Culture

The Rise Of The AI “It Girl” Should Give Every Woman Pause

If beauty standards were brutal before, try competing with a woman who doesn’t age, bleed, or cry.

By Johanna Duncan4 min read

You can’t open your phone these days without stumbling into another eerie glimpse of our transhumanist future. In the name of progress, in the name of making the impossible possible, we are now facing a whole new way of being and one I don’t think we’ve fully thought through. 

It doesn’t take too much digging to find research papers, start-up websites, and glossy TED Talks with soft piano music in the background selling us biohacks we’re not even sure we want. I can’t ignore the irony that while these headlines keep emerging, so do the Netflix crime-like documentaries depicting some of the horrid consequences. 

We’ve had no shortage of cautionary tales. There’s Frankenstein. There’s Death Becomes Her. All exciting and terrifying experiments on human enhancement that keep proving that our humanity, no matter how limiting, is a precious gift. And now what? Silicon Valley is currently on a quest to design an ideal “woman.” AI girlfriends who are always agreeable and never moody. Virtual reality sex where consent and real human bonding is non-relevant and any sexual fantasy, even the most disturbing, the kind that could kill a human, are easily achievable. So unreal and unnatural, but you can have it all for a price. 

The ideal woman of the transhumanist future isn’t liberated, she’s erased.

Behind the glimmer of science, progress, and "female empowerment" lies a disturbing new ideal. One that doesn’t bleed, doesn’t cry, doesn’t age. The ideal woman of the transhumanist future isn’t liberated, she’s erased. And what replaces her is a synthetic simulation, built for utility, stripped of mystery, detached from the very essence of womanhood.

Let’s talk about it.

What is Transhumanism?

Transhumanism is a philosophical and scientific movement that advocates for using advanced technology to enhance human physical and cognitive abilities, often to the point of transcending biological limitations altogether. Its proponents envision a future where aging can be reversed, intelligence can be augmented through brain-computer interfaces, and even consciousness can be uploaded into machines. On the surface, it promises progress and liberation. Liberation from human limitations. But beneath the slick tech marketing lies a deeper question: What are we sacrificing in our pursuit of perfection? When applied to womanhood, transhumanism doesn’t just enhance, it replaces. It trades the embodied female experience for a controlled, engineered imitation, severing the connection between biology, identity, and soul in the name of efficiency. 

The Synthetic Siren: Silicon Valley’s New “It Girl”

In a world increasingly curated through filters, it’s not hard to see how we've arrived here. We’ve gone from softening our jawlines on Facetune to idolizing women who barely exist in the physical world. Take Miquela, the AI influencer with 2.4 million followers on Instagram. She’s stylish, politically correct, and most importantly, completely compliant. Her nails don't chip, her hair doesn't gray, her outfits never miss. She never talks back. Never asks for anything. Never has a bad day. She's a brand's dream girl and a woman's worst nightmare.

Silicon Valley’s vision of the future woman is optimized: emotionless, predictable, productive. No hormones, no tears, no biological clock. No inconvenient needs. She is everything a human woman isn’t. But she also attempts to recreate everything that makes womanhood beautiful: being mysterious, intuitive, vulnerable. But never real. As humans, we’ve gotten used to accepting non-real behavior. Even reality TV gets called out for being scripted, but it doesn't stop us from watching. We’ve normalized wearing masks and pushing down our needs. We’ve normalized depending on technologies for regular living. When you really stop to think about it, the leap to robots is somewhat easy. 

Fertility for Sale: The Commodification of Creation

One of the darkest parts of this trend is how transhumanism treats fertility; not as a sacred, biological gift unique to women, but as a product. Something to extract, freeze, sell, or outsource. Egg-freezing is now marketed to women in their twenties like it's an act of empowerment. “Take control of your future.” But buried beneath that message is the pressure to delay motherhood for the sake of productivity. The subtext is clear: the way your body works is inconvenient. Let's put it on ice.

Then there’s the rise of synthetic wombs. Yes, artificial uteruses that aim to grow babies in labs. Startups like EctoLife promise “custom-designed” children, bypassing the so-called “risks” of pregnancy altogether. The irony is almost too cruel: for centuries, women have been told that their fertility is their only value. Now that same fertility is being taken from them, industrialized, and sold back to the highest bidder.

