Tertiary Sexual Characteristics / Western Animation

---

Tertiary Sexual Characteristics in Western Animation.

---

Straight examples

• Adventure Time uses this for some characters in the Gender-Bent Alternate Universe—for example, the female version of Cinnamon Bun wears a dress and bow, while the male version of Tree Trunks has a mustache and a bow tie. In the normal universe, neither wears clothes. A lock of Fionna's hair is also always visible under her hat, unlike Finn who keeps it tucked in.
• 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 (in season 1 she was purple, which is considered more unisex though leaning towards feminine than Jake's red tone). 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.
• In The Animals of Farthing Wood, The vixens (Vixen, Whisper, Charmer, Dreamer and Lady Blue) have 'hair' that resemble human headdresses. Sinuous the Snake is the rare male version, with markings on his face that look like a moustache.
• In Animaniacs, Dot has a yellow flower around her ears (which sometimes appears with a pink bow), a pink skirt and on fancy occasions wears a pink dress and matching jewellery. She also has tufts of fur from the side of her face that make her look like she has a pixie-like haircut. Rita the cat has eyelashes, as does Slappy Squirrel, who also has a hat with a flower on it. On the male side, Yakko and Wakko have shorter hair than Dot, with Yakko wearing pants (oversized slacks with a large belt) and Wakko not, although he does wear a blue sweater and red baseball cap. The Hip Hippos also had a Pink Girl, Blue Boy color scheme.
• Eva from Bernard could be differentiated from Lloyd by the ponytail that she wears.
• On an episode of Bugged, a female bug appeared who was differentiated from the (presumably) male central bug by having bows on her antenna and lipstick.
• In kids' cartoon series Captain Zed and the Zee Zone, the rather macho dream policeman Captain Zed has an assistant called PJ. In early series it is very, very, hard to precisely work out his/her gender, which subverts this trope. The best guess you can make is "maybe a tomboyish female. Or a teenage boy." Later series of Captain Z make it rather clearer: PJ is a normally endowed human female, physically recognizable as such by the usual secondary sexual characteristics, ie wider hips, facial features and a hint of bust.
• 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.) Subverted with Swift Heart. Even though she had a very obviously feminine voice and behavior, nobody realized she was a girl since she's a blue rabbit with no bow or anything. Swift Heart might actually justify this trope on a meta-level.
• Chowder:
  • Panini has the eyelashes and the girly color scheme, but wears a sweatband/scrunchie around her ears rather than a bow. Chowder in comparison is light purple, which is often considered feminine though can be unisex. Chowder and Panini are the same species but look nothing alike.
  • 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.
• Clifford's Puppy Days: Zo and Daffodil, a female cat and rabbit respectively, wear bows on their heads. Daffodil was initially pink before becoming white-furred later on.
• 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.
• Most of the female characters in Dinosaur Train have eyelashes. The female Pteranodons also have oval-shaped eyes, while the males (and most other characters of either gender) have round ones.
• 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 Duck 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.
  • Mickey Mouse Works lampshades this by mentioning Minnie's obsession with hairbows, sometimes making it part of the plot. In "Mickey's Big Break", Mickey and Donald had to crossdress as their own girlfriends to replace a picture of Minnie and Daisy they broke while playing football inside the house.
• In kids' show Dive Olly Dive, the female submarine has curly eyelashes, pink eyeshadow, and a heart-shaped headlight.
• The miniscule difference between Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man was parodied in Drawn Together, where Pac-Man reveals that he is Ms. Pac-Man when he puts on the bow.
• In the Ewoks animated series, princess Kneesaa wears a pink hood and her best friend Latara a long braid and a hood that looks more like a hat. While both have subtly implied breasts just like most other female characters in the show, it's only aunt Bozzie and the second season version of Shodu Warrick who wear dresses and have prominent breasts. Seemingly, the only other character seen in a dress, mistress Kaink, has moustache.
• 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. 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. Although, Wanda granted it because he was acting a bit sexist, and presumably chose how he looked.
• All women in Family Guy have noticeable lips while the men do not.
