MarsAtlas said:
Which is a level that only exists because TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES! In the grand scheme of the plot, that level is quite literally pointless. There's absolutely no need whatsoever to go to the strip club at all. None.
Because trying to represent the cultural ideal of what is a seedy corrupt underbelly of society is not a viable reason?
Lets face it, the game was going for a dark Noir "bad guy killing very bad guys" sort of story that tried to rope in all sorts of evil criminal underworld tropes. Also probably a reason why the targets are largely horrible characters and ideas such as characterization weren't stretched too far for them.
Diving off this into the topic question itself, no, a game such as this in no way "hates" woman for how they portray them any more then a movie with a black character that dies "hates" black people. The very line of thought to make that claim is just silly.
Any sort of fictional media made on a fixed budget will cut corners. With video games in particular, characters and story is always the first part slashed and burned if it is given a decent funding to begin with. As such this results in storytelling short-hand being used a hell of a lot. For characters, they become simply archetypes if given any "character" at all. Setting becomes overly predictable, and established cliche run amok. Consequently, in use of this story-telling short hand, you have... lets just call them "packages" that tend to go together with the inclusion of one of the components.
In this case, you have the overall theme of "dark and gritty criminal underbelly". Since they are being lazy/underfunded in the story telling department as we discussed before, they will use stoyr shorthand to express that these are bad people of the criminal type. With that comes:
-Reference to murder and violent crimes
-Reference to drugs and prohibited substances
-Reference to prostitution/sex trafficking
Now, when you include the third on on the list, you get the package deal of strip clubs and strippers. Why? Because as a culture, it is already associated together and it saves the time and effort of having to explain all the details when instead you can just dredge up the familiar tropes.
Now, in order for someone to claim hatred here, there has to be an actual dislike towards the gender on display. No, simply having a representation that you disprove of is not "a passionate or intense dislike", it is a representation you dislike and thus are projecting an intent of malice behind choosing. Now if there was no contextual reason for the representation, if they were horrible stereotypes and caricatures amid a sea of otherwise well crafted and deep male characters, if they were treated differently not within the context of the story or the purpose of their characters existence within the game's story being told but rather their gender existed with the intent of representing the sex the models portrayed, well then you might have a point to start that discussion on.
To put this in perspective, this would be like claiming I hate dragons because they tend to be big bosses in fantasy games put there for the characters to kill (ignoring the story context of being a high fantasy and thus relying on familiar tropes, such as big evil dragons, in place of having to put effort into storytelling). Or I hate men because I have to kill them by the millions for being grunts (ignoring story context of the game trying to represent Film Noir representations of the criminal world where the common cultural expectation is that the grunt are male, as well as violent and largely not too bright).
At the end of the day, this is only exemplary of laziness, nothing else. Everyone trying to make this an issue of discrimination or sexism is fighting the wrong thing, if only because it is attacking a perceived motivation that is not actually there in the first place.
And lets go full silly for a second here and say that people all agred that this was hatred against women and that as a result things should change. Because the discussion was so concerned with that sort of portrayal, do you know what the "solution" to that would be?
The same games with either equally annoying "positive" female character tropes being used in order to avoid the claims of hatred against women without actually changing the underlying reason for the choices in the first place or gender-flipped characters (which would make all inverse argues just as valid, and thus the action would be pointless) that would only please the fools who try to argue this issue as if it is a damn quota system to be solved or score card to be balanced.
