Sorry if this is a bit done to death, Starbird, but I thought I'd weigh in.
Basically, when I play games like this, I tend to choose female characters. I play female avatars in WoW and Diablo...
I won't lie - it does have something to do with the 'ogle' factor. In games where I have to actually RP (say...Mass Effect) my character will be male. However if it's just an action/ARPG/MMO game - yep, my avatar is going to be a gal.
Now, most people seem okay with this. Heck, I've heard the same sentiment from a few guys. However other players (a few guys, several females) have actually had a problem with this. To whit, they consider me playing a female character simply because I find it more aesthetically pleasing than a male character to be sexist, or offensive for some other reason.
I'm genuinely curious about this. Am I missing something?
Okay, look. From what I gather, you're a male. Generally, males find females attractive. That's what we do. If we didn't, well, the human race would have found some other way of reproducing or died off. So, sure, creating an avatar that you're going to enjoy looking at, I can understand that. I agree: Curves are nice!
(Yes, I bought Bayonetta. Oddly enough, my wife occasionally wonders why I haven't finished it yet. No, it just got too hard once I got to the afterlife.)
Now. Why would some folks have an objection to it? Well (bear in mind that this is coming from a guy with no sociology background whatsoever), women have kind of had it tough out of our side of the gender gap in the last few decades / centuries.
In an ideal world (yep, sweeping generalisation here folks, my apologies in advance), one's gender would be just one of the many factors that make up an interesting person. A nice / cute / pretty / hot girl gets your attention, you take a look, you appreciate the nice warm feeling it gives you, then you either proceed to get to know the rest of her - her interests, her intellect, her strength of will, her history, her decisions, her emotional life - or you move on.
But choosing a comely avatar on visual appeal alone - it feels like *staring*. A nice / cute / pretty / hot girl gets your attention, you take a look, you appreciate the nice warm feeling it gives you, but you don't do anything more and you don't move on - you just keep looking.
In a way, it tells that girl that, to you, the most (and potentially only) important thing about her is the way her appearance makes you feel. Sadly enough, there have been and are enough men (and women) out there who've applied that priority in such a way to have made life harder for a lot of women than it otherwise could have been. And that hurt those women.
Another contributing factor: In most modern RPG-style games I've played, gender is often given *less* than equal prominence with all the other factors that make character. Take Mass Effect. Your choice of gender has such a minimal effect on the progress of the game's story - basically, Shepard's choice of love interests, if you choose to have him/her pursue a romance - that choice of gender barely matters (heck, many maintain that Jennifer Hale's voice performance of Shepard is qualitatively superior to Mark Meer's).
So maybe look at your choices from that perspective a second: When character, the stuff that makes a person more than just comely curves / chiseled abs, is absent, you go for the curves. But when character - interests, intelligence, strength of will, history, decisions, loves, hates - is given more importance, you go for a male avatar.
Can you see how it could make a woman react with, "Oh, foxtrot foxtrot sierra. Not another creep..."?