"The Future Has Arrived"

So I saw this Svedka ad... it was a sexy sexy robot with SVEDKA written across her thigh.



In case you can't see the website's animation (either because you don't feel like proving you're 21 or you just don't care), here's the ad in an animated .gif that I screencapped from the website.

My first thought was, "Either I've been imbibing too much feminism lately, or this is crazy in so many ways I don't even know where to start."

Well, I decided the answer is probably both, so keep this in mind. There's been a lot of feminism in my brain lately, but I'm not crazy. This is worth talking about.

Now, as this article points out, these sexy roboladies have been something of a fad lately. I don't want TV anymore, so of course I wouldn't notice this trend until it bled down into whatever trash tabloid I was reading.

The article I just mentioned points out that Heineken just did something similar.

Hard to tell where to start really. The question of "why a woman?" isn't nearly as easy to answer as "why a robot?" After all, once you figure out why they'd want a woman, you'd know why that woman would have to be a robot, right?

I'm going to try not to become Donna Haraway here, though the gods know that I do love me some H-Dizzle.

Anyway, let's tangle with the woman thing first even though the question kind of sucks. Why have a woman advertising booze? Well, why the hell not? The whole point of drinking is to have fun! Fun=revelry=(at least much of the time) sex. I don't think the point of this ad is to convince you that Svedka can get men laid by horny robot broads, but I felt like explaining it beyond a simple "sex sells, let's move on."

But let's move on anyway.

What sort of woman is this? Well, she's a plastic skeleton, which means that she doesn't need organs or anything (or clothes). SHe's basically just eyes, lips, tits, and an ass. Oh, and those lovely thighs that scream SVEDKA. The only thing you'd expect such a perfectly streamlined sexual image to have that Svedka girl doesn't is hair. I guess her skull is pretty nice, though. Maybe that'll have to do.

So she's a woman boiled down to the physical essentials. But what's she like? Well she wants to party. Presumably with you, if you've got the cash to buy her favorite bottled liquor. Y'see, we women are like this. You buy us the appropriate fluids and we're yours for a night.

Well, some of us are. But that's beside the point.

Now we add in the robot thing. Robots are customizable and programmable creatures, at least in common representations (and don't get me started on negative robot stereotypes in the media; I'll go on a rant defending a demographic that doesn't even exist yet). But basically it's a control thing. You can have her as you want her, how you want her, when you want her, and never have to worry about what she wants. Heck, if it's important that she want you... you can always just program her to "feel" that way.

Don't get me wrong. I love robots. I'd be one if we had the technology. However, we don't. All we have are predictions and the startling successes that engineers have had in living up to those speculations.

There's also the fact that many of these presentations are (not surprisingly) tied to sex. In fact, there's a whole genre of erotic tastes called technosexuality that deals with this. As the linked site states, this does seem to go all the way back to Greek myth. So humans aren't recently freaky or anything. There's always been a little kink lurking at the fringes of discoveries like these.

So why's this special, then? Why point this out if it's so damned common?

I think it was the fact that a woman's thighs are such a highly-sexualized body part in my culture, and the fact that hers so boldly announce her status as property.... it kind of struck something. Add to that the usual tie with sin and debauchery (a partygirl robot selling booze... what could be better?) and Svedka Girl caught my eye. I doubt I'll forget her anytime soon.

Still trying to decide if I want to buy the vodka, though.