I haven’t played this in like a month presumably because my dear friend is trying to shield me from getting pissed off at misogynies too much, but god I have to admit I’m real fucking sick of hearing other women tell me this game is totally normal about women, that it’s you know a Realistic Portrayal of what it’s like to be a woman, that the game just has misogyny but isn’t misogynist - as if all the violence against women exists in a vacuum - and then basically pulling out of the conversation because mean old rape victim veronica is yelling about shit again, as if the game isn’t constantly trying to filter me by showing me butchered women or trafficked women or whatever. Nobody on the fucking planet uses the word “cunt” as much as the fellas in this game. I literally live in Seattle, in one of the neighborhoods that is widely considered to be BAD and UNSAFE, and i literally see people doing drugs and fucking and bleeding and dying all the time. What I do not see is women getting beaten in some kind of infinite recursive loop, women getting raped to death, I don’t see big shit about sex trafficking and the cops raiding a building where they’re disemboweling women all the time, it’s like comical to suggest this is anywhere close to reality. I’m sure women get raped in this city, I’m sure women have gotten raped in my neighborhood even. But the like hilarious disproportionate extent to which you run into this stuff is fucking ridiculous, the fact that none of this ever happens to trans women is a real Makes Ya Think moment, like cis women elevated on this absurd pedestal of suffering. ya boy jackie relatively peacefully bleeds out from his wounds or dex got one in the head real fast in a landfill, men truly get the the lightest load in this game. Sure you can dismember them and kill them real good and blow them to pieces but it’s literally not cathartic in the slightest, I dunno who the fuck thinks this is a power fantasy, but when I slice an entire group of guys to ribbons for wailing on some gal and then the next day they’re back doing it to the same lady like clockwork because gangs gotta respawn I don’t fucking feel shit doing it, it’s a chore, there is nothing positive to be gained by exposing yourself to this shit except being proud you didn’t get filtered by the frictionless slop game designed to make women not play it! I cannot derive any kind of pleasure or catharsis or whatever killing thousands upon thousands of gangoons who will inevitably return to their programmed positions, beating fucking women endlessly.
The game is just fuckin eurotrash tourism of shitty america, wow, how exciting, like this isn’t already what GTA is, except the GTA guys fucking live here so it’s less annoying somehow, they coulda just made a 100 hour game where you punch some gal in the jaw over and over again and it’d have the same fucking level of social commentary on MISOGYNY probably. The game is pulpy in a way that I like, but every time it tries to ~say something~ I want to kill myself because it’s so fucking tacky or offensive I want to scream.
I love not being able to sleep every night because I have constant unending dreams about being raped, I love waking up exhausted because I spend my nights fighting off the people who raped me in nightmares and then waking up to everyone acting like I’m too traumatized to talk to while telling me shit like this is good and normal, it’s sooo fucking good actually, did you know this juvenile power fantasy where you have knife arms and can cut up men for looking at you while every other woman you meet is a perpetual victim is what It’s Really Like To Be A Woman, a true reflection of material reality, not a pathetic fucking cope for your powerlessness in the face of intensifying misogyny at all. Don’t worry ladies I’m tired of hearing about it too. I’m real fucking tired.
It is hard not to think about how my best friend, who loved Cyberpunk 2020 and Cybergeneration and all the shit Mike Pondsmith ever did, would fucking despise this game’s treatment of women if she were still alive to see it. But she isn’t, because the reality of the world is that women aren’t lucky enough to get bullshit like subdermal armor and knife arms and Sandevistans to protect them from mental illness and drug use and prostitution.