Tertiary Sexual Characteristics - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Put A Bow On Her Head

Good News, Bowser! It's a girl!

Ben: What makes you think its a girl?
Kevin: Yeah, if it was a girl, it'd have a big bow on the side of its head or something.

— Ben 10 Alien Force

When they must assign gender to animals, inanimate objects, or even abstract concepts, writers and artists have hit upon an ingenious solution: Put A Bow On Her Head!

Writers tend to assume that for some reason most viewers will assume that the protagonist is a guy by default. So to make absolutely sure there's no Viewer Gender Confusion, developers will assign Tertiary Sexual Characteristics to the females. Occasionally, males will have some as well. Note that many, many animals already have distinct gender-specific characteristics, though these are almost guaranteed to be totally ignored in designing fictional animal characters. Either the writers Did Not Do The Research or assumed the viewers wouldn't know what they are. (Given some of the discussions elsewhere, we're going with the first option.)

The most common feminizing accessories include:

A bow, or, less commonly, a flower
Some type of jewelry
Pink or pastel "girly" color scheme
Noticeable eyelashes
Full lips (lipstick optional)
High heels
Wearing a skirt (Amusingly, boys rarely wear pants, making most of them Half Dressed Cartoon Animals.)
Long or heavily-styled hair (Even if their species doesn't even have hair in real life!)

Naturally, the list of masculinizing accessories is far more generic and smaller.

Wearing a baseball cap
Wearing a necktie or bowtie
Wearing pants
Not wearing pants
Blue colour scheme
Baldness or short hair

On the positive side, these gender identifiers are pervasive enough to be considered shorthand for viewers who may be hearing impaired. On the negative side, they are pervasive enough to lead to Viewer Gender Confusion for male characters with stereotypically "girly" traits, including many a Bishounen. See also Pink Girl Blue Boy. See Non Mammal Mammaries for the PG-rated version and Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism for more creative variations.

Examples

Anime

Ash's Butterfree falls for another Butterfree, which just happens to be the only Pink Butterfree around (and this was before Shiny or gendered Pokemon were invented).
- Toshiro Ono's manga also had a version of the "Pikachu temporarily joins up with a group of wild Pikachu" story where Pikachu hooks up with another Pikachu with a flower on its head, presumably intended to be female, with Ash's Pikachu being male.
In Digimon, eyelash difference is the only distinguishing feature between male and female KaratsukiNumemon.
The shinigami Rem in Death Note has earrings and colored lips, and in the anime version her highlights were changed from dark blue to pastel purple. Despite this, she's often mistaken for male (possibly due to Ryuk having similar features already), though it's lessened now that there's an anime version with a feminine voice.
KouRyu and AnRyu of Gao Gai Gar are basically just like the female Autobots mentioned above, in pink and dark purple exteriors compared to primary colors.
- Note that all the other robots in the series have quite masculine faces, and the French Dragons have feminine faces and figures. Not to mention light-up breasts. Volfogg is also more purple than AnRyu, but that can be chalked up to his purple being the standard ninja color.
Dolores in Zone Of The Enders has a generally female shape, but nearly all the major Orbital Frames have somewhat androgynous shapes. She is, however, the only pink one. That would possibly make Jehuty (main game series) and Testament (Fist of Mars) subversions, as they have female AIs as well, but more masculine color schemes (Blue and brown, respectively) as more befitting their male pilots (Dolores has a male pilot too, but given her role as Robot Girl, pilots herself most of the time).
Raising Heart of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, the first Intelligent Device introduced in the series, comes with a pink frame that matches its female AI.
The Knight Sabers from Bubblegum Crisis come with rather silly high heels on their armour. Even the Fright Knights who were the rather bulky first concept for the suits had high heels.

Comic Books

Subverted in Elf Quest where Picknose the troll often wears a dainty bow on the end of his beard. Maybe his girlfriend tied it.
Wellington Grey's Miscellanea gives female stick figures skirts (and occasionally a square head).
Minus illustrates the titular character's problem with lacking Tertiary Sexual Characteristics here. Many readers have probably thought she's a guy, too.
In all versions of The Moomins, the distinguishing sexual characteristics of Moomins seems to be largely limited to what clothes (if any) they wear. Snorkmaiden has her trademark hairstyle though.
- In the original books, Snorks and Moomins are different species, so to speak. And the white skin, incidentally, is fur - and Snorks can actually change the colour of theirs (though that was hastily forgotten after the first book Snorkmaiden and her brother appeared in).
Used a lot in the swedish comic Bamse most commonly in that female characters gets much larger and detailed eyes than male ones.
Subverted in Dykes To Watch Out For. In The Indelible Alison Bechdel, author Bechdel discusses the irritation of comic books wherein The Chick is distinguished by slapping a female characteristic (lips, long hair, the proverbial bow) on the male default. She also discusses how she was initially unable to draw women and only drew men, and was finally able to draw women only by thinking of them as lesbians and drawing them rather androgynously.
Luann uses this and inverts it. Most male characters other than Aaron are given dots for eyes, big round noses and simplistic bodies. The women almost always have full figures, pouty lips, droopey/sexy eyes, etc. Unusually, Luann herself doesn't share this, having a big round head and nose with a line for a mouth.

