Our guests are the authors of the new book called The Smart Wife-- Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot, which discusses feminized digital assistants who are friendly and sometimes flirty, occasionally glitchy, but always available.Thank you so much for joining us at Talks at Google, and welcome.
They'd talk about how she or her was helping them, the kind of role that it played as this helper, but as a feminized helper. And that was something that really kind of got me very interested in that space. But also, as Jenny said, one of the things that brought us together was just the broader gendered aspects of the smart home.
But what I'm talking about in part, I think, is the relationship that that show has to a certain kind of female sociality or feminized sociality. So I think about something like famously, when he was on that show, his weight fluctuated a lot, and famously, he was forced to wear girdle and like dealt with a lot of shitty studio notes, which is certainly something that I think historically that we think of when we think of like glamorous divas
After multiple visits, blood work, and trips to specialists, I was told that I wouldn't be able to have children, that my body needed a bit of a push if I were going to more adequately feminize . "When I requested my medical files years later while in graduate school, I noticed that the formal diagnosis he used in those files was testicular feminization,
But I guess what the book tries to do is show that the gendering of these devices extends beyond just their voice and their name. It's also about the types of feminized personalities. And also, one of the things that we're concerned about in the book is the incredible similarity of the personality types that are programmed
around these domestic labors, that can be the subjects of verbal abuse and therefore be models of the kind of ways in which you can speak to a feminized or female being is problematic. Yes. I think there's also-- the place where maybe-- OK, so what we've been focusing on, I think, for that last decade is how
even if they're not gay in the actual original series to appeal to this. But there's much more comfort among girls and women in Japan reading stories about two men falling in love as well and often having more feminized boys in some of these stories as well. Another question. male #4: Uh, yeah, you talked about the last major study being done as being Alfred Kinsey.
And also, one of the things that we're concerned about in the book is the incredible similarity of the personality types that are programmed into many of these types of digital voice assistants and their feminized attributes on top of that, but also in terms of the roles that they're being brought in to perform, so things like helping with to-do lists and household tasks, all the things that the assistants do
It kind of shows us how tenuous the gender equity we have gained is. And so to introduce devices with these stereotyped feminized personas that are based very much around these domestic labors, that can be the subjects of verbal abuse and therefore be models of the kind of ways
And they gave him a choice. One of the options was to be injected with sex hormones to basically feminize him. He grew breasts. He became very depressed as a consequence of these chemical treatments given to gay people who were gay.
And there is another chapter in the book called "Bitches with Glitches," which is all about how when a device malfunctions or behaves what might be deemed inappropriately or just can't understand something or whatever, that the feminized device is blamed rather than, say, the company or the team that was responsible for the problem or the glitch.
Of all countries in the world, Sweden scores the highest on femininity. So if there is a natural experiment where you could see whether toy preferences in a feminized society would somehow flip, Sweden would be the case.
Oh, can you give us some-- Well, I think elevated and authentic are really good examples of that. I mean, I do think, again, people might be more inclined-- people tend to feminize cuisines that are non-Western. So in that sense, you might find something that a woman made called authentic.
Yeah, I mean, digital voice systems are a unique category, and they're one that kind of gets the most attention. And they're most easily identifiable as a smart wife, probably because many of them have default feminized personalities and some also default female names. But I guess what the book tries to do is show that the gendering of these devices extends beyond just their voice and their name.
or when a device is unable to respond, that it is something that the company is addressing and bringing it back to the people that are designing the devices, rather than letting the blame sit with the feminized device. And where we say this most commonly occurring is in the media and in popular culture and in the discussion around these devices,