To clarify. I don't think this excuses the rapist. If I got piss drunk in a club and got robbed for example, I would still be robbed, even though that could've been avoided if I was more responsible.

And to make it even more clear - it's regardless of gender. I can't understand why some people willingly increase their chances to be victims of a crime.

It should'nt be like that though, you should be able to become drunk all you want even if you are a girl. You are never responsible for getting raped. It should be a world were girls can go out and drink all they want without some guy, drunk or not, raping them.

Yeah, this is a pet peeve of mine. "I got bombed out of my mind on Jello shots and weed around tons of men I don't know and don't you dare tell me that was a bad idea, you sexist!"

The rapist is still the horrible rapist, but don't stand in the fucking freeway.

Of course and I think it should begin earlier, teaching the kids as early as possible to respect other people. It is more complicated than that unfortunetly, mental illnesses, alcohol etc.

Exactly. This is not Narnia for crying out loud, there's bad guys and girls out there seeking to screw you over for their benefit. Of course it doesn't excuse rape - and I'm getting very tired of having the "you're defending rape" argument thrown back in my face every time this discussion comes up. This is EXACTLY what's wrong with modern "feminism" - it's black & white and any common sense or shades of grey are met with cries of "SEXIST!". How come a guy has to do everything right or is called a loser, but a girl can be completely and utterly irresponsible and still get called the poor innocent victim? Double standards, much?

It's even funnier. I remember watching an ABC programme, when they made a setup - a woman was beating the shit out of a man in a park - every single person, including the police officer were laughing their asses of, some were even encouraging the woman, and after being interviewed they've said "he must have cheated on her, he definitely deserved it".

Meaning, when a man is abused by a woman, it's always his fault, he deserves to be mocked.

So men are actually kinda forced to be more responsible. Because if anything happens to you, it's your fault. And if you can't take care about yourself of defend yourself - you're a looser.

Don't see it that way, sry.
To discuss issues (given or implied) you need partners to do so and you need to ask questions - which is exactly what RPS tried in this case and a certain Blizzard employee didn't wanted to do. If they picked the right target and did a good job with their article, is a different story, but they need to be able to ask those questions. Even following this thread here for just a bit makes it clear, that a big percentage of gamers don't want that at all. Not the discussion nor the questions.
Check the comments of Gamespots GTA V review and you'll find butthurt people complaining, because they dared to address misogyny in the game.

As someone else mentioned: They sure like unsubtle sexual content in their games, though - at least for the female characters. :)

Create an FPS game with all males wearing nothing but thongs, while females run around fully dressed. I doubt the result of how many gamers play it, would be the same as when it's the other way around. :)

I referred on his "safe environment" part, not the senseless drinking / self-responsibility. Now check that link again...

I should've been more precise - when I said safe environment I thought being alone in your house with doors locked :P

I wouldn't get piss drunk even among friends in fear of teabagging, scribbling penises on my forehead and so on.

But you are right - it needs to be clarified - I knew about most rapists being someone known to the victim, but it wasn't brought up in a discussion by anyone, so your link was still a valuable asset to it.

Very well, and I agree with most of your reply. Plus I guess you do see that describing domination in gender terms is quite the generalization.

Either there is individual responsibility or there is group responsibility. I know which one I believe in - that we are individuals with some degree of choice and ergo individually responsible for our actions and their consequences.

So ultimately I see anyone who wants to establish punishments at a group level, either based on factual power differentials or outcome differentials, as well based on some subjective wrong, as being politically totalitarian.

Now granted, I believe every human is totalitarian at some level, but I would hope rational individuals can see what road this all leads down to: power for power's sake.

I don't think any of this is about punishment. It's more about awareness (being attentive to some "invisible" stereotypes and their effects on our worldviews), distanciation (sometimes mere irony), and self-awareness (avoiding to reproduce, ourselves, the stereotypes we grew with). Saying that a story stinks a bit, because it's riddled with old-fashionned prejudices, racism, misrepresentation, or sexism, is more of a criticisms (leading to either non-endorsement or to endorsement with some reservations on this or that aspect) than anything juridic.

Quite a few of the conservatives that start screaming around whenever a game is accused of sexism are the first ones to spit on movies that they judge see as "leftist" ("anti-militarist" or "anti-patriotic", etc) propaganda. But it's generally still all about "this sucks", and not about "this should be forbidden".

The stake is frowns, social stigma, sometimes boycott (like some advocate about "Ender's game", because of Orson Scott Card's homophobia). That is a high enough stake without going in the realm of criminalization.

Well Kratos literally ripped apart 99% of the Greek pantheon, titans, gods and mystical creatures alike, only wearing a short and a pair of sandals... so those clothes look like an overkill for a bunch of silly orcs.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-11-25-blizzard-dev-apologises-for-poorresponse-to-female-character-design-question

Blizzard acknowledges that they may have been overly dismissive.

This is speculation on my end of course, but I imagine if RPS handled this more professionally and thought their approach through better, most people that don't care would ignore this and move on. There would be some naysayers as with any subject, but I imagine the rest would go about their normal lives. As it is though, we have websites trying to hammer this argument into everybody in all the wrong ways, and they are doing it over and over again.

So I guess that is part of the problem, to me anyways. It is not that this topic is a bad one, but that it is not being handled well. There is discussion, and then there are witch hunts that want to shame developers but offer no insight and analysis that really explores this problem. These articles are also biased as well. I have yet to see RPS, Kotaku, or anyone else acknowledge viewpoints from other females who do not carry the "this is totally sexist bs" attitude. We exist, but why aren't we acknowledged? This is giving the impression that we do not exist, and all women do not play video games simply because they are turned off by character design, when this subject is far more complex than that.

Sure, then you will have nobody playing your game. You will have alienated most of your male audience, and the girls that still do not enjoy this type of gameplay will continue to avoid it. Again, this type of argument ignores the fact that there is more to this than simply how a character looks in game. If people are going to get into these issues, you really need to explore far more issues than clothing and anatomy of a character.

On a personal note, as much as I love looking at sexy dudes, watching men run around in thongs shooting each other would be a turn off compared to the current trend. It would be silly of course, but it certainly wouldn't make me want to play.

I don't see that, not one bit. Take babark's link to Blizzard's response, scroll down and start to read the comments. Doesn't make me confident that it might be so.

Which is my point and proven in this very thread: the witch hunt from gamers against RPS for daring to ask those questions / taking this opinion. How can we demand from RPS to handle this topic better / more professional / more unbiased / whatever, when we obviously fail at that?
There are exceptions, no doubt. But I wouldn't dare to claim the majority of gamers handling this "discussion" well. :P

You're overseeing one key factor: that this applies to the male audience, too. And that there's an increasing trend of males being put off by this type of game design. That there are males who don't necessarily have a problem with sexualized content in their games, but don't need it in every second title and / or think it's been overdone / overused.

Fallout: New Vegas is a prime example I can give, though in the violence department. I like my blood splatters and wild, violent actions as the next guy does. However, in F:NV starting around lvl 5 (from 50) on every second human enemy I've gotten head / limbs exploding / dismembering - and every time in slow motion. After less then 2 hours, it passed the "getting old quickly" mark and became off-putting, at least for me. It's just overdone and the first mod I install when I want to play it again, is a "less gore" one.

There is a point where it becomes just too much for some and where it get's annoying - and that's also true for the sexualized content.