Male Roles Vs. Female Roles in Fiction: Discussion/Analysis/Troperwank

It's clearly a moderately sexual trailer, but something being sexy/sexual does not inherently make it sexist.

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

I think that without the contrast between of how she looks and how the police look, it wouldn't have as much of an impact. First it shows beauty vs brutality, and then it adds even more brutality to the beauty.

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I'm genuinely curious now if anyone actually gets what happens in that trailer. I suspect part of the problem is people thinking that the fembot was put down, when it's fairly obvious her "death" was faked and she was recruited to a squad for some unknown purpose. (The spoiler markup is for people who haven't seen the trailer and are getting redirected to this page in the thread by forum glitches.)

Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)

Original cyberpunk characters, male and female, had been known for being sexy and packing enough firepower to mow down several enemies. I'd hardly call it sexist Po S over a trailer like this.

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Males too? I personally have never seen a sexy male bot, but all female bots are sexy one another or another. As far as I know, all the male (or ungendered-but-referred-to-as-male bots don't seem to be designed with 'sexy' in mind. Then again, it is a bit hard to compare when "no breasts = not sexy, breasts = sexy" or "no hips = not sexy, hips = sexy" and so on. Aka, the male body isn't considered sexy, but the female body is, which means giving a robot a female body is easily considered 'sexing' up the robot already.

This may be accurate to real life, if only because we have similar sexist attitudes IRL

edited 30th Apr '16 11:33:16 PM by hellomoto

The male body is often made to be sexy with either a toned look(basically well in-shape, may or may not have a lot of muscle mass), or basically being a bishie(which they look somewhat feminine, sparkly, and simply in-shape at best. No extra muscles, but generally are well-shaven(or no beard/mustache), just average body, yet a very shiny body too). To note, bishie sparkles can be put on anything, but that alone is not the regular bishie look.

Female bodies follow the hourglass figure to be considered sexy by default. There's also other things like sexy poses, clothing that shows too much, or just the way they speak.

I actually do recall seeing a male sex bot in a cyberpunk work before. I just don't recall where exactly....

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Well the cover image of Cyberpunk is that.... so is say Dimension W

edited 30th Apr '16 11:52:17 PM by Memers

Well Cyberpunk certainly does have a lot of attractive/handsome male characters in it. Cosmetic augments will do that...

The usual dangers in cyberpunk is generally the machines or the augments being so far ingrained into society that some people are becoming more than human in the worst way (aka they are slowly becoming monsters).

edited 30th Apr '16 11:51:26 PM by Ecrivan

Formerly known as Bleddyn And I am feeling like a ghost Resident Perky Goth

The thing with robots is that the male form tends to be taken as the default, so robots with conventionally masculine features are just seen as "normal" rather than being sexualized in the way gynoids often are.

It depends on the work some are more about robots becoming human than humans becoming robots. That is where it starts to get Mostly Female aside from characters like Data.

edited 30th Apr '16 11:59:47 PM by Memers

Another issue is that most of the "sexy male robots" look too much like a literal human, sometimes to the point you think they're cyborgs. Androids however are different in that they are only robotic on the inside, but tend to be given human-like skin designs. Depends the manga/show/comic/etc. of course. The androids in Dragon Ball are good examples of this. They all look generally human, with a few robotic features thrown in once in a while, and of course you can tell if you remove a piece of them.

Male robots can often be gonks or just generally featureless besides a male voice and no chest size. Bender from Futurama has no special features that make him male. It's kind of an issue, but it gets worse when you realize that the only thing often separating the flat-chested ones is purely the voice. This isn't as much of an issue for human-looking characters, but that's solely a perception due to the human race's own natural looks. While we're super-varied, we also have a fairly obvious male and female figure(and I don't mean curves either). Whereas many animals don't have any tellable differences besides what's down below, or what you can see where their chest is, depending the type of creature. Cows and Bulls are actually a notable example of them being fairly different like humans are in general. But many Birds don't have very notable differences between the males and females.

Tangent aside, it's pretty much an issue with perception.

