I stepped aside to give others time to answer questions or speak on other parts of this topic, but I’ll answer this comment. You may not have noticed during game play the sexualization of the women in SCII (it appears mainly in cutscenes). All that does mean is that you were simply more focused on game play. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.
(Comment from the site: “Comparison images of the statue, the babe from 2005 Blizzcon, and the promo artwork, nearly all of which featured her impossibly perky booty.”)
Meanwhile, here’s a guy in a Jim Raynor costume flanked by two other babes.
There’s a bit of a difference.
Here’s an SCII wallpaper. It looks like an ad for jeans.
Finally, I direct you to this page: The Buttocks of Starcraft II. Some men (and aliens) are included, and they happen to be well-covered (even cloaked) or oddly figured while each cutscene with a woman in it shows a perfectly rounded, well lit, feminine ass in stretch gear with no armor covering it.
The reason women are irritated is that there’s no equality here, we don’t want to see men’s fantasies of huge, muscled men. We wouldn’t mind a little eye-candy of a cleanly-built guys in the same body revealing gear that women wear if we’re going to be subjected to those standards of fantacized women when we play well-developed and main-stream games.
Think about Family Guy. It’s a fair show. Peter can be ridiculously awful to Lois, and that’s OK - to some degree. That’s because it’s a comedy, and everyone, including Peter himself, gets nailed for being who they are. No one is safe. There’s an attempt at equality in all the awful behavior.
Another example (which a lot of people probably haven’t seen) is 8 to 10 Cats Does Countdown, it’s a comedy reboot of a British gameshow on youtube. On it, there’s a young, sexy blonde female mathematician and also a pretty brunette English pro who does word checks from the OED. Comments about miniskirts or possible dates are sometimes made. They’re a part of the show’s comedy. Women’s balance? The prop guys on the show happen to be well-cut guys (not overly built) who wear very little when occasionally deliver props to the stage in humorous fashion.
Most reasonable women aren’t saying “clothe video game women in burkhas!”. I’m certainly not. We’re just saying that the industry should recognize it has a huge swath of other customers to cater to and respond in kind by avoiding tropes and making the effort to play fair with women.
