I know it sounds odd. My first reaction on hearing that Apple was embedding personal assistant software with the voice and name of a lady in its new phone was vexation. Did we seriously need to be a nation of Don Drapers, men and women alike handing over mundane tasks and dictating notes to a female assistant? If we were going to become a nation of fauxecutives, couldn’t we at least choose the gender of our assistant? Because if we all get one, I want to rescue Entourage‘s Lloyd from Ari. But it actually sounds like Siri’s set up to push back against the kind of sexual harassment a real woman like her might get from the Don Drapers of the world. As Slate notes:

The choice to make Siri a woman leads to predictable sorts of harassment, though I like how she brushes it off with both sarcasm and a turning of the mirror upon the master. If you call her a “bitch,” she will sometimes reply: “Why do you hate me? I don’t even exist.” For me, Siri’s voice isn’t especially bitchy or sexy. She evokes a second-grade teacher, one who is fast with a response but also willing to patiently explain. There’s also a pronounced robotic cast to the voice that I find reassuring, a reminder that the intelligence we’re dealing with is artificial.

And as a Tumblr dedicated to her utterances observes, queries like “Talk dirty to me” are met with responses ranging from “Humus. Compost. Pumice. Silt. Gravel,” to “The carpet needs vacuuming.” Siri’s supposed to adapt, so I’d be curious to see if you persistently abuse her, she learns to take it, or if she keeps pushing back. It’s a first little experiment in what seem likely to be more extensive relationships with artificial intelligence (something that the unfortunately-named upcoming HBO show China Doll will explore). And it’s nice to see that, if we’re going to have sort of stereotypical lady robots, they’re going to be able to show some guff.

We’re pretty good at depicting actual oppressed people in other struggles here in the U.S., be it against racism or for gay rights. And for some reason, we’re okay with movie depictions of working-class people if they’re fighting fairly targeted campaigns against companies, whether it’s for protection against sexual harassment in North Country or for unionization — as long as it’s in the past, or even better, in the past and in a foreign country like in Made in Dagenham — or if they’re adorable children or surly teenagers who will presumably rise out of poverty via the transformative power of education as embodied in a single noble teacher. And it’s true we’ve got a couple of shows about characters who are not just working-class but struggling, Raising Hope and Shameless (which is, of course, a remake of a British original).

But I wonder if we might have more day-to-day depictions of genuinely working-class and poor characters if those characters weren’t always human. Obviously, the aliens in District 9 are a metaphor for the impacts of apartheid more than anything else, but one of the means of enforcing apartheid was economic: the so-called “homelands” weren’t exactly rich in mining or agriculturally productive land, and people who lived in the homelands were treated as migrant workers when they took jobs outside of those territories. The prawns are scary because they’re aliens, but South Africa’s able to stigmatize them by economically isolating them, charging them insanely inflationary prices for the cat food that they prefer, spreading rumors about their sexual practices, confining them to substandard housing and then evicting them from it.

Similarly, the robots of Brixton obviously aren’t human, but in a way, by removing factors like race from the equation, I wonder if it might be easier for audiences to feel bad about the idea of doing things to robots that we’re perfectly comfortable with businesses and governments doing to actual humans. Of course, the problem then is transferring that sympathy to actual people, and that outrage to actual policies. But if we can find alternative ways into conversations that won’t make people shut down, it’s a start.