Film

Wall-E has the chunky and functional (male) Wall-E next to the sleek (female) Eve. The other Axiom robots who were (presumably) male were more angled and squareish, reminiscent of Wall-E's cube shape.
In Shrek, Donkey doesn't realize that the dragon is a girl until she leans in close, into the light, and he can see she has long eyelashes as well as pinkish skin and some coloration to draw attention to the lips. Also a hint of purple on the eyelids, too. She looks like she has an enormous makeup mirror stashed somewhere in her treasure hoard.
- Also in Shrek, while Shrek hardly appears to have any hair at all, the ogre form of Fiona has a full head of hair.
Just look at the cover of the film Space Buddies. Can you spot the token female?◊
Subverted in Up when we find out Kevin, the brightly colored bird with no male or female distinguishing characteristics is a girl and a mother
Hardly noticeable,but in The Lion King franchise,Lions have black ear markings,while Lionesses ears are normal. Oddly,when Simba first appeared as a newborn cub,he lacked these ear markings.

Literature

In one of the Miles Vorkorsigan novels, Trooper Taura wears a pretty bow to make herself less fearsome to the kids they're rescuing. While she is visibly female, Taura is also... abnormally tall. And powerfully built. And she has fangs. And claws. Let's not forget the claws - in her introduction, she scratches through a metal water pipe... and no, the nail polish she favors later do not hide them.
Discworld, of course, messes with this:
- Dwarf men and women look exactly the same. Originally it was frowned upon in dwarf society to openly identify their gender, but recently some females dwarves have begun to wear makeup and dresses to differentiate. Amusingly, nearly all of these are derivations on what the others wear; Cheri is shocked at the idea of shaving, clarifying ''all'' dwarves still want to be dwarves.
- When the extremely prim and proper Miss Maccalariat insisted that male golems could not clean the ladies' room, Moist re-named one of them Gladys and had "her" start wearing a blue gingham dress. He does rationalize any golem gender-identification is largely arbitrary, but was more disturbed by Gladys reading women's magazines and slowly acquiring a more obviously female personality. "She" starts to develop a crush on him too. If you thought he was disturbed when she started acting feminine, that's nothing compared to some of the happier sorts of thoughts that cross his mind when he cottons on that she's getting sweet on him.

Live Action TV

Also seen on Friends, when Rachel sticks a pink bow on Emma's head because everyone keeps saying, "What a cute little boy!"
- In an earlier episode of Friends, Chandler adresses a related trope when he says: "You know what's weird? Donald Duck never wore pants. But whenever he comes out of the shower, he's got a towel around his waist. I mean, what is that about?"
As with Lola Bunny (see below), Abby Cadabby is a serious point of contention for some Muppet fans, and for many of the same reasons. Abby is a bright pink and purple Fairy Princess (it looks disturbingly like the character was designed by a marketing committee), complete with pigtails and a skirt. In contrast, very few other Muppet creatures on Sesame Street -or several other Muppet productions come to think of it- have any really obvious gender clues.
- Word Of God is that Abby looks different from the other female Muppets not because she's the girly girl (although she is), but because she's a Fairy. Apparently, the idea is that Fairies are a different puppet "ethnicity" (which may explain why she looks so much like the Sprites in Johnny And The Sprites).
- Zoe the Monster (Elmo's Distaff Counterpart) originally just had the generic "girly" eyes seen on a few female Muppets and a somewhat soft color scheme as her tells. Lately, however, she's noticeably smaller and wears bangles and bows at all times — and occasionally wears a fluffy bubblegum pink tutu.
The Red Dwarf episode "Parallel Universe" featured Distaff Counterparts of all the cast (except the Cat). The "female" Skutter (a steel-blue utility robot with a claw-like hand and a single eye) was bright pink and had eyelashes. Averted in the last season, which introduced a female Skutter called Madge who looked identical to every other Skutter.

