The portmanteau "fembot" (feminine robot) was used as far back as 1959, in Fritz Leiber's The Silver Eggheads, applying specifically to non-sentient female sexbots.
...the great majority of robots were either machine-like, male-like or child-like for the reasons that not only are virtually all roboticists male, but also that fembots posed greater technical difficulties.
Fembots in Japan, for example, are designed with slenderness and grace in mind,[16] and they are employed to help to maintain traditional family structures and politics in a nation of population decline.
[19] The fetishization of gynoids in real life has been attributed to male desires for custom-made passive women and compared to life-size sex dolls.
The robot's creator, Clayton Bailey, a professor of art at California State University, Hayward called this "censorship" and "next to book burning".
In science fiction, female-appearance robots are often produced for use as domestic servants and sexual slaves, as seen in the film Westworld, in Paul J. McAuley's novel Fairyland (1995), and in Lester del Rey's short story "Helen O'Loy" (1938),[24] and sometimes as warriors, killers, or laborers.
[25] A long tradition exists in literature of the construction of an artificial embodiment of a certain type of ideal woman, and fictional gynoids have been seen as an extension of this theme.
[29] They fought in two multi-part episodes of the series: "Kill Oscar" and "Fembots in Las Vegas," and despite the feminine prefix, there were also male versions, including some designed to impersonate particular individuals for the purpose of infiltration.
This has been seen as an allegory of male chauvinism of the period, by representing marriage as a master-slave relationship, and an attempt at raising feminist consciousness during the era of second wave feminism.
Sexual interest in gynoids and fembots has been attributed to fetishisation of technology, and compared to sadomasochism in that it reorganizes the social risk of sex.
[37] Isaac Asimov writes that his robots were generally sexually neutral and that giving the majority masculine names was not an attempt to comment on gender.
[38][39] Asimov's short story "Feminine Intuition" (1969) is an early example that showed gynoids as being as capable and versatile as male robots, with no sexual connotations.
[42] It has also been argued that our innovation should part from this essentialising notion of a woman and focus on the purpose of creating robots, without making them explicitly male or female.
[44] Critics have also noticed how the creation of gynoids is associated with service roles, while androids or systems with male voices are employed in positions of leadership.