First off, a quote from her original video discussing hitman: "Players are meant to derive a perverse pleasure from desecrating the bodies of unsuspecting, virtual female characters. It's a rush streaming from a carefully concocted mix of sexual arousal, connected to the act of controlling and punishing representations of female sexuality."

This quote in and of itself astonishes me. She interprets knocking out and dragging around the body of an NPC as "perverse pleasure"? You can do the exact same thing to a male NPC and the interaction is entirely the same. The only difference, is that you're dragging around a stripper, barely dressed in a bikini as opposed to a dude. If her main issue is that, then fine, argue against the setting. Even then I don't think she'd have much of a point. Personally, I feel like a strip club is perfectly viable and logical place for a level in a hitman game. After all, you're hunting down and assassinating evil people and they will be in more shady places, like a strip club, and strip clubs need strippers to be believable. As long as it's not gratuitous, which I don't think it is, I think it's fine. On the other hand, it's also possible that the developers included a strip club to pander to male gamers, which is their primary demographic.

Point is, her original argument makes a mountain out of a molehill. She seems to think gamers are furiously jacking off to, or gaining pleasure from dragging around a strippers unconscious/dead body. I'm sure there are some weird people out there who do that, but not the majority.

Next, the first part of her response the the criticism is that you don't get punished for pacifying civilians. First off, you do. You objectively lose points for pacifying a civilian. You only gain points back afterwards if you manage to hide them. She argues that net there is no punishment. What she forgets to mention, though, is that there are only a limited amount of containers with a limited amount of space to hide bodies in to get that score back. Meaning, you can't knock out and hide 20 civilians/bad guys. So, it allows you to pacify a small numbers of civilians, if you manage to get them to the correct place without being seen.

If you'd want to go deeper and argue more against it, you might even say that in the spirit of Hitman, you ideally touch no one but your target. After all, you don't want anyone to know you were there at all and knocking people unconscious leaves witnesses. However, you can still reach the Silent Assassin rating while pacifying civilians and seeing as she likes to argue from game mechanics, it's a weaker point in this discussion.

All of this is moot though if you look at what the game you allows to do. You can go through these levels and murder everyone if you like, women included. That's what a sandbox is. Does that mean all sandboxes are misogynistic?

This highlights the issue I've had with everything Sarkeesian has put out so far. Instead of applying a holistic approach to video games, discussing tropes of all natures, she has decided to focus on women. That's fine, in a sense, but if you don't compare what happens to men and women and want them to be on equal footing, I don't think anyone should care. As I understand it, feminism was created to give men and women equal rights, because women were very far behind men back in the day in terms of rights. Lately, however, so-called feminists like Sarkeesian, seem to go beyond that, and have started victimizing themselves and women in order to gain attention.