"Your (male) dolls look like girls" - androgyny of dolls

this also comes up with anime characters a lot. it seems to only be a problem for westerners.

i think it's just a clash between western and eastern beauty standards for men. gender is socially constructed, and the eastern conception of masculinity is just different in many ways from how we view masculinity in the west. that plays into beauty standards too. not every dude has to have a jaw like a boulder and shoulders for days to look "manly". in the west, we're so used to seeing men that look like *insert super masculine stereotype here* that when we see a male character that just isn't that, we automatically read them as feminine.

it's funny because i actually think that relatively few men worldwide actually fall into the western ideal of masculinity, in terms of how they look. most men don't look cartoonishly masculine, either in terms of body type or presentation, at least in my experience. the ones who do are in a minority.

in terms of my own personal opinion, i deeply appreciate the perceived androgyny of (Some!) male bjds. i'm a transgender man who likes pink things and cute things, so i tend to get read as a woman a lot of the time. so my dolls are kind of like me! haha. it's actually really nice to have the option of having male dolls that look more like me. it's one of the biggest reasons i'm in this hobby. western off-topic dolls for children, for example, when they have male dolls at all, almost always have that cartoonishly masculine aesthetic. that's something that, personally, i just can't relate to.

 

Long hair is often coded as feminine, and as most of my dolls are "male" (according to their plastic genitals) and most have long hair...

It both annoys me and amuses me. I'm not really sure how to describe how it makes me feel. The whimsical part of me that cares not a whit about gender just shrugs it off; it makes me feel like I'm getting away with something. The factual part of me wants to correct them.*

*Edit: To clarify, it's like when you're a kid and you draw a cow and everyone compliments you on the nice horse you drew. Dolls are an art form, and when someone interprets your art differently than you intended, it's hard to resist correcting them even when most of me is like yeah! gender binary subverted!

 

Oh, this is a fun one. My nb spouse is a boy doll kind of person and I personally have a strong preference towards girl dolls. At this point I think we've mutually come to the decision that apart from faces that are angular to the extreme, doll gender is mostly stored in the eyes. Can they see? Girl. Are they getting dangerously close to being Brock from Pokémon? Boy.

I can see why they would look fairly androgynous or even femme to somebody who isn't used to this absolutely niche eye size binary, especially since they're frequently of East Asian origin. I'm Japanese and pretty used to watching people stumble around gender without some other signifier, say a vocal range or a hair choice.

I guess we're lucky, being that we aren't particularly fans of the idea of the gender thing. It would be nice if people didn't get so hung up on it though. I can imagine if anyone spent too much mental effort on gendering my expensive designer plastic sculpture correctly or incorrectly I would probably be at a loss for words.

 

Exactly! I don't know why people are so hung up on the idea of gender. Not doll related, but people say that about my son all the time. Who cares? People, kids, dolls, and pets should have the freedom to do what they want and look like what they want as long as they're not hurting anyone.

I just usually respond, "okay." It usually seems to get across that I'm not interested in talking too much about it.

 

I think you don't need to care what others' saying. Dolls are yours, not theirs.

 

This happens to me a lot too. Most of my dolls are from Switch and have very androgynous features + makeup. Shimmer, eyeshadow, glossy lips, etc. Every time I show a picture to my mom she says "that's not a boy!". I just laugh it off because my family doesn't really get my hobbies anyway I'll continue enjoying my pretty boys both in doll form and anime!

 

I've gotten the opposite. I have girl dolls with androgynous coded features, like the one in my avatar. They've been mistaken for boys in drag. I'm guessing BJD collectors are used to thinking of ambiguous dolls as male, while people outside the hobby think female.

 

Most of my boys are androgynous due to being of the Faery/elf persuasion. Long hair, not overly-muscled bodies, etc...

I personally don’t care if they mistake my boys for girls, as in it doesn’t make me mad or anything, but I do usually let them know that she is actually a he. Mostly because it would just feel weird if I didn’t say anything and they realized their mistake later on.