Newspaper Comics

Used in typically snarky fashion in Pearls Before Swine: The female crocs & pigs are identified by Simpsons-style beehive hairdos. Maura the non-anthropomorphic duck is given a hair bow to distinguish her from her identical boyfriend Guard Duck - so that when they're both wearing helmets in a recent strip, her bow rides atop.
Subverted, dragged behind the shed, chopped into pieces, and disposed of in several dumpsters by George Herriman's Krazy Kat, where the lead character looked male but was treated by the author as indeterminately gendered; when a pronoun was used, it was usually "he" (perhaps in a nonstandard gender-neutral sense?), but Herriman deliberately muddied the waters with the romantic triangle between Krazy and the indisputably male Offissa Pupp and Ignatz Mouse. Most people since have treated Krazy as definitively female based upon the strip's cultural context. Which is odd, as he will bow to ladies, tip his hat (if he has one) and occasionally be subject to the wiles of the local "vamp." Of course, he'll start comparing himself to Juliet one panel later. Essays have been written. Not to mention the fact that "he" wears a red bow on his neck. And no, not a bowtie.
The Far Side often featured only slightly anthropomorphic animals, that is, unlike a Bugs Bunny who looks like a cross between a human and a rabbit, The Far Side would have a normal looking cow walk on two legs and do human things. Anyway, male animals would be naked, while female animals would always wear those kind of '50s-type eyeglasses with the fancy rims.
Garfield's girlfriend Arlene has pink fur, eyelashes — and lipstick. She's also drawn to look more graceful and sinuous than Garfield.
- This has also caused decades of Viewer Gender Confusion for poor little Nermal. This is largely because Jim Davis has a tendency to depict baby animals with eyelashes regardless of gender. Even Orson Pig, who started out as a piglet in the US Acres strip, had this applied to him. But the ultimate example of this goes all the way to the eighth life in Garfield's Nine Lives special, where a very young Garfield and Odie are seen, and they too had eyelashes.
- Of course, in Nermal's case, the fact that he had a clearly female voice actor in the cartoon doesn't help with the confusion at all.
The writers of the Scamp newspaper comic decided to go against the Gender Equals Breed deal with Lady's and Tramp's puppies, and make one of Scamp's sisters a boy, giving Lady and Tramp two daughters and two sons. The only real difference between Scooter and his sisters Fluffy and Ruffy is that Fluffy and Ruffy have eyelashes and wear ribbons around their neck, and Scooter does not.

