History Main / MenAreGenericWomenAreSpecial

-->-- '''Sarah Morayati''', author of the InteractiveFiction work ''VideoGame/BrokenLegs'', in an interview discussing gender in fiction

In media, male is the default, "normal" form of humanity, while female is a special subcategory reserved [[ShapedLikeItself just for women.]] This meta-trope is OlderThanFeudalism and is found not only in fiction, [[TruthInTelevision but is ingrained into many human societies and cultures]]. The technical term for this is [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androcentrism "androcentrism."]]

* Surrounding the female subject of an [[TheItemNumber Item Number]] with indistinguishable, uniformly dressed and coifed men, with the TropeCodifier being Creator/MarilynMonroe's "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" in ''Literature/GentlemenPreferBlondes'' (homaged by Music/{{Madonna}}'s video for "Material Girl").

* Inverted in ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'' episode ''Brotherhooves Social'' where Rainbow Dash declares "Don't think me and Scootaloo are gonna take it easy on you just 'cause you're a stallion!" to Big Macintosh, more or less confirming gender stereotypes are flipped in Equestria.

** In [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMfV7S5hfUo "The Problem of Lady Robots | The Whole Plate,"]] she explores how in the ''Film/TransformersFilmSeries'', coded-female Transformers are almost completely absent due to the writers claiming "the idea of a female Transformer warrants its own explanation," meaning that female robots somehow break WillingSuspensionOfDisbelief more than the [[RatedMForManly blatantly coded-male Transformers]], [[DoubleStandard who don't require one]].
--->'''Lindsay''': Megatron accidentally etching coordinates to the {{MacGuffin}} inside ''another'' [=MacGuffin=] I'll buy, a magical glowcube that's the progenitor for all the alien robots that turn into Camaroes I'll buy, [[ArbitrarySkepticism but that one of them displays]] [[TertiarySexualCharacteristics female secondary sex characteristics]] [[PinkMeansFeminine and is pink]]? [[SarcasmMode Hmmm... I dunnoooooo, man... I'm going to have to absorb more of]] [[DoubleStandard Optimus' robo-pecs and enjoy]] [[RatedMForManly his deep, manly voice]] [[SarcasmMode while I smoke on this for a little while]].

** It's worth noting that in both cases, the "Transformers are Genderless" tends to not only ignore their using male words (pronouns, calling themselves brothers for example), but also that the actual character are visually coded male. With male {{Heroic Build}}s, and sometimes even male features like beards and mustaches (Alpha Trion, Scourge and Cyclonus being examples) and that out of universe, that design is a deliberate decision so the toys will appeal to a predominantly male audience. Many of the people who have worked on the franchise over the years have gone on record mentioning that Hasbro for the longest time did not like female characters, as they believed these did not sell in a toyline aimed at boys (It is why Arcee, despite being a mainstay of the series in a MerchandiseDriven show, did not get a figure till several decades later). In fact the show runners of the various TV shows have been noted to sometime force female characters into Hasbro's originally all male cast. Recently Hasbro's proven more open to female characters, starting with fan polls leading to the creation fan-created character Windblade, who got her own comic series, and got to be the Deuteragonist of ''WesternAnimation/TransformersCyberverse''.

* In ''Webcomic/{{Shortpacked}}'' everyone refers to Ultra-Car, a talking car, as "he". It's not until U.C. gets a human body that we learn she identifies as female, and when people are surprised she points out that cars don't ''have'' sexes.

** A huge consequence of ambiguous grammatical gender is that people have to go to ridiculous length to stay PC and resort to using extensive GenderNeutralWriting if they wish any hope to attract female professionals. German job ads make use of the shorthand ''(m/f)'' (''m'' for ''Mann'' "man" and ''f'' for ''Frau'' "woman") or ''(m/w)'' (''m'' for ''männlich'' "manly, male" and ''w'' for ''weiblich'' "wifely, womanly, female") an awful lot, as a desperate attempt to say, "Hey, we hire women, too!"

* ''Anime/DragonBallZ'':
** Cell technically has no gender, and is only referenced in the English manga as an "it". In the anime, however, Cell has a male voice actor and is only called a "he". However, this can be explained by the fact that, with the exception of Piccolo, all of his known genetic donors are male.
** Piccolo and the other Namekians, a OneGenderRace who reproduce asexually, but are only referred to as male.

Grammatically speaking, in languages featuring gender, masculinity generally prevails and is the default. Adjectives and past participles, as well as nouns for humans, are overwhelmingly masculine by default; feminine equivalents are always derivative, with specific suffixes. For example, in French, a female hunter is "chasseuresse" or "chasseuse", with the feminine suffixes "-esse" and "-euse" attached to the masculine form "chasseur"; in German, you add "-in", so a (male) chancellor is "Kanzler" and a female one is "Kanzlerin"; in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, you swap "-o" for "-a", or stick "-a" to the masculine forms. The use of feminine words is pretty much always exclusive, in that a person or group of people have to be known explicitly as all-female only for the words to be usable; if there is even a hint of ambiguity, like say a theoretical group of "1000 women and 1 man", languages will default to masculine words, be it pronouns or nouns. Feminine-by-default nouns are generally reserved for higher, more abstract concepts such as "humanity", "manliness", "affliction", etc. rather than anything to do with concrete biological sex. The only notable exceptions are animals: many words for animals are feminine by default, and they refer to a species as a whole (which results in expressions such as the grammatically feminine French phrase "une girafe mâle" ("a male giraffe")), and to a lesser extent, specifically the female animals of that species (e.g. French "une chèvre" ("a (female) goat"); still, masculine derivatives are extremely rare (e.g. French "un girafeau" ("a baby giraffe")), and the males tend to have their own words instead (e.g. French "un bouc" ("a male goat").

-->-- '''Sarah Morayati''', author of the InteractiveFiction work ''Broken Legs'', in an interview discussing gender in fiction

The trope can be observed in many different elements of society and culture. "Unisex" fashion tends to be built around men's fashion; jeans and shirts are worn by both sexes, but dresses and skirts are exclusive to women in most of the Western world (with the famous exception of the kilt). T-shirts are typically sold in two cuts, women's and mens, but men's T-shirts are sometimes sold as "unisex tees." Most androgynous names (like Jordan or Taylor) started out as men's names. The restroom sign for a man is a featureless stick figure, but the sign for a woman is a stick figure in [[TertiarySexualCharacteristics a dress]]. (One could imagine an alternate universe where women are represented as a featureless stick figure, and men are represented with a cowboy hat.) In the eyes of society, male is default, and women are basically men plus or minus something else.

* An Alberto VO5 hairspray commercial featuring the actress Rula Lenska is, depending on your viewpoint, an homage to or a parody of the "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" number described in Films -- Live-Action below.

* ''WesternAnimation/TheTransformers'': In "The Search for Alpha Trion", Elita-1's AmazonBrigade is just called the "[[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Female Autobots]]" because it's noted how rare [[{{Fembot}} female Transformers]] are. Optimus Prime's all-male forces, on the other hand, are never called the "Male Autobots" in the episode, because Transformers are considered male by default.