iGirl: "She Obeys"

[Trigger Warning]




Above is a screencap from iTunes showing an iPhone app by Resistor Productions called iGirl. From the app description (emphasis mine):

iGirl-- She Obeys

Blow her, shake her, touch her and more! Check out the new custom voices.

Have your own virtual girlfriend on your iphone for less than the price of a cup of coffee or a beer, and shake her around!

iGirl combines fun and flirtation to offer users a playful app for entertainment.

The iGirl application consists of a beautiful 3-dimensional female model that can be manipulated by the user to perform various actions, including dancing and speaking.

Shake the iPhone and see how the iGirl reacts.

New animation activated by blowing on your iPhone: the famous Marilyn Monroe pose!

iGirl serves as the perfect virtual companion that you can take with you anywhere.

Got that? Buying a "virtual" girl for less than a cup of coffee and shaking her around is fun and playful. And flirtatious too apparently, though why the company thinks one can have flirtation in a unilateral interaction with a machine is left as an exercise for the reader.

The iTunes user reviews are mixed, and it might be a bit heartening that the vast majority of the reviews are one-star:

But some of those negative reviews pan the app because it's not egregious enough. Here is a sampling of reviews:

“pointless, pathetic, inappropriate for children, and downright sad.”

“U should be allowed to show nudeness. U should be allowed to customize the girl exactly the way you want.”

"This app is so stupid this is not worth the money."

"Waste"

"They made this free for Valentine’s Day. ‘Cuz there’s nothing more romantic than forcing a “girl” to obey your every command."

“she needs to get naky tehe :] but yeah more changeability and interaxtment.”

“I guess you have to be married to fully appreciate this one”

"Needs to be way more revealing there should be a guy that represents you that does stuff with or to the girl."

Aside from the fact that these reviewers seem unaware that we already have words in English for "nudeness" and "interaxtment", we see a good old domineering-wife joke and some pretty creepy fantasies (you should be able to "do stuff to the girl").

I agree with the first review that this app is downright sad and a waste. I hate to see potentially cool features like animations that respond to shaking or blowing on your phone used as yet one more joke that boils down to "heh heh --she can't stop you! Now that's the 'perfect companion', amirite?"

I have seen little analysis of this app, except for a review at Pocket Lint by Verity Burns, who says "the new iGirl app frankly just gives us the creeps" and a review at Bright Hub in which Shane Burley says, "When looking at iGirl it does not take a radical feminist member of the anti-pornography league to see this as a little misogynistic". Well put. But I was very curious about all the references to shaking the iGirl (hence the trigger warning), and I also wanted to hear about the thinking behind this app, so I dug a little deeper.

Below are a review of iGirl from tapcritic dot com and an interview with the lead developer of iGirl. Both videos also appear on Resistor Productions' iGirl app page. I have made partial transcripts, with summaries of the rest, including quotes.

Tapcritic review:
Hi this is Hal9000 from Tap Critic dot com. We’re gonna do a video review today, for probably the most juvenile and awesome application that I have yet come across, called iGirl...I think the logo pretty much says it all....What is it? Basically, it’s a virtual girlfriend. If you want you can use movements to rotate, and get just about any view you want (zooms in on her butt) Oh, we’ll get away from that. Another thing you can do, you can hit a button and she dances on cue, which, none of my real girlfriends ever have, so that makes me happy.
[...]
Let’s move from the chauvinistic bathing suit into, uh, chauvinistic schoolgirl!
[...]
[he then changes the “ethnicity” of the Girl to “Asian”]
[...]
Really the app has no purpose, other than to entertain you and your friends, which is why I love it, because I think it’s hilarious.
[review ends with multiple closeups on the iGirls' dancing butts]

I notice the reviewer directly compares the app to real women he has known and the iGirl comes out ahead. Also, he recognizes the "chauvinistic" aspect of the costumes, and it seems to be a selling point.

Developer interview:

Hal9000: We’re here today with Toby, from Resistor Productions [...] Toby is the developer of [...] iGirl, which I know everyone here at Tap Critic is very addicted to.

Hal: So, How did you get the idea for this application?

