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Vaniver comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - LessWrong
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For me, this post is not doing any favors for the "women's experiences are fundamentally different" camp. Most of these sound like stories from my own life. Of course, "Why are your characters always girls?" is probably a harder question for a boy than a girl.
I'd guess these mostly work as stories of "growing up geeky".
The only ones that didn't resonate were the last one about not playing M:tG anymore (probably since I've never stopped appearing like a geek) and the "Star wars characters are mostly male", which does seem worth mentioning.
MLP:FiM is probably a good available example of the reverse phenomenon. The positions of power are occupied by females. There are very few male characters (though a significantly more even ratio than Star Wars), and they seem to be shoehorned in as male stereotypes. I suggest male readers ruminate on this aspect of the show until it seems a bit disturbing. And then notice that females can experience this when watching most things.
Mmm. Part of the issue here is that the male characters tend to be aspirational stereotypes. When I'm thinking of leaving work early, or I'm bothered by something petty, I ask myself, "What would Big Mac do?" and I smile and keep working. Shining Armor and Fancy Pants are both less relevant for my life at present, but are still good examples.
Perhaps it's significant that I'm focusing only on the stallions and not on the colts- Snips, Snails, and Pip have gotten comparable airtime and lines, and the first two are stereotypical schoolboys (named after the famous rhyme)- but the primary female characters seem to be the adults, not the Cutie Mark Crusaders, and so it seems fair to do the same for the primary male characters.
For most fictional characters that are female stereotypes, it's not as clear that they're aspirational. I'm not sure what "What Would Princess Leia Do?" would look like, but from my first guess it doesn't appear to be a very useful guide to life.