• 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 Nibblonians, 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.
  • The bows and eyelashes are also somewhat justified here, as that makes the girl Nibblonians even cuter!
• In Happy Tree Friends, Giggles, Petunia and Lammy all have long eyelashes. Petunia wears a flower on her head, while Giggles and Lammy have hair bows.
• Female Irkens in Invader Zim have long eyelashes and curled antennae. Tak and Invader Tenn are the only female Irken characters (aside from Tallest Miyuki, whose episode was never finished), but several Irken with the same traits show up in crowd scenes, and are presumably female as well. To be fair, this may be the only difference between male and female Irken, as it's heavily implied they don't even reproduce sexually.
• Jimmy Two-Shoes: One episode has Jimmy making a Dagwood Sandwich and then using it as a Companion Cube. He made it female be putting a ribbon on it.
• Often unnoticed: In Kim Possible the women all have a pronounced upper lip (not supposed to indicate lipstick, as it only applies to the upper lip, and the occasional woman with lipstick has both lips accentuated) while male mouths are completely surrounded by thin lines.
• Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts: The mob frogs. While male frogs all seem to have small mustaches, female frogs seem to all have fuller lips. Outside of that, they're all very similar, especially considering they all wear the same outfits.
• In The Land Before Time, females tend not to appear particularly different from males, although in some art, Ducky and Cera are given near-pastel color schemes. 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 colorblind. Amusingly, Ali's appearance evidently isn't enough to establish her gender to the other characters — Ducky checks.
• Lilo & Stitch: The Series has Angel, who is a copy of Stitch but with a very high-pitched voice, 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, which causes anyone that used to be evil to turn evil again.
• In their heyday, 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 bubblegum pink. Similar tells are on Shirley the Loon (long hair/feathers, a dress, and a bow) and Fifi LaFume (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 Bros. 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 who looked like a 10-year-old boy. Speaking of 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 even had the hair bow in Baby Looney Tunes.
  • 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 when Moral Guardians thought he looked too naked). 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.
  • Whenever Daffy is mackin' on a lady duck, she tends to have very obvious tells.
  • Petunia Pig wears red ribbons on her pigtails.
• In Mega Babies, Meg's eyelashes and ponytails distinguish her from her brothers Buck and Derrick.
• Zee from Moose and Zee is a small blue bird who wears a flower on her head.
• My Little Pony:
  • My Little Pony 'n Friends: In "The Golden Horseshoes, Part 2", the goblin mother, the only female in their family, wears a pink dress and bow, an apron, and low high heels. Her husband wears a sailor outfit.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • As far as secondary characteristics go, males lack eyelashes and have more angular muzzles and narrower ears than females. Some are noticeably taller and stockier, but not all; for example, the exposed muzzle is the only way to determine Wonderbolt (and Shadowbolt) genders (unless they really want to let you know). There are, however, a couple of mixed and non-standard character designs in the background cast, which have been cause for endless confusion. Also, most male ponies ^note  usually generic background ones, which in turn was one of the major inspirations for the fandom creation of Doctor Whooves tend to have ruffled or spiky hair while almost all female ponies' hair are completely smooth and straight. In one episode, Rarity was shown to wear false eyelashes, and she's been seen applying mascara to Fluttershy. The main difference seems to be the size of the male ponies who are always one-half or one head taller than all the females (with the obvious exception of the Princesses, of course). For ponies, who are around three heads tall, this is actually quite a large difference.
    • One particularly unconventional difference is that female ponies' eyes are usually rendered with two catchlights (and fillies have three), while the males only have two.
    • Female phoenixes have pink feathers and different head feathers. Or so it might seem at first, but if you know much about real birds' sexual characteristics you will know that it is the smaller pink phoenix who is the male (or just look at the confirmed-female phoenix, Philomena).
    • Male Breezies have shorter manes and rounder eyes, but still look just as girly as the females with their eyelashes.
