MALE GENES.

Surely the genes of the mother are not located within the males semen, but are in the dormant and lifeless female egg waiting to be activated into life by the living male semen.

You are combining several things here.

When you say "male characteristics" are you talking about things like appearance? You can have a daughter who is the "spitting image" of her father and you can have a son that favors his mother in appearance. You can also have a hybrid of traits. Things like eye color, nose shape, etc are carried equally in the egg and the sperm and what gets expressed in the child is pretty much random although some traits are "dominant" and will express more often. These can come from either side. I have three brothers. One clearly favors me and we look like our father, the other two clearly favor each other but don't favor my father much at all.

If you are talking gender, the gender is determined by the sperm. When you say "dormant and lifeless female egg", you are completely wrong. The egg is not a blank slate waiting to be written on, it is a living cell just as the sperm is a living cell and each contributes equally to the resulting DNA. If egg and sperm do not connect, both die and new egg and sperm cells are required.

THE QUESTION WAS . . . . . . “If the child is born the spitting image of HIS father, were those male characteristics initially in the female egg or were they introduced into the egg by the male semen?”

A tenth generation native Irish woman gives birth to a set of identical male twins with complete African Negro features, black skin, broad nose, thick lips, tight curly hair, etc, etc: from where do you suppose those genetics originated?

And as two active male sperm cells entered the Irish woman’s inactive unfertilised egg and two identical human bodies developed from those male cells, would any two of the thousands of male sperm cells that were released and could possibly have entered the female egg, have also developed into those same identical bodies?