Gender in City of Heroes

City of Heroes does an interesting job of working with gender -- a subject that you'd expect to hear more about from Warcraft theorists Jill and Torill. Your hero can be chosen from three basic categories: male, female, or huge -- the latter a covering mutant monsters with more-than-superheroic proportions.

Some random and naive observations:

• There are a lot of female heroes.
• Female heroes are not more obviously sexualized in appearance or behavior than male heroes. This might be a function of the TOS cops, but it's interesting anyway.
• I haven't noticed any particular tendency for female heroes to follow traditionally-female or nurturing occupations (defender/medic, controller/magician). There are lots of female blasters and scrappers.
• The game design generally emphasizes fun over realism, and works hard to ensure that bad choices seldom have really permanent consequences. There's an intriguing hierarchy about the costs of changing different aspects of your character or 'toon. Changing the color of your clothes is cheap (and surprisingly powerful), changing the style of your costume is more expensive, changing your proportions is very expensive, and changing your gender or profession pretty much involves building a new character.
• There's not much flirting, but costume contests are a big deal.
• Female-presenting toons are quite likely to be vociferous opponents of planned changes to rebalance the game by reducing ('nerfing') some attack powers and encouraging less dependence on pure bruising.
• A big change projected for the next edition is some sort of customizable home base, which will add a home decor component to the clothes shopping. It's interesting (but fun) to go out to fight street crime in order to Do Good and also to get the credit you need for that cool new hair color.
• The art crew has managed to build a visual character generator that can manage the whole range of superheroes, from square-jawed caped crusaders of the 30's to manga schoolgirls from Mars.