The point is they're attractive men generally, Nathan Drake for example, the point is certainly wish fulfillment for men as appose to sexual attraction for women, but they're still designed to superficially provide an avatar that is attractive to the audience.
Female protagonists are more rare than men because most gamers are male and video games are product design, your task is to appease the largest amount of your potential audience, and if men prefer to play men, you should make the lead a man. You can make it optional but then people will still complain when you advertise with one over the other like in Mass Effect. It also doesn't allow for as rich a predetermined character.
Some are more transparent than others, Gordon from HL being a common example. A nerd who ends up being the most important man in the world and the love interest of a beautiful woman despite the fact he's repressed to the point of a sociopath. It is part of the product design. Female leads do of course exist, Metroid, BG&E, Parasite Eve, Perfect Dark, Tomb Raider, Silent Hill 3, a couple of the Resident Evil's etc. I don't tend to think many are overtly sexual, Tomb Raider is, PE, PD, but even something like Bayonetta who is an over the top sexually provocative character is an empowered female, she is not meant to be sexually attractive to the player, she's meant to be intimidating.
For all the arguments about females in games, I don't believe they're objectified anymore than any other aspect of those fictional worlds. It's true everyone who wants to can simulate shagging Madison in Heavy Rain for example, but you also get to play her. That relationship doesn't feel like it's earned that intimacy, but that's from terrible writing, not objectification. In very few games can the player fuck anyone. The most stand out example of that kind of thing for me would be GoW, it's based in an alternate fictional history of absolute sexual liberation, but it's still a little sordid. The instance in GoW3 felt valid, the others I don't think should have been there, but in that it's very easy to not do it, in fact in GoW2 you have to go out of your way to find them.
