Fascinating trend I’ve noticed from lurking in Frankenstein-related tags:
If there’s a male construct, people frame him as the creator’s child. He has full agency and personhood and deserves to be raised in a family. The most obvious example of this is Frankenstein’s Creature, but you’ll see echoes of it with creators of robots, Pinocchio, etc.
If there’s a female construct, people frame it as expected that she’s created to be a romantic/sexual object. I saw a few posts that Pygmalion is morally superior to Victor Frankenstein because he fell in love with his creation, for instance. I don’t need to go into the dozens of “make a female robot and fall for her” tropes.
The most uncomfortable intersection of this dichotomy are the countless posts insisting that it was Victor’s duty as a father to create a female to gift to his son—and that the “wait but she’ll be an actual person of her own” reservations Victor had in the book were immoral. He owes his son (male construct = family, agency, personhood) the gift of a person (female construct = object, no agency, not family). She wouldn’t be a daughter, just “the Bride.” Nothing about Víctor owing her happiness, but the exact opposite: that she must be custom-designed to be miserable and rejected so she’d be trapped with the male-creature.
For a piece of literature where personhood is such a central theme, it’s a disturbing and disappointing trend.