Video Games

Ms. Pac Man has a bow on her head. In the Animated Adaptation, Sue, the Distaff Counterpart of Clyde, became a purple ghost with eyelashes and earrings.
- Ms. Pac Man also has an eyelash, and a mole, and if you look real closely, you can also see lipstick.
- The miniscule difference between Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man was played with in Drawn Together, where Pac-Man reveals that he is Ms. Pac-Man when he puts on the bow.
Female avatars on Kingdom Of Loathing have ponytails.
The Paper Mario games do this quite a bit.
- Generic Toad NPCs are identified as female by having long hair and eyelashes.
- Bombette, a female Bob-Omb, is pink, has a blonde, braided fuse, and a heart-shaped windup key.
- Bow is a female Boo. In addition to long eyelashes, she also wears... well, doesn't her name make it obvious?
- Goombella is also pink, and she has a blond ponytail.
- Ms. Mowz, a Mouser, has a heart-shaped tail and wears high heels.
- Interestingly, Watt and Sushie are aversions. Sushie otherwise looks like an ordinary Cheep-Cheep except for purple and orange coloring, and Watt, a Sparky, has only a pacifier (to signify that she's young).
  - There's still some confusion among gamers regarding Watt's gender. The fact that the game refers to Watt as both male AND female at different points doesn't help either.
- Petuni, the only known female Puni (other than the Elder), can me distinguished by the pink orb on her antenna.
The female Chain Chomp that sometimes appears when the Pocket Chomp item is used in Mario And Luigi Partners In Time has a bow on its head.
Wendy O. Koopa of Super Mario World (pictured above) has a pink hairbow, a pink shell, makeup, jewelry and high heels.
- Birdo from the Mario franchise deserves a special mention as being either played straight or subverted. It all depends on which appearances you're talking about and which side of the Pacific you're on.
Atropos, Robo's Distaff Counterpart, Duel Boss, and girlfriend from Chrono Trigger, is pink and wears a bow.
- In fact, after you beat her in her Duel Boss fight versus Robo, she gives you her ribbon as a special Robo-only equippable item.
In The Sims 2, you can build male and female Servos (robot butlers). The male looks like a generic robot, but the female looks like the male with a pink bow and lipstick.
- In [MySims], Sims are technically neither, though the specific characteristics they're given tell the tale. The player-controlled Sim can be given any available characteristics you want. (Feminine voice, eyelashes, and attire with a masculine hairstyle and a five-o'-clock shadow? Go for it!)
- In [MySims] Kingdom, on the other hand, you choose a gender for your Sim, and that puts a limiter on what your Sim can wear, what kind of hair is available, etc.. Sometimes, it changes what outfits you get as a reward. For example, there's a reward that lets males choose from a selection of outfits that are shorts-only; females get two-pieces, some with shirts over them (split near the bottom).
Gender-specific physical differences were created for some Pokemon in the Diamond/Pearl games. Fortunately, they tend to be arbitrary markings or based largely on gender differences in reality, so good on Game Freak. Female Wobbufetts appear to wear lipstick, but it's just for the lulz.
- Prior to this, the few gender-dimorphic Pokemon had their obviously different male and females listed as separate species! Male Volbeat is red and has a glowing tail, female Illumise is purple and doesn't. As a maybe-intentional subversion/inversion of the typical blue/pink color scheme, Nidoran-line females are blue/indigo, but the males are pink/purple.
Neopets didn't always have this, but after the pet artwork received a global update, female pets gained conspicuously longer eyelashes over their male counterparts — or, in the case of the two insect species: partially-closed eyes.
Averted in 3 in Three: the title character (a talking digit) is addressed as "Ms. 3" despite having no Tertiary Sexual Characteristics.
- Well, yes, but that's because of her primary and secondary sexual characteristics. I mean, look at those curves!
We went this far without mentioning Amy Rose from the Sonic The Hedgehog series? Anyway, when she first appeared in Sonic CD, her defining sexual characteristics are being pink (a contrast to Sonic's blue), eyelashes, and a skirt. When she was redesigned for Sonic Adventure, her femininity was more emphasized by changing her hairstyle (up until then, it was exactly the same as Sonic's) and giving her large golden bracelets to wear on her wrists.
Now that it's no longer a secret that Samus Is A Girl, Samus's Powered Armor in the Metroid series has undergone a slight-but-noticable makeover to make the gender of its wearer more obvious. It posseses a rather slender waist and a large Breast Plate, and its visor is now more obviously transparent, usually showing off Samus' eyes... and her rather long eyelashes.
In The Movies, the full-body animal costumes are the few unisex outfits, because they replace the character model for the actor rather than fitting over it. Except, the gorilla suit has a male and a female variant. The lady gorilla has a bow and lighter fur (but, curiously, no cleavage!) And no, you can't cross dress it; it always matches the gender of the actor.
In Nuts Milk, The pink blob Nuts is exactly the same sprite as Milk just with the addition of a pink bow.
- In Ice Climber, Nana (the P2 character) is just the Popo sprite with a pink parka instead of blue.
Averted in Okami. Amaterasu the Sun Goddess looks just like any other wolf.
- I don't recall seeing any other wolves, though there are several dogs that show up. But as I understand it, she spent the game running around in the reincarnated body of Shiranui, a male wolf.
In Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, Rareware apparently got tired of the years of people going "Kazooie's a girl?!", so they re-made her appearance. She now has long eyelashes, "curly" hair, and a more curvy look, to make her more obviously female.
- And then, once you beat the game, she starts wearing a bow-tie (yes, it's a bow, but it's a masculine bow, so does that count as as subversion?)
The protagonist of I Wanna Be The Guy, The Kid, gets a bow in his hair on Normal Mode, to suggest the less than masculine choice of playing on the easiest setting.
- Ayane gives Ryu one in the Xbox Ninja Gaiden if he selects Ninja Dog mode.
All over the place in the Kirby series, where characters are given bows to show that they're female. It's most obvious with Chuchu the octopus and Ribbon the fairy. The only two exceptionsseem to be Keke and Adeleine. This caries over into the fandom, where fanmade female characters are usually given a bow, or at least big ol' eyelashes.
- Also, the blue Lololo's distaff counterpart Lalala is pink and wears a bow.
- Taken to the extremes with Kaboola/Kabula, an airship boss in Kirby's Dream Land and Kirby Super Star Ultra. Her most recent redesign has eyelashes painted on her hull.
The protagonists of a sequel to Bubble Bobble: Coro and Kulu, the female duo Beta Couple to Bub and Bob.
- And whoever the heck the new Beta Couple in Bubble Bobble Plus (Wii Ware) are.
- Rainbow Islands: Three out of eleven random people who have all been imprisoned in The Alcatraz and transformed into green bubble dragons are female and thus have a pink bow on their head.
In Twinbee, one of the ships (not just the pilot of said ship, the ship itself) is female. How can you tell? Winbee is pink. Later adations have also shown that her cockpit is shaped like a heart, though this is somewhat excused - with two rounded bumps on top, it also shows she's the second 'bee ship. Twinbee, the original, has a round cockpit (one "bump"), while Gwinbee, the third, appears to have a rounded arrow pointing down (three bumps on the top part of the cockpit).
In Kingdom Hearts, the Bouncywild, the Distaff Counterpart of the monkey-like Powerwild, has blonde pigtails.
Nintendo's Miis have all the same facial and hair combinations, however males wear a shirt & pants and females wear a dress that flares out.
The female Kongs in the Donkey Kong Country series have long, blonde hair.
Pablo Sanchez of Backyard Sports has a basebll cap, is bald, and wears shorts. In every game except Skateboarding where he wears a helmet.