 

Maybe this is why some of the companies create so many resin bits for their male sculpts. That way you can whip a handful of them out to add context. Got a family member that refuses to see the light, send them some resin dick pics or not so subtly leave your boy sprawled out in the nude next time they visit.

Really though, I tend to take my doll's stance on the matter, and my dolls don't care.

 

Honestly... couldn't be happier. Vince can look very girlish depending on which wig he's in and what he's wearing-- even among doll people, because he's more child-like, if I have him in his long hair and he's wearing a more feminine outfit, and his jewelry, you know... he's androgynous in the way kids can be and it doesn't bother me if people assume. Billy is even more androgynous in a young child way, but because of how he's dressed, I've never had him mistaken for girl in his usual look.

Being a slim mini guy, other doll people recognize Pete as male even though he's always got longer hair and is usually wearing mostly pink-- but, when he's wearing one of his more femme outfits, I won't be surprised if non-doll people assume doll=girl, he's still cute and stylized and if he's wearing a looser shirt, it's not like you can tell what's going on with his body.

At least with Jack (and Party Martian), it's not going to be an issue... and my current hybriding wip will have a masculine enough face. But on the whole... like, I am a trans man who, for health reasons, is transitioning socially but can't do so medically. If my boy dolls sometimes get misgendered for dressing cute, well... that's going to happen to me sometimes, too. It's kind of comforting to have a couple little resin buddies going through it with me who don't have any sore feelings about it.

 

The cow/horse is a good analogy. Even if the person thinks they're complimenting my "pretty girl", it still kind of bothers me because it makes me feel like maybe I didn't do a good job portraying the character I had in mind. All of my male dolls are masculine characters, so it kind of annoys me.

Unless it's Sixx. Sixx enjoys blurring gender lines and any pronoun is perfectly fine. Most of the time, unless somebody specifically asks, I don't even reveal if Sixx's base body is male or female--it's fairly androgynous as is, and it's modded to be both male and female, plus the head sculpt is a female sculpt.

 

This used to be a thing back in the day, a lot of people would put their male dolls in skirts then get offended when people would tell them their "female" doll was pretty, or something else. I am talking about more than a decade ago, when wearing whatever pleases you didn't have to do a lot with your gender or what you feel like you are, but with what society had to say. There were people who thought it was funny, and others who truly got upset about it. I personally would also force my one mini doll into dresses, because I thought it was cute. He's an inanimate object, that is supposed to be a very boyish-boy. All about standards of traditional gender roles; his fictional character would never wear a dress, so I found it amusing to sew dresses for him (occasionally), because he is a doll. He did get confused for a girl even when he was wearing old-school-standard boy clothes (I suck at sewing, so maybe it wasn't obviously "boy" clothes), his character has super long hair, so maybe even if he had been wearing a traditionally-male tuxedo, most people would have assumed he was a girl.

I like to think most of my other dolls are pretty masculine compared to what was out there when I was still purchasing dolls (prior to 2010-ish). None ever got confused for female, except my most modified doll, but I thought the few rare cases were due to language barriers (spelling, and grammar of the commenter added to their location). I never got offended, I did find it incredibly funny and got a good laugh when it was about my heavily modified doll, because again, I think of him as being very masculine compared to most other BJD from his time. I recently however was told by someone that he was a girl, and I thanked them for their complements for my doll but corrected them that he was male -- made by the artist that sculpted him to be male on a male body from default sculpting days, to now. However, they kept suggesting that maybe it was a transgender character, or fluid, or confused about his gender. That did bother me a bit, because I had already explained that he was completely male, always was, always meant to be, not confused or otherwise. DX

I also agree that most people outside the hobby confusing dolls' genders has to do with culture and social standards of that culture. I grew up loving anime and Japanese video games, I still adore the anime, video games and art style to this day. I collect action figures and other types of toys from those genres. When 1:6 action figures get releases, because that hobby is predominantly (heterosexual) male, you read a (more than) bit of phobic slurs towards the ones that tend to look more feminine, or people complaining that they look too femininely (when they are actually accurate to the art/actual-character render). Mostly I see/read a lot of male collectors complaining when the characters faces are not "masculine," even when the character don't necessarily have masculine faces. I guess that's why eleven years ago Square Enix decided for all their Western fans, that none would want to play as young Nier and gave all people in the USA the choice to play as old-Nier only, while in Japan you could chose either, if you owned a PS3 or an Xbox (I think the people in Japan who owned the Xbox were stuck with old-Nier, but I guess they assumed all were Westerners).