• Various non-human characters from Oggy and the Cockroaches have pronounced eyelashes and other human-like feminine features:
  • Cats: Olivia (Oggy's love interest), Monica (Oggy's twin sister), Oggy's mother and Oggy's unnamed female relative all have eyelashes, with Olivia wearing a bow, while Monica has a Girlish Pigtails and pink rollerskates; Oggy's grandmother is an exception but she does wear a dress and has pink nail-polish.
  • Others: Lady K (the roach in Olivia's house and Joey's love interest) and the fat bee that Joey had a crush on have eyelashes, thick lips and breasts; Dee Dee's cow and one of Oggy's pet snail have eyelashes and thick lips.
• Pac-Man:
  • All of the male members of the Ghost Gang (including Pinky) wear hats. Sue, the Distaff Counterpart of Clyde, became a purple ghost with eyelashes and earrings.
  • Pac-Man wears a red hat. Ms. Pac-Man wears heeled boots in addition to her usual bow, though she gains hair unlike her husband.
• If it isn't otherwise obvious, the easiest way to tell if a dog or puppy on Pound Puppies (2010) is male or female is to look for eyelashes. If there are some, it's a female; if not, the pooch is a male. (Unless, of course, the dog's person is making up their male dogs as female for some reason.)
• 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 from the 1998 series, and the counter-Blossom has the baseball cap tell.
  • The episode that introduced the Rowdyruff Boys, in itself titled "The Rowdyruff Boys", has the girls sporting long eyelashes in a ploy to disarm and eventually destroy them by using their feminine wiles (i.e.: kissing them).
• Razzberry Jazzberry Jam: Without exception, every single female character in the show has visible eyelashes. In fact, this is the only way to tell that one character (one of the aliens who appear in “Music Is Universal”) is female.
• Rocko's Modern Life: "From Here to Maternity" involves shopping for essentials for a baby that Filburt and Dr. Hutchison are expecting to be hatched from an egg while Heffer nurtures it. Filburt and Heffer obviously expect the little tyke to be of opposite genders, considering that instances involve Heffer picking out a frilly pink dress while Filburt picks out a football jersey. There is even a montage involving Filburt playing baseball with the egg and teaching it how to shave, while Heffer dresses the egg up in a tutu and dances ballet with it and plays tea party with the bowed egg.
• Christmas special, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (the stop animation one) has Claurice, a doe that Rudolph is attracted to. How do we know Claurice is female? Well, she has no antlers for one thing, but she also has lighter fur, eyelashes and a bow on her head. Yup, definitely a female deer. In real life though, both reindeer sexes have antlers. In fact, the females shed theirs later in the year than the males do; the reindeer that have no antlers by Christmas are the old males.
• 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. They also have different colored shoes, Lil wears a dress, and Phil has pants.
• The Simpsons: Only women and girls have visible eyelashes.
• 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!")
• The Smurfs (1981):
  • 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. No wonder poor Smurfette has a trope named after her — and it isn't a positive one either.
  • A second and third Smurfette (named "Sassette" and "Nanny Smurf" respectively, to avoid confusion) were introduced latter. Sassette (who is also an artificial Smurf) wears overalls, like Handy, but hers are pink and she has long, red hair, which she wears in Girlish Pigtails. Likewise, Nanny Smurf (Who knows where she comes from) is identified as female by having hair and a female voice. It should also be noted that all three Smurfettes have notably smaller noses than the male smurfs.
• Spoofed in the South Park episode "The Cissy," when Eric pretends to be a "transginger" girl named Erica, and the only difference is a pink bow slapped on top of Eric's hat.
• QT-KT from Star Wars: The Clone Wars is an astromech droid, the same model as the more famous R2-D2. She has the same cylindrical, domed chassis and general design of markings, except she's painted pink instead of R2's blue, her beeps and chirps are distinctly higher-pitched and "breathier" than R2's, and her name is pronounced like "Cutie Katie".
• The female locomotives from Thomas & Friends were all specifically designed after real locomotives that appear "feminine" to the show's writers. For example, Daisy has eyelashes and lipstick, Mavis and Flora both have cowcatchers and runningboards that resemble skirts, both Emily and Molly have large drive wheels, Rosie and Lady are both colored pink, and Belle's smokebox is extended in a way so that she appears to have long hair.