Web Comics

Faux Pas has foxes where the females have slightly darker fur and eyelashes, as well as makeup-style fur around their eyes. The humans in the comic are likewise confused.◊
- Randy, a male red fox, even was miss April once: "Some humans are weak on details".
XKCD typically distinguishes female from male stick-figure characters by giving the former hair.
- Rick Astley also has hair, but it's Eighties Hair.
Kay Wai Jellese/Kaye Haychold in Jennifer Diane Reitz's webcomics Unicorn Jelly and To Save Her. Kay/Kaye (like the author) is actually male but transgendered, as her species defines that. In Unicorn Jelly she's a conical blob with eyes and a mouth and wears a bow that's held in place on her "forehead" by a small stud. In To Save Her she (or a version of her) assumes humanoid form (with a female figure)) and still wears a bow on her forehead.
Subverted frequently an in untitled stick figure webcomic that expresses the differences between males and females in body language and anatomy. Usually keeping both a circle with five lines and deriving humour (and elitist criticism) from the fact that most people perceive some thing without clear gender specification as male by default.
In The Inexplicable Adventures Of Bob, after one of the lobster-like Pirates of Ipecac is suddenly revealed as female, she is then always portrayed with eyelashes and slightly rounded curves on all the pieces of her shell. Up till this point, both pirates had been drawn identically.

Web Original

Dorf Quest: The girls are pink! And the gods, Blue.
Zero Punctuation features red bows on female imps.
In the Homestar Runner cartoon "Costume Commercial", the ghosts used as decoration are typical white blobby ghosts, until the announcer says "and for the ladies..." at which point it's a pink background and the ghosts have bows on their heads.

