Big Mouth and The Good Place show the pitfalls of thinking of digital assistants as female

Slate

Chelsea Peretti's kitten-earned Big Mouth smartphone Cellsea and D'Arcy Carden's AI assistant Janet deliberately display the limitations of gendered tech, says Inkoo Kang. "Studies suggest that humans are predisposed to assign gender to tech that mimics humanity, and to project corresponding traits onto it," says Kang. "Even though users know perfectly well that they’re interacting with lines of code, they tend to attribute personalities and motivations to apps—a propensity toward anthropomorphism that’s understandable but in an ideal world would be constantly challenged. This context helps explain why the depictions of feminized tech on the most recent season of Big Mouth and throughout The Good Place feel so innovative. Both series feature technology that initially embodies female tropes—the toxic girlfriend and the agreeable secretary, respectively—but soon expose the limitations, if not the absurdities, of gendering decidedly nonhuman entities."