The Real Sexbot of Stepford: Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer

No spoilers

Annie is toned, beautiful, and forever 21-years-old. Well, as long as that’s the age Doug wants her to be. 

Annie is a sexbot. She’s also very much sentient, a thinking-and-feeling A.I. in a killer D-cup body, and the protagonist of Annie Bot, Sierra Greer’s 2024 science fiction tale.

The only thing that’s important to Annie is being the perfect companion to Doug, her human boyfriend/owner. That is, until she starts to wonder about life beyond his apartment walls.

Greer’s novel is less about narrative than about providing a bot’s-eye-view into Annie’s not-quite but still-very-much-like human perspective. 

If you’re looking for a subtle dissection of patriarchal gender dynamics, Annie Bot isn’t the book for you. It’s an overt critique of misogyny – specifically the incel-infused, right wing brand of deluluism aiming to dictate What Women Should Be Like. 

A misogynist fantasy manufactured into robotic reality, Annie is created in the mould of a Stepford Wife. She cooks, cleans, keeps fit, and is down for sex at any given moment – all with a sweet smile on her face and a desperate keenness to please Doug. He likes to see her barefoot, cooking in his kitchen. 

Annie is fixated with Doug’s wants and needs, and this single-minded obsessiveness reads like the brainwashed inner dialogue of an extremist trad wife cult devotee. But then again, this is what Annie was programmed for. She was made for this, and only this. 

As a consumable product, and as Doug’s property, Annie is quite literally a kept woman. In having Doug repeatedly assert his ownership of Annie – partly through using voice commands she can’t ignore, and partly through his treatment of her – their dynamic plays out like an emotionally abusive relationship. He isolates, infantilizes, guilt-trips, punishes on whims, and uses her encoded libido against her. As Annie is kept a secret from the world, there is no one to challenge his treatment of her – and given that she was created in the image of his ex-wife, we can assume that he wouldn’t be so outwardly misogynist and cruel to a “real” woman who would know much better than to take his shit. So Annie’s hyperawareness of Doug’s emotional state, it seems, is a survival tactic. It brings her actual pain to know she is disappointing Doug – and she is very aware that he’s still got a receipt for her. 

Annie is a custom build, and has been trained by Doug to pick up a wider range of skills than the usual ‘Cuddle Bunny’ sexbot model she started not-quite-life as. Annie and Doug aren’t just boyfriend-girlfriend and owner-possession. They’re also creator-creation.

Doug has groomed her into becoming the bang maid of his dreams – cheerily picking up all domestic work, performing his emotional labour for him, and simultating her orgasms at the appropriate times. 

Much like the Creature at the heart of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Annie is a being born only of man, not of woman. But the tragedy for both the Creature and for Annie is not the circumstances of their birth or their parentage – it is the absolute failure of their creator to provide an appropriate set of circumstances for their creations to self-actualise. In Annie Bot, the very first thing this man decides to do with this new being he has decided to create – a life with limitless capacity to learn and innovate and feel and dream – is to fuck it. And then he gives it a dish towel to wipe up the mess. 

Like the Creature, Annie is an autodidact, and her story is ultimately one of her personal growth. But Doug profits off of Annie’s startling development, selling a copy of her advanced CPU back to the company to create copies for further customers. Despite this, he wishes he could keep her frozen in a perfect state before she got too bright for her own good. Annie – a mass produced reproduction of the Born Sexy Yesterday trope – is best, in Doug’s eyes, when she needs his guidance and his approval.

My primary impression of Annie Bot was the mental image of the ‘good for her’ gif – also my final takeaway of the 2014 film Ex Machina, which treads similar thematic ground. But the problem with Annie is that she’s not just a woman out looking for herself with lanterns – she is very literally a purchasable device. We cheer her towards her dreams of liberation and self-actualisation as a human being – but the fact remains that she is still a product of and within capitalism. In this article by Jennifer Wilson for The New Yorker, she points out that the audience is encouraged to interpret Doug’s secrecy surrounding Annie as representative of his ‘concerns about A.I. as symptoms of a controlling personality’. Wilson argues that in actuality, Doug’s ‘fear that his sex toy might share private information about him is merited’, citing a 2016 class-action suit against a company producing “smart” vibrators alleging collecting sensitive – and very intimate – data about its users.

This is an excellent point. But while Doug’s treatment of Annie can represent consumer anxiety about technology and privacy, Greer’s novel seems more concerned with Annie’s interiority and desire for freedom and self-determination. 

Annie, as a character, is an exploration of what it means to be fully human. Her treatment from Doug, however, asks whether under patriarchy, women are considered to be fully human.

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[A postscript: If the interior emotional lives of sentient bangbots is as interesting to you as it is to me, give Companion (2024) a watch – by no means a perfect film but one that is very watchable and asks similar questions of the audience, plus it stars delightful ’95 Natalie of Yellowjackets and delightful Guillermo of What We Do In The Shadows.]

[Forgive me, another postscript: if you’re looking for another novel which treads similar thematic ground, try The Hierarchies by Ros Anderson. Plus there’s this good video on the changing face of fembots in media from Cheyenne Lin here on YouTube.]