And yeah most romance novels are trashy, but it's not like milslop Clancyfics are better. Most people just want some shallow entertainment and that's fine.
On the other hand for shorts science fantasy is much better off. Apparently anybody who can knock out six pages of romance tends to use somebody else's character development as shorthand and so can only publish to AO3 but if you can knock together a decent SF story in six pages that's worth some cash from a pro or semi-pro magazine. Even pretty hard† SF, which is not a common taste, can shift enough copies of a bunch of shorts to make economic sense.
† Science Fiction is graded "harder" the more likely that if you ask "How does that work?" about something in the story the author gets as excited as Hank Green and starts explaining details that may or may not just be facts about our universe which they've incorporated into their story -- as opposed to "A wizard did it" or "That's not important". The diametric opposite of the MST3K mantra.
... and actually, wasn't it the case that before the discovery of the "whale" brain-hack to crack open a few (mostly) men's bank accounts, most of the gaming market was women, for broad definitions of "a game", both by player count and revenue?
Even comic books, I'm pretty sure it's only the American superhero-type comics that're mainly "for guys"—if we expand it to include stuff like manga and Euro comics, then the overall audience leans female, right?
Books are overwhelmingly dominated by women.
> And yeah most romance novels are trashy, but it's not like milslop Clancyfics are better. Most people just want some shallow entertainment and that's fine.
Romance is a poor term because it's used to launder literal werewolf "dubcon" porn under the same label as something like Jane Austen novels. That's probably useful to marketers and for sales, but it makes it impossible to make productive use of the label without further qualifiers for anyone who's trying to actually communicate using the term.
(Meanwhile, yeah, much of what actually sells in that genre [and, again, the term is terrible and overloaded] leans pretty hard into being trash. So does pornhub, or Mr Beast videos, or whatever. So what? It's fine to enjoy them, but it's also fine for folks looking for excellent works of art to mostly avoid them in that search. Meanwhile tons of the modern "literary fiction" and poetry market is by and tuned for an audience of women, in fact I'd be surprised if most of those two categories weren't that, but of course few people actually read lit-fic and especially poetry these days)
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BUT, the post is actually less about all that than about how older "girl games" are missing from game history and ignored in things like game-making tutorials and instruction. I'd venture that "boy games" that are similarly low-narrative and/or lean toward being more of an activity than a game (bear with me on the terminology, I'm not interested in turning this post into gatekeeping "what is a game" but I think you understand what I mean, yes? The distinction is here useful) also get left out (I can think of a few[0]), plus the factor where a lot of these were licensed games, which doesn't usually help. I'm not so sure this is as much sexism as that narrative games and clear, tight, goal-oriented game loops are both major factors in games having artistic "staying power" or influence, and in lending themselves to "baby's first video game" tutorials (the latter, especially, for that), and are both really, really hard to accomplish in a video game without resorting to a lot of the usual stuff (violence, largely). This is fundamental to how games are built which is that...
...games necessarily objectify the shit out of literally everything in them. This makes satisfactorily modeling things like realistic relationships extremely hard, and even the games that do it remarkably well are prone to feeling kinda weird as a result (see also: Action Button's rightly-famous Tokimeki Memorial review on Youtube). This is why a lot of relationship-focused games end up as visual novels, where they can be contained to basically a choose-your-own-adventure book format. It's incredibly difficult to build a game-loop around relationship mechanics, and have it be any good at all. This is how you end up with so many "girl games" on the "wrong" side of the "what actually is a video game?" discourse (ugh): it's really hard to build "proper" game mechanics around a lot of the aspects of those "girl games" that appeal to girls in the first place.
Take a dress-up "game": in the most-minimal form (and a form which does exist in the wild!) you're not looking at something that's much more game-like, apparently, than MSPaint. Try to add a dress-up mechanic to a "traditional" game and you end up with something that's a pretty superficial veneer over bog-standard mechanics (stat-boosting item equipping, or something like the FFX-2 "dress sphere" system) or is purely aesthetic and has no "actual" "game" effects. It might be fine to include those anyway! But they're never going to feel especially integral to the game. How do you make dress-up itself a video game? You kinda... don't. You attach it to a sandbox, maybe, and let the player develop their own game (goals, narrative) with it, just like toys in a toybox. Like The Sims... which was a smash-hit among women. Go figure.
Is a toy box a game? Kinda no. Do the contents become vital components of a game when a child plays with them? Often, yes! What is a game? Do we call what kids do with toys, often, "games"? Yep. Is soccer a game? Is chess? Yes and yes. What do soccer and chess have in common with a girl developing stories around her real, actual dolls and such, and dressing them up different ways? Not a fucking lot, but we may use "game" for all of them.
... and so we've come full circle from "romance is a shitty term for a genre of books, and often not very useful for communication": "video game" is a shitty term and often not very useful for communication. The game can be what the player brings to a "toy box" that lets them dress up characters and move them around. Maybe it's fair to call a program "a game" if its main intent is to facilitate that, even if it lacks things like a traditional "game loop" or strong extrinsic goals or motivations (which would let us get away with saying that MSPaint could, situationally, be a toy in service of a game, but doesn't belong in even a very-generously-defined category of "video games" itself, should such distinctions matter for whatever purpose we have in employing the term in the first place).
But a video game can also be an "e-sport", on (kinda) the complete opposite end of a certain spectrum. These things have almost nothing to do with one another aside from that they happen on a computer and are supposed to be some variety of entertaining or fun. "Video games" are both those things, and everything in between, it seems. Not sure how useful it is to lump all that stuff under the one term, but so far efforts to carve out distinctions have been poorly-received, so we're stuck with "all these things are video games even though they're so wildly different that very often their fandoms have no overlap whatsoever, on substantial grounds, not just surface appearance or marketing".
[0] Long ago I had this DOS CAD program for kids called, as I recall, "KidCAD". It was entirely useless for any "serious" work, all it was, was effectively a rudimentary line-rendered digital lego set. Leaning into the kinds of distinctions the linked article uses, I think it's fair to call it a "boy game" in those terms, like a dress-up game is a "girl game". It also had zero built-in narrative and no "game loop" whatsoever. Guess how much attention it gets in game history, and how easy it is to find anything about it now? LOL.