I'll just focus on your first paragraph on why games are still marketed towards the male audience as I agree with your point about female characters being in a game for sexual appeal.
Anyway, I think the answer to your question about targeting male audience is because of history. What I got from next week's reading ("Slots of Fun, Slots of Trouble") is that even in the beginning, games were already targeted at men like the idea of gambling machines only being in bars and (this part makes the difference) "were rarely ever seen by decent women" (pg 11) and that only men were supposedly strong enough to try out the strength testers. First off, it's implied that if you were a proper, well-respected lady, you couldn't play such gambling games and secondly, females weren't even given the chance to prove their worth when it came to strength-testing games. Because of these limitations, my guess is that since then, any kind of games ended up associating with males because women were either too embarrassed to play games because it was "unlady-like"...
So I think that because of this mindset from the beginning, most parents will teach their children that it's fine for boys to play video games but it's not really acceptable for girls to play them. I don't know about you but I know many girls who play video games but they are still embarrassed to admit that they do sometimes (Closet gamers!!!) and because of this hesitance to admit, I think most advertisers/game developers end up targeting a male audience because they KNOW that a male audience is more responsive to game releases than females.
Some comments on there prove that girls are less likely to admit that they are girl gamers due to harrassment but this is also another reason why female gamers are more hesitant to admit that they are girls which is why female gamers are not as common.
Excellent stuff!
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