Ranges of Female Body Shape vs Male

carljokl · September 2016

It did occur to me when recently creating a female Alt that there seemed to be quite a contrast between the body shape ranges for Female Characters vs Male Characters.

Is it fair to say that the women's shape is more constrained?

If you max out a Male character on heavy on the body triangle, they look fat. Maybe not huge but notably overweight.
Do the same on a female character and I would say it looks like a more healthy realistic body shape for a woman. It does not look particularly overweight to me.

Muscle is similar. Men can become quite distinctly built with muscle. Women look toned but still petit. I realise that it is generally not a fashionable look for an overly muscular woman. I did think that the body shape range would rule out trying to create someone like Xena Warrior princess.

I accept I may be overreacting. I am not bitter or upset, it is just an observation. I wonder if it reflects a cultural bias on how women are expected to be shaped vs men.

Nestor · September 2016

Women can be just as bulked up as a man can be.

Also, I have noticed that in the preview screen, characters appear much thinner than in the game. I have to make the legs almost stick like in the character creation to have them come up proportionally correct in the game.

So, I have to ask, did you try to make an overweight female and look at it in the actual game?

Totalitarian · September 2016

It'd be impossible to completely throw out cultural bias, but there are definite physical attributes that men and women differ in, and body shape is definitely one of them.

Women have lower muscle mass and higher fat content than men, so it makes them look differently.

Taking this from a purely functional aspect, these can be well explained.

So, the toned look of women, when built heavily in the 'muscular catagory', as opposed to the beefy muscular that you'd get on a male character, comes from how women have lower muscle mass than men. So, when a woman gets muscular (not including bodybuilders, which is something completely different), they basically get to be thin, and then the muscle builds as they're thin, so it gives them an unexpected appearance of being both muscular and thin.

Whereas for men, they first start loosing weight and then building muscle, but because of the higher muscle mass of men, they start significantly beefing up much sooner than a woman would. So, after an initial thinning, men then start putting on muscle mass considerably more than women.

Basically, women put on a wiry strength, while men put on volumous strength. And this causes men to be, in general, physically stronger than women.

And when you change the flat slider around, and women appear to be more healthy, while men appear overweight, that's also normal. Next time you see a woman IRL, without being creepy, look at her upper arms, and you'll notice that there's a layer of fat there that a man of analogous shape won't have. It's because women need extra fat to nurture children, which is why a pregnant woman starts to pack on weight; to support children. This is the reason that women have bigger butts and breasts than men; they store fat there for if/when they have children, so there's a store of nutrients and energy to produce milk and develop offspring

Women and men have different body shapes which react differently to muscle and fat.

threefarms · October 2016

FART