In the new movie “Companion,” Iris seems to be the perfect girlfriend.
She looks like a 1960s paper doll, with heavy dark bangs and pink headbands that go with her pink gingham matching separates. She is endlessly supportive of her boyfriend, Josh, who appears to be very in love with her. In fact, Iris meets Josh’s every need — she even tells him the weather each morning.
That’s because Iris is a robot, “more specifically, a companion robot,” Josh admits to her, after Iris discovers that she is not a real girl. Josh hates that other people imply that she’s just a sex bot, because, he tells Iris, “You do much more than that. You’re an emotional support robot.” There is also a male character with a male robot boyfriend who spends his time cleaning and cooking elaborate meals.
Without spoiling the whole thing, the very funny, very gory movie centers on Iris’s dawning consciousness. She becomes enraged when she realizes that she is totally programmed, and can be reprogrammed, by Josh — her voice, her eye color, her intelligence level (he can adjust the setting on a 0-100 scale at any time, where 0 is an automaton and 100 is an Ivy League grad).
What the men in this movie want is a robot who is “completely docile, yours to do whatever you want with.”
And what the women — even the fembots — want is to drive away alone in a fancy convertible, the wind blowing through their hair. Iris wants her freedom, and she will get it by any means necessary.
“Companion” is obviously extreme and satirical; it’s a horror comedy. But it turns out that in the real world, human American women feel a bit like Iris does, and their view of the opposite sex in 2025 is pretty bleak.
A new look at single life from the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute describes a pervasive pessimism among both single men and single women. But the single women polled seem particularly down on the idea of marriage, and many of them do not feel they have good options.
“Single women not only reject the idea of marriage but also believe it’s a liability,” A.E.I.’s Daniel A. Cox and Kelsey Eyre Hammond write. They are concerned about marrying the wrong person. “More than half (55 percent) of currently single women believe that single women are generally happier than married women.” Meanwhile, “men largely reject the idea that single women are happier than married women.” Basically, everyone agrees that married men are happier than single men.
Single women are also worried about their physical safety; they are far more likely than single men to say that men would take sexual advantage of women if given the opportunity, and women don’t trust dating apps to keep them from harm.
Earlier research from the Survey Center on American Life suggests that single women think being married is a raw deal for women and a good deal for men; even conservative women believe that marriage is better for men than for women. I don’t know how many ways I can express that women do more household labor and child care than men; it’s a frequent refrain in this newsletter. In 2020, my colleague Claire Cain Miller noted that young men do not really do much more household labor than older men, despite women’s massive workplace gains since the 1970s. The simplest explanation: “Men might be happy to have a partner bringing in another paycheck, but not happy to do more chores.”
Perhaps less discussed is the unreciprocated emotional work that women feel they put into their relationships. A 2017 overview of the research on family relationships and well-being written by a trio of sociologists who study health over the course of adult life explains it this way: “Within a traditional marriage, women tend to take more responsibility for maintaining social connections to family and friends and are more likely to provide emotional support to their husband, whereas men are more likely to receive emotional support and enjoy the benefit of expanded social networks — all factors that may promote husbands’ health and well-being,” but not the wives’.
It used to be that marriage was a much better financial bargain for women than it was for men, but as the wage gap has narrowed among younger men and women, that is increasingly not the case.
I asked Cox why he thinks single women are so down on marriage, and he told me one of his theories:
The models of marriage they see in older generations are not always appealing. I believe there’s a greater sensitivity among young women today to the domestic labor disparity. Especially among college-educated single women there is a better understanding that their careers will suffer if they have children and their partners don’t step up. And many single women believe that single men are not interested in a 50/50 split. We found that 49 percent of single women believe that “most single men today do not want an equal partner.”
I don’t think wanting an equal partner is too much to ask for, and I don’t blame single women for wanting that and refusing to settle for less. But I am married, and I like being married. I am not categorically down on the institution.
Despite my profound enjoyment of the sex robot murder comedy, I do not think that all men want a fembot that they can completely control, and a lot of men understand that women are sick of doing all of the emotional labor.
After all, “Companion” was written and directed by a man.
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