Western Animation

In The Smurfs, the evil wizard Gargamel takes his revenge on the Smurfs by creating a 'Smurfette' to trick them. While the male Smurfs all wear white pants and had very little hair, the original Smurfette had long black hair and a white dress. In a nutshell, the Smurfs disapproved of her because she wasn't a real Smurf. So Smurfette visited Papa Smurf, and he turned her into a pretty blond in a sexier white dress, heels, long eyelashes, and a flirty attitude. Unfortunate Implications and gender stereotyping in one fell swoop. No wonder poor Smurfette has a trope named after her — and it isn't a positive one either.
In the Ewoks animated series (yes, there was such a thing), Kneesaa had a pink cloak. However, she was the only character distinguished in this fashion; for everyone else, you had to rely on memory.
Haley Long in American Dragon Jake Long. She doesn't have the bow, but when she transforms, she always has her hair. Though this seems to be true for all the characters when they transform, male or female, her dragon form is also pink. When Fu Dog is showed macking on a female dog, she usually has a bow, lipstick, and/or a sparkly collar. Hey, Fu digs the girly-girls.
Care Bears come in all colors - though a female Bear's fur tends to be more noticeably pastel. And nearly all of the pink-furred characters are female by default. In some series, they even wear girlie clothes too. (Note that this applies to cases where the writers had made up their minds as to who was what.)
There's an episode of The Fairly Oddparents where Timmy wishes everyone would look exactly the same. Everyone turns into a gray blob... and the female characters have gray lipstick and heavy eyelashes. Fail.
- In one episode, Timmy accidentally wished he was a girl... and was turned into a girl with a ponytail, a bow, eyelashes, lipstick, a blouse, and a skirt.
- To be fair, Fairly Odd Parents' style incorporates such T. S. C.'s the rest of the time anyway. It could count as self-awareness.
In their heyday, the Looney Tunes inadvertently became the Talking Animal equivalent of a sausage party. Over the years, attempts were made to add some ladies into the cast for a more even gender balance. The results were... mixed:
- Babs Bunny in Tiny Toon Adventures has the eyelashes, the bow (one for each of her ears, in fact), and a skirt, and her fur is bubble-gum pink. Similar tells are on Shirley the Loon (long hair/feathers, a dress, and a bow) and Fifi LeFume (a bow and purple fur). The good news is, their personalities were strong enough to transcend these obvious cues.
- Originally, Lola Bunny from Space Jam was going to be little more than a pink-furred, shorter version of Bugs. Oddly, Warner Brothers toned down her Tertiary Sexual Characteristics too much. This was an attempt to avoid upsetting anyone, especially the merchandise makers. But the story goes that the McDonald's execs took one look at the prototype toys and outright refused, saying that there was no way that they would accept Bugs Bunny flirting with a rabbit that looked like a 10-year-old boy.
- Anyway, back on Lola. She stands as a point of major contention for fans of the Classic Looney Tunes, and it's partially because her gender-specific traits are so obvious. It makes the addition of a female member to the cast seem all the more forced. She had the hair bow in Baby Looney Tunes though.
- This trope is pervasive enough to have caused decades of Viewer Gender Confusion for poor little Tweety Bird. He even used to be pink (changed to yellow in an attempt to avoid confusion)! Oh, but now Word of Executive says Tweety is female? Look at that. Guess he had a sex change after I Taw a Putty Tat.
- Subverted in "Back Alley Oproar". Sylvester (before his Flanderization to Tweety's Butt Monkey) hands off a bit of sheet music to a big orange cat who looks stereotypically male (and the thing is, it's hard to say exactly how). She proceeds to sing an lovely soprano aria from an opera — before getting hit with a rifle butt.
On the Disney side, in early cartoons, Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck would be virtually indistinguishable from their respective beaus if it weren't for the lashes, hair bows, heels and skirts. In an interesting footnote, Minnie seemed to favor going topless, while Daisy's skirt barely covers her bare bottom. Not that there's anything there to hide, but...
- Interestingly enough, take a look at some of the characters who popped up in Mickey and Minnie's wake and you'll come away with the impression that Minnie was the Trope Maker for "Well, she's got a bow on her head!"
- More recent designs of the two characters have toned down their more obvious tells. In particular, Daisy now looks more graceful and feminine (for a waterfowl) and less like Donald in a dress. She has also acquired some Non Mammal Mammaries. Even in the classic days various artists differed in their ability to make them look feminine. The Art Evolution went towards the obvious side of this trope.
- House of Mouse lampshades this by mentioning Minnie's obsession with hairbows, sometimes making it part of the plot. In one episode Mickey and Donald had to crossdress as their own girlfriends.
Oddly, only Blossom of The Powerpuff Girls has the hair bow, though she and her sisters are all in dresses, and all look like little freakish bigheads as do the Rowdyruff Boys, and the counter-Blossom has the baseball cap tell.
Phil and Lil on Rugrats pretty much have to do this as they are fraternal twins distinguished solely by their voices and gender-appropriate clothes. They frequently switch around to confuse their parents. They also had different shaped ears.
Yin Yang Yo is all over the place. Yin herself has the eyelashes and the hairbow. Her friend Lena seems to get by on just lipstick. The Aardvark Princess has the clothing, but neither lipstick nor bows. Villain Smoke has the secondary sexual characteristics. No bows, no lipstick, but a Sailor Scout type outfit, and big breasts. Villain Saranoia has the secondary sexual characteristics, as well as the lipstick. Carl's mother has the lipstick but not the clothes or the breasts. The Chung Pow Kitties all have the eyelashes and bows. Which is justified, because they communicate only with kittenlike meows. One really couldn't tell without the eyelashes and bows.
Panini of Chowder has the eyelashes and the girly color scheme, but wears a sweatband around her ears rather than a bow.
- Also, in the "Thrice Cream Man" episode: compared to the titular creature, which is an aqua-blue blob of living thrice cream, the Thrice Cream Woman is pink (strawberry-flavored?) with lipstick, eyelashes and breasts.
The short-lived series Sitting Ducks pokes fun at this concept, by having the main character Bill be completely unidentifiable (even being mistaken for a girl at least once) until he is given a bow to wear around his neck. All the ducks are identical, and are only distinguished by their clothes. Some of the female ducks wore makeup and jewelry, except for Drill Sergeant Duck, who lacked every tell except the actress (who was an alto). This was so prevalent that in one episode the aversion was lampshaded. ("Stop calling me sir, I AM A LADY!")
Early female Transformers always had breasts or breast-like torso armor, "feminine" coloration (pinks or pastel shades), narrow waists, and hips. Some modern ones however, aren't like this, sometimes due to being characters whose toys were originally molds used for male characters, other times just due to being less conventional character designs.
- Character: Thunderblast. Episode: Memory. Robot nipples.
Go-Bots averted this by assigning gender to the (presumably genderless) toys in a completely arbitrary fashion. Small Foot in particular has no human-esque gender indicators apart from her voice.
In The Land Before Time, females tend not to appear particularly different from males, although Ducky and Cera seem to be noticebly lighter in colour. In the fourth film, a guest character called Ali is written in, who is the same age and species as Littlefoot, although a different gender. To get the effect, Littlefoot's design is copied, but the eyelashses are lengthened slightly, eye colour is changed from red to blue and her overall colour is slightly redder. Another new female character, an Oviraptor, is added into the series — and she's pink. And she's named "Ruby", presumably to help the color-blind. Amusingly, Ali's appearance evidently isn't enough to establish her gender to the other characters — Ducky checks.
Partially subverted in The Backyardigans: Tasha in 'reality' is a typical girly-girl in a cute dress and takes similar parts in the pretend adventures, while Uniqua wears overalls more usually characteristic of males or Bokukkos and gets an impressively gender-neutral selection of roles. Then again, she is also pink with darker spots.
Most of the female robots in Futurama are like this (with some notable exceptions).
- Bender gets hammered into Fembot shape in one episode, including reworking implied genitals that he has never demonstrated before or since— his lack of such was vital to saving him from the Space Amazons. Another episode had a robot with an obvious "fembot" figure that turned out to be anything but... at least until "she" finished her payments. And the Crushinator may be a piece of big, clunky Lunar farming equipment, but she's still pink, sporting pigtails, and still female... still has a woman's needs.
- There's also the female Niblonians, with ribbons on their eyestalks and long eyelashes—though oddly enough, their race also has a more realistic sexual dimorphism in the males having larger canines.
Female animals in the Ice Age movies tend to have longer eyelashes, lighter colored fur and, when applicable, obviously feminine bodies. Female sloths in particular have girly "hair" and what appears to be lipstick. In the audio commentary for Meltdown, it is joked by the character designers that they would have saved themselves a lot of trouble if they'd just stuck a bow on Ellie's head rather than try to modify Manny's design to make it feminine. Dawn of the Dinosaurs features Skrat facing off against a female skrat for an acorn. ~~Miss Scrat~~ Scratte has dark foxy coloring, a significantly curvier body, eyelashes, and blue eyeshadow. She may also be a separate species since, like female gleflings, she can glide
Lilo & Stitch's spinoff series has Angel, who is a copy of Stitch but with a very high-pitched voice, very pink fur, long eyelashes, an hourglass figure, and long antennae that look like hair. She has a heart marking on her back in her first episode. Her special power involves singing. So Yeah..
Master Viper in Kung Fu Panda has eyelashes, flowers on her head, and "lipstick"; pretty much the opposite of Master Tigress (see below).
- This may have been an attempt to get around the all-too-common Reptiles Are Abhorrent effect.
Female Irkens in Invader Zim have eyelashes and curled antennae.
The Darkwing Duck episode "Trading Faces" swaps Darkwing and Goslyn's bodies. The only physical change made to them was that Darkwing's body had eyelashes and Goslyn's body had none.

