The entire trope is creepy, the usual portrait of the male private eye detective as is the portrayal of his object, the "damsel in distress". (Mind that the "damsel in distress" is commonly an excess signifier in the setup hinting at something not being as presented, thus initiating the core story.) You can't have one without the other, and still stay true with cultural history of ephemeral narration. This is here further motivated by us encountering a phenomenon of distress in code, namely, in the anatomy (a common term for this) of a unified storage format for variables and an artefact found in this. Moreover, this is really a 1970s story (as is the PET 2001).
(I find it rather creepy that the portrayal of the male narrator, who is without empathy but for the curiosity for his object, should be ok and go without any notice. On the other hand, note the absence of any notion of violence, untruthful or untrustworthy behavior, etc, otherwise common to the genre. Which would probably also have passed the filter, which is again creepy in its own right. — In defense of the genre, these are really paper-cut, mechanical figures to enable the progress of the story and not human figures, at all.)
I found the whole start of the article very difficult to read. In the end I gave up trying to understand your words and instead looked at the data to find out what you actually meant. This article would be much better if you removed the whole Noir detective story bits.
"Specifically, Floats comes with a clean baby face, with no marks at all, fresh ASCII strings all over. Integer, however, is yet another character, marked by signs on both cheeks, and ol‘ Strings is known by a single sign mark on the second, right-hand side of his signature grin."
Mind that this builds on a previous article (linked), detailing the storage formats of Commodore BASIC, which readers of the blog will be already familiar with. It recapitulates that variables are two ASCII characters with the type encoded in the sign-bits of this byte-signature, in order to establish a common ground for filling a gap in this account.
Also, it's meant to advertise the respective tools of the emulator (something I'm not aware of having been done like this before) and to stimulate interest in the reader to conduct further investigations of their own. Hence, the "wrapping" (which, BTW, emphasizes that jargon is not that innocent.)
(Also, I've to emphasize, the apparent scandal is not related to gender. Just as a thought experiment: Humans tend to anthropomorphize objects they are interacting with. At this point, it becomes nearly impossible to relate to structure, if there is even the least resemblance, regardless of alleged gender. "He had a mark on the left of his two…", is equally scandalous as is, "she had a mark on the left of her two…". The scandal is more fundamental than this. Meaning, we can't express care for and/or interest in an object and address its structure at the same time, and still avoid this kind of scandal. Anthropomorphic terminology or jargon doesn't help.)
You are missing the fact that the scandal would be equally so, if this objectified any other gender and that objectification is the game of that trope/genre. And it's effectively not the only case of objectification in this text.
(I find it rather creepy that the portrayal of the male narrator, who is without empathy but for the curiosity for his object, should be ok and go without any notice. On the other hand, note the absence of any notion of violence, untruthful or untrustworthy behavior, etc, otherwise common to the genre. Which would probably also have passed the filter, which is again creepy in its own right. — In defense of the genre, these are really paper-cut, mechanical figures to enable the progress of the story and not human figures, at all.)