Your first mistake in art is thinking you draw men and women inherently differently
I'm serious, this is genuinely not a joke. There's no wrong way to do art but you do make a mistake when you think that you draw men and women differently without any overlap or gray area, like they're two opposites and that's how they'll always be FOREVER. Treating two genders as vastly different is absolutely the incorrect way to think about things and considering how anatomy is one of the first things you practice when you start drawing human or human adjacent characters, it becomes harder and harder to unlearn as time goes on
When learning to draw, you need to understand that there's more body types for ALL genders than just "flat as a board with no hips" and "slightly thinner waist with larger chest"
There's more ways to look than androgyny you fucks
The continued comments saying "I draw both of them with big tits" or "I draw both of them as cute" or "I draw both of them the exact same" are literally missing part of my goddamn point here. I'm not saying you draw every character you ever draw exactly the same, I'm saying that when you draw characters differently based on their gender is where you're messing up
You're all also forgetting about, ya know. FAT PEOPLE. AND I AM A FAT PERSON. That one stings with disgust as well as disappointment on a lot of you. Do better.
You should be drawing characters differently, with different body shapes, with different hair colors, from different places around the world. But what you SHOULDN'T do is draw them differently strictly based on their gender and how you perceive a gendered body to be.
There is more ways to look than androgyny. There is more ways to draw than exactly the same.
OP's original point refers to how suspicious dimorphism in character design, as well as (tangentially) all the bullshit excuses for double standards in costumes, are born.
It's a serious and good art advice: Do NOT get caught up in bio-essentialism when designing characters of different sexes and/or genders, and NEVER take pointers on what features read as masculine vs feminine as gospel or as unbreakable rules, because neither life nor art works that way! And yes, making everyone uniformly androgynous isn't the answer either. Genuine diversity, as always, is the key to avoiding both the Sameface/Samebody Syndrome as well as the obsessively binary thinking about how people look.
~Ozzie
