Who are The Femmebots and What is a Fembot?
It’s a great question from a subscriber, and TBH, the definition has changed each season since we first launched in 2009:
“Hot women in Miami who have brains and do cool sh*t” (Season 1)
“Women of color working in tech” (Season 2)
#LatinasinTech and #LatinasinData (Season 3)
Before we can answer why our definition of “The Femmebots” keeps morphing, we must first acknowledge that the more common spelling in science fiction, and around the interwebz, is “Fembot,” as in FEMale RoBOT.
A Fembot is a machine, modeled according to the shape of a human female, that can be programmed to run algorithms, crunch data, and be the object of man’s desire.
It follows rules and code without question. It is adaptable, and will contort and flex into whatever YOU want it to be. It doesn’t have babies or a husband or aging parents to care for, so it can work ALL the time, 24/7, as long as it’s plugged in.
Most importantly, a Fembot exhibits no human emotion while it gets the work done.
No anger. No sadness. No fear. No mood swings or monthly period. And certainly no grieving the loss of another #techjob or dog.
The first Fembot appeared in the 1927 film “Metropolis.”
As you can see, technology was quite advanced back then, thanks to the male gaze and experimentation with light.
By the 1970s, Dr. Franklin’s Fembots were fighting the “Bionic Woman” and “The Stepford Wives” were robot women programmed to do everything and anything to please their husbands.
In the 1980s, our fav Brat Pack nerds Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith built their own Fembot to look like supermodel Kelly LeBrock in “Weird Science.”
In 1997, the same year I started my career in tech,comedian Mike Meyers’ version of Fembotswereshooting bullets from their bras in the first Austin Powers film, “International Man of Mystery.
More than 70 years after the first Fembot made her debut, the male gaze was still in control, behind the camera and behind the computer.
By 2007, I started thinking of myself as a Fembot while working at a tech startup conceived by a first wave Web 1.0 millionaire who had just moved to Miami. At first, the job was a dream: the CEO eMpowered me — and paid me — to build a website on the Joomla platform, design a weekly email newsletter using Constant Contact, and interview/hire freelancers and employees.
Within three months, all of that eMpowerment shifted when the CEO started an affair with one of my co-workers. It didn’t faze me too much at first — my boyfriend at the time worked as a graphic designer for BangBros and I didn’t believe other people’s relationships in the office could affect me. So I kept my head down, and kept building traffic to the website and growing the email list until one of my co-workers started asking me out — every day, bro. Like, I’d be sitting behind my computer WORKING, and this guy would approach my desk or send me instant messages.
At 31 years old, this had NEVER happened to me.
I was all, “Yo. I’m working here, this is not a bar, this is not a club, it’s an OFFICE,” and yet he persisted until I finally filed an official sexual harassment claim, which was a joke because the person in charge had already given the green light for a more sexualized office culture. To protect myself, I managed to get my own office — with a door — which I often closed, especially when my intern was working with me. It was the only way to drown out the boss and his mistress fighting loudly. The longer I was there, the more I felt compelled to stop being a “wet blanket,” so one day I added a bikini girl into my PowerPoint presentation to see if the boss was paying attention. Sure enough, his head snapped toward me, and he was like, “Hmm, you’re more tricky than I thought you were.”
Damn straight. But ultimately, that’s not the game I wanted to play, so I tried hard to take my work with me, which I failed at miserably, but that’s OK because eventually it all came down on him when the startup failed and his story ended up in a salacious news article published by a major Miami newspaper.
To say the least, I was a bit traumatized by the experience.
It wasn’t clear what I needed to do next, but I did remember the words of one male co-worker (who was NOT a sh*thead) on a flight to a venture capital conference. He said to me: “Know Thyself.”
Huh? Que? What the heck does THAT mean, Obi Wan?
