The big problem here is that women characters written by men for men to read are not like real women. Most scifi authors tend to be pretty autistic, or chuuni fanboiz, and so have little comprehension of women or how they think. Scifi authors can't write women characters that act like women. They write male characters with women's bits. When you read scifi, or fan fiction of scifi, you keep running into women warrior characters, who don't mind being friends with other women, or share a boy who is mildly accomplished or worse a Gary Stu for whom the bubble gum has run out so he's been kicking asses all over the place. And that's the sort of character that teenage boys and man-boys like to read, unfortunately. Their decisions matter and save the world and feel WAY too proud of themselves for being ethical when it mattered. This is pure fantasy escapism.
That's not to say there isn't a corrollary for women and girls. They have Romance novels, which allows women to cheat on their husbands or boyfriends without actually losing the weight or getting all dirty or having a personality of their own. Romance novels are a big part of what libraries are actually for, btw. Women trade romance novels around. They started doing this well before we made official public libraries over a century ago. Japan's first novel, 1000 years old, was a romance novel traded around by serving girls, hookers, and nobelwomen alike.
In the YA section, most of the books are about teenage girls coming of age only to fall for a Boy or two, get talked out of their panties, and end up pregnant and abandoned, weeping. That's the major of YA girls books, right there. Put them in a setting with vampires, zombies, werewolves, or post apocalyptic ritual murder cults and you now understand 90% of all YA books. They're nearly all written for Girls, btw. Boys won't find much there they want to read. Most of what is called Steampunk isn't punk, and barely touches on steam or engineering, though there's plenty of Mary Sue posturing, Boy romancing, and childish behavior. Its the inevitable consequence of Emily Bronte and Jane Austen books being endlessly sighed over into some terrible distant remake.
Nobody even remotely sane would want a woman fond of those books. They are rotten spoiled princesses and the remakes are written by fat women with disgusting fantasy lives. 50 shades of grey's author is nobody's idea of a good lay. Its the physically unattractive and lonely people who end up being the writers of fiction. This difference explains a great deal about both their motivation and why the people they write are often better than they are themselves.
In books your characters have all the strengths you don't. They compensate for our failures, and allow us to imagine how much better our lives would be if we were someone else.
In science fiction, nerdy unathletic people read books about people who are athletic and popular and capable and have all the best tools to get stuff done, and are popular with the opposite sex in all the ways that real people aren't. That's the biggest problem, because getting raised on scifi or YA-Romance will give you unrealistic expectations from the opposite sex. When you try for a relationship you're going to end up disappointed.
Girls want to marry Mr. Darcy, but the rich romantic guy doesn't exist in the vacuum. He's got a wife, kids, and a couple other mistresses. Romance novel fans get who they get, and they'll cheat on him or mistreat him because they still want the romance they don't deserve and haven't earned. Most women get fat and unattractive and find themselves failing to inspire a healthy sex life because self control and exercise is too much like work. That's how women really are. And men, too. We find our wives getting fat and ugly, and their personalities are revealled to be crap after all, once she gets a ring.
Cheating becomes inevitable (70% for either gender), and the consequences result in a broken marriage two times out of three, even if there's kids. Some couples stay together for the kids, making everyone miserable. Kids of divorced parents are usually unable to have stable relationships themselves. And guess what? Men warn each other of those kind of women. And we listen. We want nothing to do with Bridget Jones, the cheating skag.
Unreasonable expectations, that destroys so much in our society and I have to say we have, as a culture, failed. We want too much, and the stable, rational, woman is a unicorn. She does not exist. She's every scifi heroine, but she's myth. No scifi author can write a plausible woman with moods, rages, resentment, and frequent infidelity they actually do in the real world.
No female author of romance novels will tell women the cost of their bon-bons is a bored husband who won't touch her fat thighs. Or that their sex drives increase with age and their years of teasing and spite in their teens and 20's irreversibly changes their personality so the ugly inside will show on the outside by they time they're 30. This ugly personality shows in their wrinkles, in their faces and bodies, and men look for it to avoid. It will put men off them for life, just when they need us most. Mothers should teach this early enough to matter, but no luck. Schools skip straight to lesbianism, which is a Darwin award. Bad wives get traded out for the younger model. They behave unforgiveably so men may as well find a pretty body to sleep with rather than deal with bags of fat and anger.
The ugly on the inside will eventually become the ugly on the outside, and men watch for the signs, and avoid women like that. The downside is women who are already ugly on the outside could have a great personality, but end up alone anyway because men are superficial that way, or have stricter breeding requirements. Women get around this with surgery, painful exercise, and infidelity, breeding with any man they fancy, not just their married spouse. Women are strongly opposed to mandatory DNA testing, and block it in divorce suits to prevent proof of infidelity invalidating their child support claims. In medical studies of infidelity and STDs where DNA tests are performed, 25% of all children are from a non-spouse, born during the marriage because she cheated on him. Only 10% of those are admitted to in surveys, however. Men pay attention to that too. This reality is a fantastic motivator to avoid marriage. Women marry men for money, not for love. Love may come eventually, but I personally doubt this myself. Lots of long-term couples find serious love and survive the infidelity, and raise the children regardless of the father's identity. The species goes on. Even if a quarter of all couples are infertile, and many marriages fail before two years, almost always due to money, with infidelity just a symptom of the bigger problem.
In light of these very popular media genres it is a small wonder that men avoid women with romance novel fetishes, and women avoid men who like scifi. We are incompatible because of our tastes, and both end up Darwined though inability to breed. You don't have to die to get a Darwin Award. You just have to deny yourself the ability to reproduce. Advertising your tastes in the impossible is a great way to do it.
