I agree, and I wrote a long post in another thread about how Anita completely misrepresented the tone and game mechanics of that Strip Club section - which I now can't find, because the Sarkeesian threads tend to get locked and deleted with quite some regularity. Anyway, suffice it to say that the strip club section of the game is designed to build antipathy towards, and justification for killing, the corrupt club owner, there's no reason or motivation whatsoever to harm any of the girls, and if you do find yourself dragging the strippers around in circles you're flat out playing the game wrong and must be either very bored or have worrying sexual kinks that could be better catered for elsewhere.
The same can be said for that one section later on where you discover dead stripper and use her corpse as a distraction. Yes, in very literal terms the stripper has become objectified and is "used" as a game mechanic - but I'd say it's justified in the context of further underlining what a bastard the club owner was. It's not included for laughs, the dead girl isn't sexualised (again, if this part of the game turns you on, that's between you and your psychiatrist), and I don't think it can be said to support any kind of trend of misogyny in the game. Heck, if the players principles prevent him/her from interacting briefly with the dead female body to accomplish a clean getaway, the alternative is to simply walk downstairs and kill the group of male police officers - and if that's considered the lesser of two evils, I might argue that suggests misandry, not misogyny.
What's a bit more interesting about the latest FemFreq video is this idea of "can implies should" - the idea that in a game that provides any kind of sandbox, any choice the player is given is implicitly condoned, even if it's self-destructive or triggers a lose-condition. The developers of Absolution wouldn't have gone to the effort of coding death animations for civilians if they weren't reasonably confident that some players would kill civilians, for example. But does this mean the developers want players to kill civilians? I'm not so sure.
I'm sure plenty of people remember the similar discussion around Skyrim when it first came out, and people discovered that you could potentially kill any man, woman or animal in the game - but not children. Kids were invincible. And some people set about creating mods to let you kill children, too. Hold up, let's read that last bit again - people went out of their way to make it so that you could kill children?! Why on earth would people want to do that? In isolation and out of context it sounds horrible. But I think that's oversimplifying things. We could make an argument about consistency and creating a less restricted experience where you can roleplay a truly evil character, or run the risk of a stray arrow hitting a kid in a battle, or have heightened stakes when a dragon attacks a village. None of this stems from an actual, real-life desire to kill kids. Yahtzee uncharacteristically waded into the argument, and, also uncharacteristically, I found myself disagreeing with him: his counterargument was that in a game where you could have sex with adults, would we insist on making kids fuckable too? Aside from this being a silly slippery-slope argument (killing is often justified in games, sex less often), I'd say the same consistency argument could be applied. In a hypothetical game where you could have sex with any man, woman and animal - consensual or not - then yeah, it'd be a weird omission to have kids in the setting that you couldn't do the same to. I'm not saying for a minute that this would be a moral or enjoyable game, but hey, once you set a precedent...
I dunno. Does "can" imply "should"? If a button is there for pressing, can all possible in-game interactions be seen as just variations on a button-press, or has it become more complicated than that?