Real Life

Babies. Without their little pink or blue onesies, they're relentlessly androgynous.
- To be blunt, aside from hairstyle/clothes, it is hard to tell clothed boys from girls before puberty outside socialization or self-identification.
- They have actually done several social experiments with this. The point of the experiment was to show how people treat girl and boy children differently. Each time they would just use one baby and just give it different clothes so when it was a girl bows and pink when it was a boy blue and maybe a sports shirt. No one could tell the difference.
  "Is it a boy or a girl, doctor?"
  "I think it's a little early to start assigning gender roles, don't you?"
- A Doonesbury comic in the Sunday paper a few years ago that featured a newborn baby. When asked by her grandmother what gender the baby was, the mother replied that she wasn't going to say, because it was the baby's one chance to be treated by people without gender preconceptions. The grandmother immediately begins gushing over the mischievous glint in its eyes and tiny fists that prove that it's a boy. When the mother exclaims that "it's a girl! A tough, strong girl!", the grandmother immediately shifts gears with, "Well, of course it is! Look at that precious dimple!"
The only thing distinguishing the man from the woman in bathroom signs is a dress on the latter.
- Attempts at doing something different (such as one Scottish sign showing men in kilts and women with extremely large breasts) can be hilarious.

Other

There was this one a painting of a teddy bears' picnic where the 'female' bear was wearing a pink ribbon and a skirt (but nothing else), while the 'male' bear wore neither. This has the disturbing implication that he was exposing himself to her.
This editor's sister has several hippopotamus plush toys (including a huge one, more than 60 cm tall). Originally they were all male, evidenced by a bow tie and trousers. My sister removed the bow tie and trousers from some of them, turning them female. The huge one became the mother of the whole dynasty of hippopotami.
The Big Brother Ponies were slightly bulkier than other Ponies (all female), had overall bolder color schemes, and were given hilariously exaggerated "masculine" names, accessories, and occupations. (The Fandom has not ignored the fact that the hats and collars given to the Big Brothers make them look like some kind of equine Village People tribute band.) However, their most prominent designating male feature was... big hairy feet. Because draft horses in Real Life are a One Gender Race. Uh...
The Lego Life on Mars theme has the female Martian Cassiopeia, whose gender is distinguished from the male Martians by her eyelashes.

