City Stats: "Most Cities Are Androgynous"

[Anthony]

True, a city that has an avatar can have a gendered avatar (this isn't limited to fantasy; you sometimes see SF with a main computer that has an avatar).

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Anthony

True, a city that has an avatar can have a gendered avatar (this isn't limited to fantasy; you sometimes see SF with a main computer that has an avatar).

There is also the comics character Danny the Street, who was a member of the Doom Patrol when it was at its weirdest. Danny was not merely gendered but transgendered. . . .

[TGLS]

Maybe some cities are Impressive instead of Androgynous?

[Tyneras]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Many capitals with all the phallic towers and displays of masculine statues and monuments.
I think some of it has more to do with our primate ancestry equating raw height with power and safety, but the anatomical similarity doesn't hurt for a predominantly patriarchal species.

So what of cities riddles with tunnels, subways or sinkholes? A city built beside or inside a canyon?

Tall things = phallic has always struck me as a rather absurd argument, since no one ever applies the reverse to every crack, crevice or hole in the ground.

[Flyndaran]

Other than vulgar slang, people don't draw natural cracks to symbolize vulva the way most kids use simple towers to represent penises.

Sinkholes aren't a natural or wanted part of cities, so it looks a bit like you're reaching.

It doesn't matter which came first; seeing towers as penises or building towers as representations of such. The fact is that if you ask random people to point out city structures as similar to body parts, you will almost entirely get answers involving male anatomy.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

The fact is that if you ask random people to point out city structures as similar to body parts, you will almost entirely get answers involving male anatomy.

Not so in the case of paired domes with cupolas. The San Onofre nuke plant is a pretty famous example.

[Culture20]

A decidedly masculine city:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metroplex_(Transformers)

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Tyneras

Tall things = phallic has always struck me as a rather absurd argument, since no one ever applies the reverse to every crack, crevice or hole in the ground.

There's actually a bit of a running joke that paleoarcheologists like to label every manmade hole a vagina and therefore the object baring the hole a fertility symbol.

The female reproductive organ is hidden by normal posture in humans, whereas the male one is most definitely not. Top that with humans having exaggeratedly large phalluses that are generally agreed upon as having developed via sexual selection, and you have a rather obvious body part that is of intense interest to both genders (females because reproduction and reproductive selection, but males also for checking out the competition - like antlers).

I'm personally quite convinced that our tendency to see penises everywhere has nothing to do with patriarchy and everything to do with the same sort of brain specialization that makes us see faces everywhere. And then if we can't see penises, we vandalize the surface with drawings of penises :P

That said I think some things that are "obvious phallic symbols" aren't that obvious; certainly, there's a looong distance between amusingly shaped vegetables and swords. Swords are easy to "accidentally" hold at hip level, however, and that gives them a pretty big boost.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Not so in the case of paired domes with cupolas. The San Onofre nuke plant is a pretty famous example.

Orlando Florida used to have a strip club deliberately designed as a pair of domed buildings to evoke that imagery (the buildings and cupolas were even painted in flesh tones). It was infamously called 'The Booby Trap'.

After it closed it was repainted to look like a pair of oranges. The new paint job really didn't work, got torn down a few years ago.


There was another (now that I'm thinking back to thirty+ years ago) that was an inverted 'V' with the entrance at the joining of the 'legs' called 'The Fox Hole'.


So there are/were gauchely designed building aimed at implying female anatomy.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I really cannot tell you why I wrote "most." It could just as well have been omitted, with GMs left to overrule it if they really thought they had a case for a city being gendered. About the only thing I can imagine is that in a fantasy world a city might have a human enough personality to be gendered, like Roma Dea or Carl Sandburg's Chicago, "hog-butcher to the world."

I was mostly kidding of course. The thing is of course it's almost impossible to get a better than Attractive city anyway without stepping across the line into caricature.

http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/...20111204170657

+2 from everyone else but +4 from little girls!

Note, incidentally that it is kind of domey.