as I can tell, “fembot” was coined for the 1970s TV series The Bionic Woman, in which the protagonist Jaime Sommers twice fought powerful androids in cases designed to look like human females. The word was brought into the common parlance recently with the debut of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, in which Dr. Evil creates a line of evil fembots to seduce and destroy Austin Powers.

The sense of “fembot” defined above is the only one I’m familiar with in the conversational lexicon. I’ve only heard it from a few people (plus I’ve used it myself), but aside from the literal meaning of “female-shaped robot,” it’s the only metaphorical sense I’m aware of. I would hypothesize that this sense only really gets play among young women who are part of the mild feminist backlash and widespread domesticity resurgence characteristic of certain segments of my generation, and, naturally, among the men who associate with them (hello). It’s unquestionably pejorative towards feminists, but I think there’s an understanding inherent in the word that it refers only to the insufferable extremists who have no sense of humor. The common usage that sticks in my head is “I don’t want to sound like a fembot, but…”

It’s a tricky question, though, because I can’t find much in the way of authoritative support for this sense of the word. The frequently useless Wiktionary only has the literal meaning. More interesting to me, though, is the community-endorsed sense offered up Urban Dictionary:

A girl or woman who, unfortunately, finds herself oversubscribed to dominant views of beauty and femininity.

Dude, your new step-mom is such a fembot. I mean, aside from the plastic surgery, dye job, and falsies, I don’t know what your Dad sees in her.

This is a definition written from a strong feminist perspective: it’s evident in the word “unfortunately,” which is both inconsistent with dictionary style and unnecessary, considering the bias of the writer is already conveyed by “oversubscribed.” It’s curious that both the feminist population and the aforementioned population that, for the sake of brevity, I will call “anti-feminist” have seized on this cultural creation of the fembot and attributed to the word two different metonymic definitions. (I’ve turned over the question of whether these two senses seem like more traditional metonymy, in which an object is referred to by one of its characteristics, or a synecdoche, in which a part is referred to by the name of the whole. The answer, I think, is that it’s not really worth stressing over.)

The feminists see the stereotypically beautiful temptress element as the salient characteristic of the fembot, using the word to call to mind the visual impression created by actual fembots on the screen. The anti-feminists see the combative, antagonistic, and violent elements as the salient characteristic of the fembot. I would argue that the seductress characteristic forms no part of the anti-feminist definition, and that it is only the “fem-” prefix, not the femininity of literal fembots, that is rolled into the sense by association and thus applied metaphorically to militant feminists.

I personally think that the anti-feminist sense is more intriguing than the feminist sense, because, ten times out of ten, I would prefer a metonym/metaphor combination based on a non-aesthetic characteristic to a simple metonym based strictly on visual appearance. I also prefer boxer-briefs to either of their simple cousins, though, so maybe I just like bullshit hybrid whateverthefucks.