• A Thousand and One... Americas: During the Scenery Porn (accompanied with Introdump) that takes the eighteenth episode into the next setting (the Amazon River and the nearby biomes), we can see a monkey couple atop a tree's think branch. The female one has a pink flower at the top of the head, serving as a ribbon of sorts. The two monkeys are phenotypically indistinguishable otherwise.
• Sartana of the Dead from El Tigre is an undead skeleton-headed woman. She wears a dress, has lipstick and eyelashes, as well as Hartman Hips.
• Toucan Tecs: The otherwise androgynous Red Leader wears a pale pink scarf. Averted with Fifi, however, as apart from her voice and name, there's absolutely no indication that she's female.
• 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.
  • Override of Velocitron has heels in her robot form. Her status as female is only in the American dub as She's a Man in Japan.
• Penelope Pitstop's Wacky Races car, the Compact Pussycat is not only various shades of pastel pink and bright red with a pair of ruby red lips as a grill, but her dashboard features lipstick application, hair dryer, and other feminine options.
• Inverted in the series What-a-Mess. Well-groomed Afghan Hounds naturally have long hair on their heads, and long hair that tends to make them look like they're wearing fancy clothes. Despite all this, the Afghan Hound protagonist, What-a-Mess, is a male dog. However, this trope is played straight with the cat, Felicia. She has long eyelashes and a bow.
• Rota Ree on Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch is a yellow convertible who is also Wheelie's girlfriend. Her windshield is the form of a pink bow.
• Word Party: How do you tell that Franny and Lulu are girls aside from their name and voice pitch? They both have eyelashes.
• Work It Out Wombats!: Frannie, one of the fish babies, has a bow to show that she's a girl.
• 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 kitten-like meows. One really couldn't tell without the eyelashes and bows.

Exceptions

• Darla "The Geek" Gugenheek from The Adventures of Sam & Max: Freelance Police is drawn without lashes, further emphasizing her tomboyish appearance.
• The Amazing World of Gumball:
  • Inverted majorly: eyelashes aren't exclusive for female characters. Darwin the fish has feminine eyelashes and a rather girlish voice, although his VA is a boy. Contrast with other female characters like Tina (a relatively realistic T-rex), Masami (a cloud)^note This was lampshaded once by Gumball not being sure if she's really a girl Molly (a brontosaur), and Carmen (a cactus), who have very gender-neutral appearances. Several other male characters also have eyelashes (Richard the rabbit, Alan the balloon, the donut cop) while only about half the female ones do.
  • As for the Wattersons, despite the fact that eyelashes aren't a telltale sign, Nicole and Anais's eyes are completely round, as opposed to the guys' eyes which looked like straight tubes. All of their eyes are rounded in later seasons to make them all cuter, and now all eyes are perfect circles instead of ovals
  • That said, any time a flashback shows Nicole as a child, she's always wearing a red/pink bow, likely to obscure how she looks almost identical to her own son.
  • In the episode "The Blame," Gumball impersonates his mother by wearing her outfits and drawing eyelashes on his face. He doesn't account for when he closes his eyes and the lashes don't match, though.
• Amphibia: MicroAngelo is a pink snail with visible eyelashes, and also happens to be male. By comparison, the female snail Bessie is purple and lacks eyelashes.
• Arthur has at least one. Similar to the Wonder Pets listed above, there was a young female character with a gender neutral voice and a baseball hat nickname "W.D."; she also has a gender neutral haircut and wears masculine clothing, to emphasize she's a tomboy. Her name is "Wilhelmina", but no one calls her that.
• Most boys in As Told by Ginger have no eyelashes. Minor character Ian has eyelashes, possibly to emphasise that he is a "Pretty Boy", while the campy and effeminate Brandon also has eyelashes.
• Zigzagged 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.
• The Beatles: In "Not A Second Time," a very off-model Paul is given eyelashes as the boys rehearse their song.