Most birds have different colorations between sexes, some remarkably so. Some insects don't even look like the same species. Size difference is relatively common among all animals. But yeah, beside the point.

More to the point, female robots are probably more rare than female characters, mostly due to male being default.

However, men are also more square with straight lines and distinct angles, compared to women who're more curvy. The former is a common feature for robots, so them being seen as male by default does make sense, even without considering Men Are Generic, Women Are Special. If you take a block, add a head, put two legs underneath, and two arms at the sides, most people will think it looks more male than female.

Of course, once you get to robots that resemble humans enough to have the curves and shapes women and men have, it's less of a point, but at that point they have more defined genders, rather than something that doesn't really matter but falls down as male by default.

Another point that probably adds to it is that robots are sciency. On the flipside of that, beasts are often female. We still have the default male, but there are certainly more female beasts than female robots. (By the way, by "beasts" I mean creatures that don't have obvious gender traits to people not familiar with them.)

edited 1st May '16 12:27:05 AM by AnotherDuck

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Also, it depend of how much "male" robot it is, most of the time is just the voice but other is the shape, square=male, circle or curve=female

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@ Ecrivan: A.I. had one played by Jude Law. And Circuitry Man had one as the protagonist, if I'm not mistaken.

Still a great "screw depression" song even after seven years.

And yet, Star Wars' BB-8 is a voiceless ball and still considered male.

You also have Bicentennial Man, which is a male butler robot model and there are even a female model of the same series but both look nearly identical save the voice.

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That bothered me so much. Especially because Bebe is generally a female name.

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She was programed with a female template, like many robots where programed with human traits in A.I., so it wouldn't be that much of an outreach that robots meant to mimic humans to be programed with some gendered traits like the ones in A.I. and Bicentennial Man were.

Then you get into Ridiculously Human Robot and it is difficult to avoid such scenarios. It doesn't really help that the predictions of human A.I.s would come from a sort of Brain Scan capable of replicating all higher brain functions of existing people.

edited 1st May '16 9:30:36 AM by AngelusNox

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I thought droid genders in Star Wars was more of a fan thing than anything else. I can't remember if they ever refer to BB-8 as a male in the movie itself, or if it's always just "it" or "the droid".

Still a great "screw depression" song even after seven years.

There was a big debate outside the movie about BB-8's gender, one of the producers called it 'She' a few months before the movie came out and when the movie came out everyone actually involved in the project called it 'He'.

The producer was a women so I assume it was 'an identify an 'it' by your own gender' thing but it did make quite a few people mad as they liked BB-8 as a girl droid.

Edit: tried to rewrite this post 10 times to not sound sexist but I don't think I quite got it... Sorry if not.

The best robot in fiction IMO is Aigis in Persona 3, no Fanservice, very well written, you can strike up a relationship in the Updated Re-release with her but it does not matter which gender you chose as the MC, the sign of your relationship is you touch her CP Us with your finger thus leaving a fingerprint on her heart... Dawww.. Her story line throughout the main game and being the MC in The Answer arc was excellent.

edited 1st May '16 10:39:28 AM by Memers

BB-8 was called he by the fans, its gender is never specified.

Certain droids in Star Wars did have gender programming included; mostly ones designed to interact with sentients on an interpersonal level, like protocol droids.. That generally doesn't include Astromech droids like BB-8, who are really just intended to be really sophisticated tool boxes/mechanics/in-flight engineers. But if you don't wipe their memories routinely, they start to develop quirks and personalities (the R series droids were infamous for this in the EU, due to their extreme intelligence), which I assume could include gender identity.

edited 1st May '16 11:11:34 AM by Rationalinsanity

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The hell is "gender programming"? Like, what even is that? Are the male robots programmed to cat-call women on the streets? Do the female robots have a Stay in the Kitchen protocol?

The concept reeks of stereotyping, in the sense that masculine/feminine stereotypes are about the only way the distinction can even be presented in sexless machines.

edited 1st May '16 11:26:35 AM by TobiasDrake

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I don't think any sources actually went into detail on the subject; and I always thought that it was iffy as well.

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