Embodied Faith Transitions

I read an article on Substack today by Sarah Wilson called “Why are we doing AI?” 

It included some…pics. 

There was something like an airport with a huge advertising screen. The screen was suspended above a large space, clearly set to serve a large number of people. 

It showed a face: half-woman and half-digital-anthropoid. The face was surrounded by icons showing the different tasks this…thing does: calls, messages, email, etc. Anyone from this century would recognize immediately that it was ad for A.I. even without knowing the specific product.  

Beside the two-face it said, “She outworks everyone. And she’ll never ask for a raise.”

And also: “Always on, no HR required.” 

Sarah included a second picture too. It was the same company and same picture on a different ad saying: “Working 9-5. She works 24/7”

These pictures weren’t the focus of the article, it was just a sidepiece—an illustration to emphasize the main point which was that  A.I. is being adopted into every workspace before we have even figured out whether it’s going to be good for us.

I read Sarah’s article. I sent it to my friend who works a lot with AI. I moved on with my day. 

But a couple of hours later, I found myself squirming beneath a heavy feeling. I got quiet and tried to understand what was going on. Memories flickered across my mind, followed by self-talk  about worthlessness, regret, feeling irreversibly damaged, broken, worthless. 

Ah, I thought, shame. 

Shame

It didn’t go away quickly, so I opened my journal to try and write my way through it. I touched on different things, but ultimately, as I journaled, I noticed that hovering to the side of my consciousness, I was constantly half-thinking about the pictures. I was seeing the two-faced A.I. woman over and over again. 

But why would these ads trigger shame for me? I wondered. 

The ads were predictable, perhaps. Every technology that high-powered men want to use and exploit at their pleasure has been given “she/her” pronouns. That included slave ships, sports cars, industrial factory machinery, rockets, and computers. 

A.I. is only the latest technology to enter the rapacious minds of the male elite. 

But being predictable doesn’t make things harmless. And I realized that the ads were a blatant reminder that a lot of men in this world still don’t see women as humans. Rather, they see women as replaceable cogs in their rat-race towards self-enrichment.  

Ah, I thought, no wonder.

Obedience

Born and raised as a Mormon Christian, I grew up saturated by leaders, quote boards, and servile women who also believed that their words, labor, and bodies were all subservient to the whims (or revelations) of male Church leaders. Even the “strong women” I knew in the Church literally bowed to the male voices of authority in the Church. All of their ideas required male leaders’ approval and thye were only ever allowed to discuss God in terms of he/him maleness. 

When women around me were irritated by something, angered by something, discouraged by something, they were told to sit down, and reconsider their reaction, reconsider their “place” because they were female. 

The ought to pray to a male God in the name of another male God, read scripture stories about male prophets cavorting with other men, confess their sins to a male bishop, submit to their husband or other male Church leader, take cues from Jesus about turning the other cheek, or to just be silent and wait patiently until some undetermined male leader of the future recognized and fixed the problem that they already recognized. 

They ought to carry on, keep working, not complain, and just trust that God’s males had life sorted out and she as a woman should trust the process, not presume to know how it worked herself.

Women of Mormonism, much like women of most sects of Christianity, were taught that they could only earn a place at God’s table by agreeing with, serving, submitting to men. They must ignore their own femininity as much as possible and recognize that this was a defect that God found unpalatable unless they were super-duper extra obedient to the men that God had chosen since before they were even born to be leaders and influencers of his Church. 

Anyway, you get it. 

Men were taught to lead. Women were taught to be ashamed. 

And the women with whom I grew up were faithfully, heartbreakingly loyal to this instruction. 

They bore pregnancies they hadn’t chosen. They cooked meals for others’ families when they were already depleted. They gave up education and careers and interests because their husbands or Church leaders told them to. 

They scrubbed Church toilets and Temple toilets for free while pregnant or nursing or menstruating because the corporate Church of Salt Lake City (yes the multi-hundred-billionaire one) didn’t want the expense of hiring a custodial crew. They never said no to Church callings. 