Haunted by that question, I retreated into my little condo because I was unemployed —again. I binge-watched “The Witchblade” anime series, and re-watched my favorite sci-fi movies like “Barbarella,” “Logan’s Run,” and “The Man Who Fell to the Earth.” I suppose this is how I came up with the idea that I was a Fembot, built and programmed to please Brobots, and I needed to re-code and rebrand myself into an eMpowered FEMMEbot.
The double M French spelling FEMME, according to the online Dictionary, is a post-feminist metaphor for femme empowerment. And as I thought about my Powerpoint presentation that ceased to be interesting to the boss without a bikini girl photo, I decided a FEMMEbot’s super power would be the ability to shoot/project her brilliant ideas from her “Boob Tube.”
It took me a while to figure out how to execute the idea, but I finally launched the first fleet of Femmebots as a performance art piece during Art Basel Miami 2009 with two former co-workers and survivors of that startup, along with some new friends. Together we stomped around a Wynwood warehouse projecting our brilliant ideas from iPhones clipped to our chests.
It was fun. We got approached by advertisers to be promotions girls at events around Miami, which was flattering, but not the point of the commentary. We didn’t want to become the butt of our own joke, and I certainly couldn’t capitalize on the objectification of myself and other women, regardless of how broke and unemployed I still was.
If you received last week’s newsletter, “Dr. Nutmeg 2024 vs Maria La Gata 1924,” you’ll see it took me another 10 years of working as a malleable Fembot at various #TechCompanies in DC, NY, Prague, and Brazil, while simultaneously trying to create a TV show about eMpowered Femmebots, who “shoot from the tit*,” AND call all the shots. I managed to create two Seasons over this span of time:
Season 1
Season 3
Now that I’ve started this Substack, I’m no longer a single-M Fembot. I know. That sounds so dumb, but I’m trying to create lore here.
Which brings us back to Star Wars and my Obi-Wan co-worker, who told me:
Know Thyself.
As it turns out, I’m a full-on shot-calling Femmebot in 2024 — which means I work too much but I’m trying to use all the skills I’ve learned from working for other people — and I can’t wait to introduce you to all the others I’ve crossed paths with along my very bumpy user journey.
In Season 3 on TikTok, you can see all the upgraded Femmebots created with new AI apps RunwayML, D-ID, and Midjourney. It’s exciting to see our latest post got thousands of views!
These are the double M-powered femme (women) trapped inside Barbie bodies, Barbie boxes, Barbie expectations, constantly judged from the outside, attempting to participate in this big bad world of tech, politics, film, animation, etc, etc.
Some of us are Femme Fatales.
Some of us are Femme Lesbians.
Some of us are Latinas in tech, Black girls in tech, Asians in tech, Wonder Women in Tech, cis-gender female filmmakers, Boss-women in STEM. We are the ones who never quite fit into our places of work because all this FEMME empowerment is still relatively new.
There are plenty of FEMME people who would reject my definitions and the boxes above, so I’ll just say Dr. Nutmeg’s Femmebots Feminist Zine here on Substack is for all Latinas who have had to play a parody of themselves to pay the rent or make a dream come true…but especially in tech because there’s never really been a publication just for us to share our stories of resilience and the ways we have survived in this relatively new industry.
Sidenote: During our research we found this other Fembot Substack! Totally great information from a millennial feminist perspective.
On Mondays, we will be presenting writing and tech workshops here, specifically for Latinas in Tech, Film, Animation, and entrepreneurship.
Dr. Nutmeg will be interviewing some of these Latinas — wearing animated Femmebot costumes — on her Virtual Reality TV show “Turing Test.”
On Thursdays, we will deliver a new chapter of a serialized novel about a Latina entrepreneur: Either “Dr. Nutmeg’s Latina.Bomb” or “The Nine Lives of Maria La Gata.”
Stay Tuned for the Next Issue!
Did you choose Dr. Nutmeg 2024 or Maria La Gata 1924?
If you didn’t vote, haz clic ahora!
Susbscribe to receive future issues!
Dr. Nutmeg’s Femmebots® Born in 2009 and Trademarked in 2019!
