You are not kidding. I scrolled through the comments and actually got MATI reading some of them.
I remember stumbling upon similar thoughts in many lib feminist-leaning tumblr art blogs at the time. Always irked me the wrong way. These women sometimes point out reasonable problems within straight romance, but since they refuse to interact with it and exclusively work with and develop gay romance, it paradoxically makes them okay with it being this way. They're not particularly different from misogynistic male authors in their npc-like mentality. To them a woman either fits into the narrow confines of a safe "girlboss with a malewife" archetype or a weak useless creature made for male gaze. If a girl is neither, it definitely means she's lesbian/trans/non-binary and so on.
femboys as a third gender, because men are better at being women than women:
Funny she says it, because a man would blankly state that femboys ARE women because he jacks off to them.
Men also can fantasize about being someone completely different in a way that most women can't, it seems. Which is why is male power fantasies the lead is still an ultra gigchad but the female equivalent (which a lot of romances are) they absolutely cannot remind anyone of someone attractive and gregarious because that's like that Stacy bitch at school all the boys had a crush on. And she wears short skirts, I wear sneakers, she's cheer captain and I'm in the bleachers.
At first I thought I'd disagree, but now that I think about it, you're kind of right. But the situation is not so clear-cut. I've read a lot of romance-oriented media for men and women in my time, and I've come to the conclusion that both suffer from similar problems that have influenced the rise of subcultures like himedanshi and fujoshi. The obsession with self-inserting and writing romance as shallow wish-fulfilment might be one of them.
The Chad protagonist was more relevant to men in the older media. It has fallen out of favour in the few last decades, only recently making a comeback as a meme in the midst of another masculinity crisis among young men. And even then, the main reason they like it is because it's "literally me". It's more of a power fantasy, rather than liking and relating to a well-written character who's different from you. More than a few guys still react aggressively to a male protagonist who is too "female gazey"/good looking or too flawed for their liking, preferring a blank self-insert with very specific traits.
And if we're talking about himedansi, there's also a fierce hatred for the existence of any man at all, reflecting all the aforementioned fujoshi arguments against women in romance, such as writing for male characters is always bad, the relationship between women is more intimate and special, etc. Also, these fine gentlemen like to declare the yuri genre to be the most straight male thing of all, because it doesn't involve any men t
hat could make them pop a boner and they are totally not gay/cucks.
Yep, you got it right -
it's heterosexual because it's homosexual. And it's homosexual because it's heterosexual.
As for women, there are plenty of stories where the heroines are 10/10 Stacies with top model looks and nice clothes. All those old smut books for housewives always had an equally beautiful woman in the arms of a bare-chested ML on the cover. Nowadays, the modern zoomer equivalent would be manhwas and ya romance novels. It's even noticed by some men that compared to the male protagonists, the female protagonists, even the plain ones, look good enough to star in a harem anime. It's the character writing that suffers, so no wonder fujoshi dislike them... or is it really the reason?
Here's the part of the difference I noticed between himedanshi and fujoshi. While BL is very strict on any female-male relationships, a good chunk of the yuri for men involves
A SELF-INSERT DUDE turning into a woman, or lesbians having dicks as some retarded futa species (really gives off omegaverse but for men vibes, by the way). They can't even follow a female protagonist without a quick note about her being male in some way. Fujoshi, on the other hand, boast that they don't need a character to be female in order to identify with them. And oddly enough, very few BL works involve turning a female protagonist into a guy. Compared to futa, cuntboys weren't much of a thing until tifs became mainstream, and at least on the eastern side they're usually portrayed as originally men who've had their penis turned into a vagina by some kind of curse.
Gay-obsessed women want to erase women from existing near men.
Lesbian-obsessed men impose their male image on women.
I'm starting to think that yuri/yaoi might be patient zero for the trans craze that happened on tumblr and 4chan later on. Before being trans was a thing, all those gay pooners mostly identified as "lesbians" who just
happened to consume mostly porn without a single woman in it, and most bisexual transbians were "straight as an arrow" macho dudes who loved their lesbian porn.