Exceptions

Very pointedly averted in Blues Clues. Blue is (duh) blue - and female. Her non-girly color was deliberately chosen for this reason. Blue's friend Periwinkle the cat, despite the girly name, is both pastel and a cat... and male. Furthermore, since most characters have generic "little kid" voices, you frequently can't tell if a character is male or female until someone uses a pronoun on them. Random side characters were actually far more likely to be female!
Similar Nick Jr. Show The Wonder Pets has another toy-around with this. The hero, Linny Guinea Pig, wears a baseball cap and overalls. She's a girl, though. (The fact that her name sounds like "Lenny" doesn't help the Viewer Gender Confusion, of course...)
Spongebob Squarepants has female style eyelashes. They're probably there to make him look even cuter... but sponges don't even have genders the way we understand them and can reproduce asexually. The show's creator is a Marine Biologist so...
- And the sheer amount of Ho Yay just clouds the issue further...
In Recess, Spinelli shares a first name with The Ashleys clique... and nothing else. She does wear a skirt, but she gender-neutralizes it with her very masculine boots, coat, and hat.
Ribbons in Final Fantasy Tactics A 2 can normally only be equipped by the female-by-default races, Viera and Gria, and by female Humes... but the otherwise male-by-default Moogle and even Bangaa races have a job that can teach them "Ribbon-bearer" support ability. Guess what it allows them to do?
- Also played with in one mission, where there is a rule against harming characters of the opposite gender. The fight features Night Dancer, an apparently female bangaa with long eyelashes, lipstick, and a feminine way of speaking. This is not breaking precedent; unique characters are allowed to have a different gender than the species standard (such as Adelle and Frimelda, the only female humans in the whole game). However, if you attack Night Dancer with a female, you're suddenly informed that you broke the law - which means "she" is a cross-dresser! Penelo is also human- she is restricted by laws that restrict humans- even though she has access to the classes and equipment of the Viera, an effectively [One Gendered Race], as was Ritz in the previous game- though Ritz may have been entirely Viera as the mechanics were concerned.
  - In one quest where you resque a kidnapped Seeq beauty queen, you see in her portrait that she looks exactly like a male Seeq viking, only with lipstick.
- In Final Fantasy Tactics set the precedent of Ribbons as female-only equipment but made a very special exception for guest star and (forced) cross-dresser Cloud Strife.
Eyelashes appear to be the only difference between males and females of most species of Digimon. The voices usually readily reveal gender - but not always. Season four has a male Biyomon with the same appearance and voice of the female Biyomon who was a main character in season one. The male Biyomon in season five has a more masculine voice, but he isn't any less adorable 'n' pink... and with his debut, we've officially seen more male than female versions of the most stereotypically feminine rookie-level Digimon.
Partly used, partly avoided in the videogame Zombies Ate My Neighbors with a power-up potion that temporarily transforms the player character into a hulking unclothed purple beast. Julie's monster form is identical to Zeke's — one can't tell the gender of the underlying human via visual inspection. This trope is applied in that it is Julie, not Zeke, who retains a characteristic of her human appearance so that the two can be distinguished when both transformed at once. This trope is dodged in that the retained characteristic is... her bright red baseball cap.
Despite being pink, no one seems to mistake Kirby for being female.
Oddly, the Russian animated series Nu, pogodi! features a little hare, who, despite sporting long eyelashes, big blue eyes, pink cheeks, engaging in girly activities such as watering flowers, and being dubbed by a woman, the artist insists is a male.
On The Simpsons, there are alien siblings Kang (male) and Kodos (female). Both have identical appearances and equally deep voices.
A fun Real Life example. Among aquatic birds, it is always the male who is more colorful (because the flashier you are, the more babies you have). And he always courts the female, who in turn is always ~~well camouflaged with her less Awesome But Impractical plumage~~ "less pretty", right? Meet this birdwatching Troper's friend, the Phalarope. So they're a whole genre of Wholesome Cross Dressers. The females even court the males and the males brood the eggs; it's not yet clear as to why. Needless to say, this causes a bit of Birdwatcher Gender Confusion for those not in the know.
Kung Fu Panda's Master Tigress completely lacks the usual tells — no hourglass figure, cleavage, "lipstick" or long eyelashes. Her clothes are not stereotypically girlish either.
- Not completely - her female Tiger character design is extremely similar to Tai Lung's male Snow Leopard. Tai Lung is always shown as shirtless, while Tigress always wears a red vest. Possibly to avoid the Unfortunate Implications viewers might think of later... "does Tigress walk around topless?". Though, points deserve to be given for the already noted lack of hourglass figure or *ahem* other telling factors that animators usually think we need to determine she's a female.
- They're there, but they are quite subtle, based more on movement and shape of the arms and shoulders than obvious or exaggerated characteristics. In other words, more realistic, if anthropomorphized, sexual dimorphism.
Played with for the inherent humor, in Venture Brothers. Doctor Girlfriend's physical tells are obvious — she likes the same pink dressed and pillbox hats Jackie Onassis wore. But if you only heard her and her very masculine smoker's voice...
Totally averted in Digger, which may confuse people used to tertiary sexual characteristics in Humanoid Animals. Digger is female, as are many of the matriarchical hyenas, but you'd only know it from the dialogue.
- No tertiary sexual characteristics, but Digger does possess a pair of small breasts.
- Given most of the other Humanoid Animals are basically spotted hyenas, what they posses is going to cause problems of identification at the level of primary sexual characteristics, so thank god for the dialogue. And given Digger is a marsupial those aren't breasts: Word Of God suggests they are pectoral muscles (albeit drawn in a slightly Non Mammalian Mammary way to aid reader gender determination) and Digger’s actual mammary glands are where you’d expect in a Wombat; in her pouch.
  - The aforementioned dialog? Not as much help as it sounds like, because unless Digger or someone else directly references Digger being a female, you can't really tell from her behavior. She's not all that girly, because wombats as a whole are a fairly practical species; although that means she's probably a little bit weird by wombat standards since her full name is "Digger-Of-Convoluted-Tunnels", but that's a whole other trope...
Mama Condor in the Looney Tunes short The Bashful Buzzard has none of these, looking like an ordinary cartoon vulture.