D&D 5E Art in 5e...?

[Klaus]

Yeah. I removed the breasts, narrowed the thighs, looked at the result, and thought, "So... now it still looks like a woman, except she wears an A cup instead of a C cup." The sideburns were an effort, not terribly successful, to make the character more definitely male. I thought about going farther and making it a full beard, but then everyone would be reacting to "elf with a beard" instead of "male in possibly-effeminate pose."

Actually, the main thing you could've done would be to alter the wait-to-hip ratio of the figure, which is *the* tell-tale sign of gender in humanoid forms. If you thickened her abdomen (by filling out some of the curve in her back), you'd more effectively alter the gender.

Also, female faces tend to be portrayed with softer transitions and detailing. By adding a sharper line between light and shadow on her face, you'd also make the figure more masculine.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

They might not be passive, but they're entirely sexualised. It's the same sort of sexualisation that you get in body builders rather than porn stars, but it's still designed to be sexually attractive. Badly, if you're trying to attract women, but that's a separate question.

That's not really true, though, in the modern day - many barbarians in D&D-type art are non-attractive and not sexualized even in a homoerotic way - artists actively avoid making them sexy in any conventional way (including homoerotic), by picking ugly/tough/threatening-looking types. It's not exactly Tom of Finland, as you appear to be implying (again the '80s it was closer, and I would agree with assertion there).

Also, female faces tend to be portrayed with softer transitions and detailing. By adding a sharper line between light and shadow on her face, you'd also make the figure more masculine.

Which is kind of example of low-level sexism in art of precisely the kind being discussed, I'd suggest. Indeed, as an artist who did fine art rather than graphic art, I was actually taught to avoid this sort of sleight-of-hand.

Waist-to-hp ratio is good advice though.

EDIT - To be clear, fine art is NOT superior to graphic art, but it has different approaches.