  • In a singalong host segment when John asks Ringo for props to support a romantic ballad, Ringo emerges in a ballet dancer's tights ("I'm a ballad dancer!"), with eyelashes to boot.
• Be Cool, Scooby-Doo! had Fred identifying the Mystery Machine as "she." Shaggy questions "The Mystery Machine is a girl??" After which Scooby looks under the chassis and asks "How can you tell?"
• Bunny Maloney stars titular Bunny, a pink male rabbit, and his girlfriend Candy, a pink female rabbit. Bunny looks like the "men" silhouette on a restroom door if it had rabbit ears and a tail; Candy has a much curvier figure, Blush Stickers, eyelashes, and a red scrunchie on her left ear.
• While the female Care Bears tend to have lighter, more pastel colors than their male counterparts, color is not always a giveaway, and, of course, more than one bear has flipped gender between generations. According to TCFC, the way to distinguish males from females are the eyebrows, but it's not that females have them and males don't — it's that females have three, while males have only two.
• Challenge Of The 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.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog is a pink, male dog.
• Subverted in Danny Phantom, where Mr. Lancer is revealed to have a sister whose photo he keeps on his desk. She has chest hair and a beard, but also long red hair and make-up. After Danny passes the test he was there to take and leaves, Lancer reveals aloud that he keeps the photo specifically as an opener for heart-to-hearts with his students that works every time. Then he wonders when anyone will ever realize the picture's just of him in a dress.
• Kaeloo has no visible features which distinguish her from the males whilst other females are given breasts, curves and eyelashes. Possible Fridge Brilliance in that she is a frog, and hence would not have breasts or hair. Played Straight in the games she and her friends play, as fake moustaches and bows are often donned.
• Mama Condor in the Looney Tunes short The Bashful Buzzard has none of these, looking like an ordinary cartoon vulture.
  • Subverted in the Looney Tunes short "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 a lovely soprano aria from an opera — before getting clobbered with a shotgun butt and staggering off the roof.
  • An old animation trope was to draw all babies with eyelashes to make them look youthful and innocent. This can be seen in many shorts from the early-to-mid 1900s but has gone out of style since. This is why Tweety from Looney Tunes has prominent eyelashes—he's a chick.
  • The 1939 Warner Bros. cartoon "Screwball Football" has a team kicking off to start the game. The entire line is posed post-kickoff and then performing a cutesy dance recital and finishing it with a curtsy.
• From around 1947 to 1955, Mighty Mouse was given eyelashes. They were absent from the 1959-61 TV-budget shorts and the Filmation series then reinstated in the Bakshi series.
• As mentioned above, the "Big Brother Ponies" from My Little Pony were essentially the only male Ponies up until G4. They looked almost◊ exactly◊ like the girls except for "boyish" flank markings, being a tiny bit larger than the girls, and unshorn fetlocks. Depending on whom you ask, several of them look even more feminine than the girls. Fridge Brilliance pops in when you remember that G1 liked to be accurate, and horses have long eyelashes.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Speaking of G4, lots of casual observers think Rainbow Dash is The One Guy because it's exactly the sort of art style where a blue character would generally be Color-Coded for Your Convenience. Additionally, her mane (though still long) is a lot closer cropped than the rest of the Mane Six, her voice is about the same timbre as Spike (who is a prebubescant male dragon), and she is tomboyish in behavior.
  • Zecora has the more angular muzzle of male ponies, though much slimmer. Casual viewers may mistake her for a male until she speaks. This has been adopted by the fandom as a feature of Zebras in Equestria's world.
  • The Breezies. Fans have been searching far and wide for any way to tell their genders apart, but nothing yet has been found. Not even the voice, as, being tiny fairies, it's high pitched enough to leave room for confusion.
