It's also a reaction to the sexually immature or sexually neutered narratives that most genre (at least in the past) put forward - sex fic, that is. Because, really, what's more natural when faced with characters that fancy each other silly than to put them in bed together. If most interpersonal encounters in genre storytelling weren't so entirely contrived to keep characters apart, people would be less interested in seeing people shag.

As for stripping women out of the narrative, word to all of that. As I get older, I'm simply not prepared to work as hard as I did as a kid to find something redeeming in stories where the characters I identify with are marginalized or absent - hence my entirely diffident response to Stargate and SPN.

Also since gender (or represntations of gender) are fundamental to character and character is fundamental to story, any argument about narrative that starts "it's not about gender, it's about story" is automatically bollocks IMO. Even something like The Assassination of Jesse James - with three whole female speaking roles and less than 50 lines of dialogue (counting grief-striken wails) between them in a three-hour movie says something about gender (although more about the people who made the film).