In His Form

Today in the sale section of my campus bookstore I came across the manga A.I. Love You by Ken Akamatsu. The premise of the series is that the hero, Hitoshi, creates an artificial intelligence program who attains corporeality when a bolt of lightning hits Hitoshi's home. "If a freak accident can turn Thirty into a real girl," the back of the book asks, "can Thirty turn Hitoshi into a real man?"

The first three volumes of the series were instructive to me only insofar as I realized once again how provincial I am when my girlfriend pointed out that I was trying to read the story back to front. Although the form was new to me, the plot wasn't. In fact the first volume contains the words "I designed my ideal woman." Pygmalion, The Stepford Wives, and Tomorrow's Eve are some of the narratives I can name off the top of my head that use this premise; even the Judaic account of Lilith's replacement with Eve at Adam's behest represents a similar theme.

Tomorrow's Eve by Villiers de L'Isle-Adam is my favourite of these narratives, and all its other flaws can't hold a candle to its horrendous misogyny. Just like A.I. Love You, Tomorrow's Eve tells of the creation of a supposedly perfect woman, Hadaly - "perfect" being defined in relation to her use by men. Villiers published the book in the late 1800s, in it coining the word android. I originally found this usage ironic, since Villiers used the word to refer to Hadaly, even though andr- is from the Greek for man or male. The more I think about this misnomer, however, the more apt it seems: like Eve and Thirty, Hadaly was formed in the image of a man, since her body and consciousness were created in response to a man's desire and his idea of perfection. In fact, the women of these narratives all appear to be consciously designed to be unlike pre-existing women, women who don't live up to male standards of perfection. So if Eve and Thirty aren't specifically androids, they sure aren't gynoids either.