• 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 voiced by a woman, the artist insists is a male. It's a Zig-Zagging Trope where Hare is concerned- There's no Viewer Gender Confusion in this case in homeland Russia, because the hare in question is called/named just the Hare, and the Russian word for "hare" ("Zayats") is masculine by default, implying that the Hare is indeed a boy. Don't ask. He is also wearing shorts. Unfortunately, the rest of the world who watched the exported version of the show were rightfully confused given that the English VA preserved Hare's high-pitched voice, left the scenes where he engages in feminine activities uncut, and girls, and just assumed the pants to indicate a tomboy. The trope is played straight with a lot of other anthropomorphic animals appearing in the series, whose gender is mostly determined through the pants vs. skirt method.
• While many of the characters in Pac-Man play it straight, Pac-Baby does not. Despite the tuft of hair, the pastel colors, and the bow, an episode showing an older Pac-Baby reveals him to be male.
• PB&J Otter had Baby Butter Otter as the baby sister with no tertiary sexual characteristics, which was a triple whammy when came to Viewer Gender Confusion with her also having a similar character model to her brother Peanut and being One of the Boys.
• Mostly averted in The Penguins of Madagascar and played with in "Miss Understanding". Due to some mistake, Skipper's led to believe that he is actually female. Once he accepts it, he promptly puts on a big pink bow.
• 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. She has pigtails though, so she's not completely neutralized.
  • The show actually subverts the cartoony way of not really having any tertiary sexual characteristics, like the eyelashes, as none of the girls (or if anyone's wondering, the boys) have any. The only characteristic the girls are given to look different are that they're drawn with full lips (with the exceptions of Cornchip Girl and a few others). In fact, the only female character drawn with eyelashes is Miss Grotke. She probably wears mascara.
• Summer Smith from Rick and Morty is one of the few female characters on the show to lack eyelashes and visible lips. She's even been mistaken for a man in-universe a few times. Not helping that her face is pretty much identical to that of her father Jerry.
• In a scene of the very first episode of The Ruff & Reddy Show (the "Planet Pirates" story arc), Ruff is given eyelashes.
• On one of The Simpsons Halloween episodes, the aliens Kang and Kodos are revealed to be siblings — and male and female respectively. Both have identical appearances and deep voices (though if you listen carefully, Kodos's voice is slightly higher).
• Sofia the First: All the female characters have eyelashes while the males don't, although Prince Hugo happens to have tiny eyelashes.
• SpongeBob SquarePants has female style eyelashes. They're probably there to make him look even cuter, as he has an endearing child-like demeanor. Real-life sea sponges are hermaphroditic animals that reproduce asexually. The show's creator was a Marine Biologist, so...
  SpongeBob: Can you reproduce by budding?
  • When Mr. Krabs tells SpongeBob that a hat he's wearing makes him look like a girl, SpongeBob happily takes it as a compliment:
    SpongeBob: (starry-eyed) Am I a preeetty giiirl?
    • Later when Krabs tells him that he isn't beautiful, SpongeBob lets out a sad, little "I'm not?" and gets tearful.
  • Lampshaded sometimes when some characters actually do mistake him for a girl, or aren't sure what gender he is.
• In Steven Universe most female characters and gems aren't drawn with eyelashes (and most gems apparently have no breasts). Ironically, the one who does have noticeable eyelashes is the very masculine, evil Jasper. Steven himself averts the cliche that only girls wear pink, as his clothes and powers are both pink.
• Subverted with Little Sneezer from Tiny Toon Adventures. Eyelashes? check. High-pitched voice? Check. But make no mistake, he's a male.
• Jerry and Nibbles/Tuffy of Tom and Jerry inverts this with his long eyelashes and cute face, leading to Viewer Gender Confusion for some. Female cats in the shorts had long eyelashes, wore lipstick, bows and sometimes female clothes.
• Played with for the inherent humor, in The Venture Brothers. Doctor Girlfriend's physical tells are obvious — she likes the same pink dresses and pillbox hats Jackie Onassis wore. But if you only heard her and her very masculine smoker's voice...
• In Wildfire, all the foals are given long eyelashes, including the colt Brutus.
• Wonder Pets! has a toy-around with this. The hero, Linny the Guinea Pig, wears a baseball cap and cape. She's a girl, though. (The fact that her name sounds like "Lenny" doesn't help the Viewer Gender Confusion, of course...)

---