For a lot of us, the Hitman: Absolution that saw agent 47 fighting a squad of lethal strippers was an entertaining piece of art, but it seems that at least one stripper doesn’t agree.
Speaking to Forbes under the pseudonym "Athena," one stripper described the trailer as no more than "violence porn."
"I think it’s an excuse to show violence against women by making them the initiators of violence," she said. "It’s as if the makers of this video game are saying, 'Hey, these women asked for it. It’s okay to kill them and beat them up because they’re the ‘dregs of society.' It’s as if [the game is saying] they are subhuman and deserve to die. But that’s not who they are, it’s what they do for a living; stripping is a job, not an identity."
"I just think it perpetuates hatred of women, because we all know that women who work as strippers and prostitutes are overwhelmingly victims of violence, not perpetrators of it."
"Sociologists have found the number one reason women prostitute themselves is because they’re in poverty and don’t have the resources they need. Stripping and prostituting become a way to survive, and to demonize them for that is profoundly misogynistic. It’s bad enough that they need to do this to survive, but to turn them into the enemy…?"
"It just looks like violence porn to me, and I’m concerned about the minds of men who would come up with a game like this."
The entire interview can be found here.