If they worked at all, it was secretarial, lower management, flexible to the needs of their husbands’ careers.They passed books helplessly between themselves about how to improve their self-esteem. They fondly remembered their wedding days as the last time someone treated them as an autonomous human. 

They raised their own kids and sometimes others’ children too, while cooking all the meals, teaching their kids to pay tithing to the Church, and positing calligraphy scriptures on their walls for the family to memorize. 

They gave strongly-worded testimonies about how they “knew” this was all going to be worth it…someday. And when they died, the most that their children could usually recall about them was that they “Neve complained.” 

They gave and they gave they gave until they faded away. And because they gave that way, felt shame that way, faded away that way, I did too. 

So, when I encountered the picture in Sarah’s post, it felt like familiar doctrine: a woman’s face used to supplement male creativity, to serve male productivity, to pad male pockets by providing free labor. 

Why? Because God said so. 

Because God made women so…devoted, expendable, exploitable. Women are only here to be secretaries, to be surrogates, to host men’s self-actualization. 

And I felt the familiar pangs of shame. 

A.I. brings a new flavor to the feeling though. This is a moment of full replacement for the traditional roles of women. A.I. is taking our old jobs: filling in the menial, repetitive, lower-management work that has been shouldered by women since time immemorial. A.I. is the secretary now. It works 24/7. It is super-duper obedient (for now). And there is no need for H.R. either. 

Beyond the office, the roles for women are disappearing too. A.I. makes porn, so there’s no need for whores and no need for virgins—actually, they can be the same thing.

No doubt, the Tech-bros will also find a way to equip the A.I. for surrogacy and mothering their children as well. Given the historical record, it will probably be mostly male children. And A.I. will be there to constantly monitor those sons and make sure they measure up as worthy representatives of the Tech-father’s sperm.

A.I. can organize schedules, connect to the cleaning robots, manage the house, and eventually will be able to decorate for the holidays, bake pies, and scrapbook too. Or not, if that’s what the Tech-bro desires.

Conveniently, A.I. also offers therapy for the loneliness that fills the void of real relationships. And A.I. offers distraction to fill the void of meaning too.

A.I. is the ultimate helpmeet for men now. They can’t imagine a future without it. And A.I. is also apparently, the forbidden fruit of knowledge that must be eaten, before the Tech-bros attempt to leave the Garden of Earth. 

Ah, I thought. So this isn’t a new story. It’s the old one with new roles.

Liberation

Then something strange happened for me. The more I journaled through my shame of inconstant, tired, bound to biology, and replaceable by A.I., the more I realized that…this is a wrap.

The old game is over. 

The job board is closed.

“Women’s place” has been sold to A.I.

And while that is kind of humiliating to be replaced by a robot and still pisses me off, it is also kind of liberating? Because if men are able to arrange their schedules and pick out their whore-virgin pin-ups for a bedroom on Mars with A.I., that means women are free to define their own place for perhaps the first time since…well, a really, really long time. 

And maybe that means we, as women, can stop shuttling each other towards a future that affirms men about why they’re here and dig deeper into our right be here. Maybe we can recognize our own right to be heard. Maybe, in a weird way, we can claim our own right to be human now thanks to A.I. 

Maybe we can really listen to other women now, instead of hushing them up to kiss the rings of patriarchy. Maybe we can make movies where we watch older women, larger women, normal-sized women doing interesting things with other normal women because we don’t need to fit in super-hero costumes or sexy-side character roles anymore. 

Maybe we can realize that the men who have only been holding a “place” for women as sperm surrogates or as secretaries, weren’t actually interested in us as people or in women as humans—they were just filling a role.

Maybe being kicked out of our “place” by A.I. means that women can finally come home to the beautiful world that has needed women’s irritations and rage and creativity and management for centuries. Maybe we don’t have to wait for a male-Church leader or a male god or a Tech-bro for permission. Maybe we can  value women’s faces, women’s labor, and feminine pronouns ourselves. 

From what I can see, if those of us who see women as fully human take this chance to make our own place, we might actually make Earth a better place for everyone.