It's working as a tool of erasure in your discourse though. I'm sorry but growing up and being bombarded with animated shows in my youth, i could count in my hand the number of western characters that helped me realize that womanhood wasn't about just looking cute and doing girl things. While our generation grew up with disney princesses doing their passive nothings, gals in japan had mononoke hime and nausicaa to draw inspiration from. While samus had been heavily sexualized even in her first appearance as a reward to players, she was a female lead in a game, how long did it take for the west to catch up with that? Or even to the level of final fantasy leads?
I only learned women could run business companies watching Cardcaptor sakura, the shows i remember the most talking about being a woman and growing up were stuff like ginger and steel braces, which were mostly about insecurities of being a girl than about the other aspects of it... We had one show about super hero girls, japan had an industry out of it, and honestly i'm lucky enough to be born in a country where the most famous comic book character is a tough girl that can pack some punches because im not sure america had someone like monica at that time .-. Shows like totally spies and stuff featuring badass women had some heavy inspiration from anime, pther european media like w.i.t.c.h. Drew a lot from magical girls series... in games we had Jill, Samus, Celes and Tifa all coming from japan and none of these from Moe.
I've been meaning to say this in this thread for a long while, but it really hurts me whenever people talk about japanese culture as being only an otaku cesspoll like some people in here, they don't even like the problematic otaku in japan. But that's not the reason why, the reason is that you're treating a whole legacy of characters and features that, honestly, even ended up inspiring western media to be better.
We wouldn't have Steven universe without Utena, i don't think Lara croft would even be a thing if Samus didn't prove herself to be markeatable, hell, even shera got anime af. There are wonderful novels and manga like The rose of Versailles and The Twelve kingdoms talking about women in ruling positions, there are manga about coming of age and learning to respect yourself, like Paradise Kiss and Vitamin. Manga like Rayearth and Fruits Basket being staples in media for young women and , hell, i could go on and on, but i feel like the west only started catching up in the last 5 or 6 years.
Manga isn't just a porn industry, it's a literary form that has several divisions and demographies, generalizing them by the moe kids would be like judging american press by treating all of the publications as if they were Playboy magazines, it is wrong, and its got a lot of prejudice bottled in. There are manga for young women talking about sexuality, there are adult manga talking about themes that don't involve sex, there's manga about LGBTQ+ people that doesnt treat them like aliens or sexualizes them(look up "my brother's husband"), they just aren't as loud or flash or sell as many figures as the share of the genre that does that, it's the equivalent of that market that says cartoons should exist only to sell toys, but aimed at older people with some bad bad taste.
I'm sorry but i do owe a lot of my formation to japanese media, despite all its flaws. Had i been raised only with the western media that was availble in my childhood i'd probably not know about many amazing things a woman can do and still be waiting for a prince charming to take me away from home. Really, i'm as bummed as anyone here with the amount of loli and fanservice that's been around some of the media that comes from japan, but i won't go around pretending the good share of it never existed just so i can blame it on the "japanese culture" because it's easier to think about it that way.