Toby: ...We’re a web game company, and we’ve been working on a web MMORPG for about a year now, and we saw this iPhone stuff happening and we’re like , OMG some of these apps are obviously becoming really popular and in terms of resources that it would take to build one, I don’t think it would take a lot. So we decided to make an app, and, we were basically analyzing what was in the top 25, and you have like iBeer, iFart, y’know all these kinds of things, and we were working on a game, and the costs...can be pretty intense, so we said why don’t we start out with a novelty application? And the biggest thing that we saw missing in the top 25 was some kind of like a hot babe, or like, boobs, or something like that. So when we were discussing this—you probably saw that an app called iBoobs got rejected by the app store, which was the app we were working on making at the same time as the other developer. So we...decided to scale it back and just make an iGirl application.

When asked if there was anything they had to take into account when trying to get through the Apple approval process to be accepted on iTunes, Toby says,

When you shook the iPhone, now you’ll notice that her breasts shake a little bit, but it used to be just ridiculous, like, they were like, flopping all over the place, so we just toned—we scaled that back quite a bit for the first release.

And Hal says: It’s a shame...they [Apple] need to open their minds up and realize how ridiculously funny the application is.

Toby: Yeah, y’know I think that was the goal with us, y’know, like you mentioned in your first article, there are probably some basement dwellers out there that really get into this. But our whole goal with this is the whole sort of American Pie thing, it’s not like, serious, adult stuff—you’re not supposed to take it seriously. It’s a big joke, it’s for fun.

Toby: We’re getting a few thousand downloads each day. The reviews are mixed: some people completely get it and they love it, and some people are like “hey, this is a cool app, but you could add some more features to it”.

Then Toby summarizes the updates they plan to make to iGirl. He mentions that a lot of people want the girl to be naked. Toby says “hey, we’re with you, but that’s not gonna happen!” He is planning to add custom voices, where the user can record the iGirl’s verbal responses. Interestingly, he says “you can do it yourself if you want to, but you can actually have your girlfriend go in...you can make completely custom recordings, so the reason why that’s cool is, you can make it as dirty as you want to. Or you can just be funny with it, whatever”

Toby then summarizes the new blow feature, where the user can blow on the phone and the iGirl’s skirt blows up and she has to hold it down, like Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot.

Toby describes a future update which will show every phone that has downloaded iGirl as a “heart” marker on a Google Earth globe and users can zoom in on any iPhone anywhere in the world and see and hear their iGirl.

To this, Hal9000 quips, “I’m glad I can see the iGirl, but not see what the person’s doing, involved with the iGirl, ‘cause that would be a little much for me.”

Toby then goes on to say that they are also considering making the iGirl more like a Tamagotchi. He says, “you can, like feed her Prada bags or whatever, and she’s in a better mood”. He also says the user will be able to “interact with her, and y’know, give her money and whatever”.

There is a lot to unpack in this interview, but I'll just point out a couple of things. First, an app of disembodied boobs was Toby's stated original goal. Apple would not approve disembodied boob apps; the iGirl represents a "scaling back", which Apple obviously approved. So, an app where the user can manipulate, control, shake, put words in the mouth of, and blow the skirt up on an entire woman is more acceptable than a depiction of breasts. Discuss.

Second, I see now that the whole joke of shaking the iGirl to "see how she reacts" boils down to ha ha boobies. They jiggle, get it? And it's hilarious.

This app is "just for fun" and "just a joke". Anyone who doesn't like it just doesn't "get it" and anyone who pervs out on it is a "basement dweller" who is just taking it "too seriously". This last part is an especially interesting bit of denialism. On the one hand, only weirdo "basement dwellers" would take unsavory pleasure in this app; on the other hand, Hal9000 jokes that he doesn't want to see what users are doing "involving" their iGirls, as though he assumes that masturbatory or sadistic interactions are widespread. So which is it?

This app is obviously not a real woman, is just for fun, and has nothing to do with real women. Yet Hal9000 compares her to his real life girlfriends, and Toby thinks it would be neat to "have your girlfriend" record custom statements for your iGirl to make it "as dirty as you want". These reactions blur the lines between real women and iGirls. Moreover, most real women have experienced to some degree or another being treated as though we are interchangeable units of femininity who can be grabbed, moved about, and yes, even shaken at the will of some random dude who doesn't like how we respond to him. So yeah, not so much fun.

Finally, way to turn a tamagotchi into nothing but a threadbare gender stereotype of a gold-digger ("feed" her Prada bags to elevate her mood? Give her money? Seriously?). Yawn.

The hat tip goes to Shaker Kate. Thanks, Kate!