 

I lean in. I like confusing the hell outta people and many of my characters are genderfluid at best, so really, it plays right into my hands when people genuinely can't tell. it's a win for me, I guess.

Where does it come from? This is a hobby born of garage kits that's become some sprawling monolith of consumerism in the worst possible way. Androgyny sold well with the original market the companies were playing to, predominantly those interested in anime/manga and games, where male characters tend to conform to certain tropes. That became the norm in the hobby, attracted more people who enjoyed that aesthetic, and it still sells now, so it's a classic case of 'if it ain't broke'.

 

I like "old school", stylized sculpts... That I tend to give longer hairstyles and keep in traditional Asian outfits that don't always involve trousers.

Needless to say, I get that "What a cute girl"-thing a lot.
I mean *A LOT* lot.
Like all the time a lot.

I always laugh and just take a compliment in the spirit it's given. I know my dolls tend towards androgyny to Western eyes, so I can't really fault people for getting their gender wrong. Sometimes I'll point out that, in spite of the hair, doe eyes and what looks like a skirt, my guy is a guy... But more often I don't correct their assumptions, unless the person actually seems to be interested in talking about the doll in some detail. Then I'll mention the proper gender, with a note that many heads their style actually can be used for either male or female or neither, depending on how they're painted and the type of body they're matched with. That fact alone seems to fascinate some people... and goes a long way towards not making them feel bad about getting it wrong at first glance.

 

Haha yeah, none of my male dolls have been spared from the inevitable fate of being called girls by my parents. I prefer stylized sculpts which end up being on the androgynous side, compared to more realistic sculpts which can be more easily identified as male. Plus most of my dolls have longer hair and I like to give them faceups heavy on the eye liner/shadow, so yeah, not really helping them out there.
I don't really care if somebody thinks my dolls are female at first glance, because it is an easy mistake to make if you're not familiar with typical BJD aesthetics. It's more amusing to me than anything else.

 

I currently have 2 male dolls, one of whom is not likely to be mistaken for a female doll (EID man)—I rarely post him, because his body is a beautiful paperweight, and now it might be a little shorter than I want for his character. Even when he has long hair for photos, his facial features, and his broad shoulders/bulging muscles.

The second I’m learning is more androgynous than I’d expected. Partly it’s the magic of twigling’s sculpting, given that Eloy is really pretty and doesn’t necessarily have to read as a particular gender, and then on top of that, mine has a softer faceup, and was wearing a long wig. He was also on the 5th motif body, which when dressed right, got read as feminine by a friend of mine who excitedly asked me who “she” was. This is a feature though, not a flaw, so I’m seeing what clothing options I have experiment with that.

 

My father keeps calling my masculine dolls girls. Possibly out of habit, because when I finally got my IoS Doctor Strange and had to resort to rolling around on the floor using various jiu jitsu moves to get him assembled (wow he was tightly strung, that was a workout) because mom didn't have the hand strength to help me, he wandered by, started to ask if I was having trouble with her, saw the extremely large sculpted manly muscles, stopped talking, and left.

I can kind of understand why he automatically assumes new doll = girl. The vast majority of my collection are girls! But I do have five distinctly masculine dolls (I will give him the benefit of the doubt and not include my MSD sized boys in this number, because they're on the childlike body that could be seen as being a girl body) and I dress them in fairly masculine clothing. Fantasy masculine clothing, so some robes are included, but they're clearly robes, not dresses.