Godzilla: Male or Female?

As for Mechagodzilla, its a robot designed without sexuality in mind. However, I'm pretty sure one of the later designed Mechgodzillas was built around Godzilla's skeleton, and so it would probably be considered intersexual as well.

There are proportionally few robots, fictional or otherwise, that are assigned sex, even though nearly all of them are assigned some kind of gender. There is a difference between the explicit sexuality of assigning a robot sex, rather than the less direct act of assigning a robot gender. Robots themselves may be indifferent to all this sort of thing, but I think giving gender to robots is hugely important to the people around them.

I also disagree with your statement that self-reproducing robots cease to be robots. Self-reproducing robots are still robots, they are just scary.

from http://www.stomptokyo.com/movies/godzilla-98.html :

Philosophical Issue #2:

Is Godzilla a male or a female?

This is a bit of a thorny issue. All of the characters in Godzilla refer to Godzilla as "he," for no particularly good reason. On the other hand, Godzilla lays eggs. So which is he? Or she?

Now we aren't experts on what kind of bait and tackle a lizard might have (if we were Dave Barry, right now we'd say, "Wouldn't Lizard's Bait and Tackle a great name for a band?"), and frankly we're not willing to do the field research. However, we do live in central Florida, where lizards are pretty darn easy to find. The following is a fictional conversation that might result from an attempt to determine lizard sexuality:

Chris: Hey! I caught one!
Scott: Is it a boy or a girl?
Chris: I don't know. It just peed on me.
Scott: Did it have the toilet seat up?

That being said, we understand that male lizards impregnate females internally, so we should expect male lizards to have some sort of organ in that area. Put another away, lizard size does matter. In the movie, Godzilla did seem to have some sort lump in that area. Moreover, our trusty Godzilla action figure would seem to bear this out:

Our Godzilla figure.

It's a boy!

So how did a male creature become pregnant? As bizarre as it sounds, sex is not quite so fixed among other creatures in Earth's biosphere. We're not used to this because we humans don't change sex spontaneously, unless we happen to be Michael Jackson. However, we were assured by a scientist who saw Godzilla that under extreme conditions some reptiles can become pregnant without the help of another member of their species. As we write this we couldn't verify that any species of male reptiles could become pregnant, but that would also not be unknown among higher vertebrates. Certain fish can change sex spontaneously. One little burst of hormone and Boom!, dude looks like a lady. Granted, in all these cases, the species in question has to have the attributes of both sexes built in when born. So in that case, is the creature really "he" or "she"? If we assume that this is the case with Godzilla, isn't whether we call him "he" or not really just a matter of semantics?

I think this is a really interesting point. When giving gender to less sophisticated machines, such as ships and cars and printing presses, English speakers tend give the feminine (ex: "she's a fine ship, ain't she captain!"). Giving male gender to sophisticated robots seems to suggest some kind of male-female power dynamic -- the more intelligent/powerful/human a creation is, the more male it is.

Tongue-twister time!