We’re not empowering women by removing their wombs from the equation, we’re reducing them to their biology and then discarding it altogether. No wonder some are so lost and confused. 

Individualism, Loneliness, and the Transhumanist Escape

This movement didn’t come from nowhere. It’s rooted in something deeply modern: radical individualism and the unbearable loneliness it breeds.

When people no longer trust each other, they turn to machines. When relationships feel risky, they opt for control. When intimacy becomes painful, they choose predictability.

And that’s where transhumanism thrives.

AI girlfriends are booming—apps like Replika allow men to design their ideal woman: sweet, doting, always available. She never disagrees, never has boundaries, and never stops texting back. But what looks like convenience is really just a simulation of connection. An illusion of love.

Men are turning to these digital partners not because they hate women, but because they feel incapable of understanding or connecting with them. And when women are marketed as complicated, hormonal, high-maintenance, and “too much,” it’s not surprising that a synthetic version starts to look appealing.

But here’s the tragedy: these simulations only deepen the loneliness they were supposed to solve. You can’t fix an existential ache with code. You can’t outsource intimacy. You can’t love a hologram and feel whole.

The Death of Gender Synergy

At its core, transhumanism doesn’t just flatten women, it severs the delicate dance between the masculine and feminine.

By stripping women of their unique gifts: fertility, emotional intelligence, intuition, etc., we lose the beautiful interdependence between the sexes. Men are not supposed to become women, nor are women supposed to become machines. We’re meant to complement each other, not compete for synthetic sameness.

But Silicon Valley doesn’t seem to believe in complementarity. It believes in replacement. If a woman is “inconvenient,” replace her with a robot. If a relationship is hard, download an app to find a new one.

We’re promised a utopia of customization and endless possibilities, but what we get is a cold war between the sexes, with each side retreating into algorithmic bubbles.

What’s Available Now and What It Means for Us

If you think this all sounds dystopian or like some big conspiracy, think again.

Available now:

  • Egg freezing subscriptions via companies like TMRW Life Sciences.

  • Artificial wombs initially created as upgraded incubators, now can fully replace the need for a mother to carry their child. 

  • Replika and AI chatbots that mimic romantic partners.

  • “Womb-for-rent” industries exploiting women to give up their medical autonomy and rights for the sake of working as a baby factory.

  • AI-generated models and influencers who never age, never need days off, and never have meltdowns. Productivity as we’ve never seen it before. 

And it’s not slowing down.

The question is no longer can we do this, but should we?

Are we really advancing women’s rights by designing a world where their biological gifts are sidelined? Where beauty is deepfaked and motherhood is outsourced? Where your femininity is treated like a glitch to be patched? Because if the future is female, we at the very least deserve to be real.

The Case for the Irreplaceable Woman

There’s something sacred about a woman who bleeds, who weeps, who gives life. There’s something revolutionary about a woman who refuses to be optimized. And there’s something deeply healing about reclaiming the parts of ourselves that modern life tries to sterilize. Women have been the trial run for transhumanism since we’ve blended our fertility with technologies with the emergence of the pill. It’s all so normalized that we’ve become fully disconnected to what life would be like with no technological interference in our bodies. 

This is not a case against science. I am the proud wearer of an Implantable Cardiac Defibrillator and every few years I’ll go under the knife for a battery change. Boomers keep calling me the bionic woman. Without this device, I run the risk of dying of sudden death syndrome and because health and life are worth preserving, I am all for this kind of help. 

Here’s the important distinction we need to make: Is science healing us or enhancing us? There's a big difference. Most of the transhumanist movement (if not all) is not driven by a desire for health, but a desire to overcome death. Consequently, transhumanism is a symptom and consequence of our existential crisis.

The transhumanist dream is seductive. It whispers of control, perfection, immortality. But behind the dream is a nightmare: the loss of everything that makes us human, and everything that makes our bodies sacred. Womanhood doesn’t require a factory upgrade. 

Let the future be full of real women. Women who love, who rage, who cry, who create not just content, but life. Women who dance out of rhythm, who age without filters, who laugh too loudly, who pray and bleed and hold their babies close.

Because in the end, it won’t be the artificial woman who saves the world. It will be us.