That’s right. Hiding underneath all the accolades and slick marketing lies something much more sinister within — misogyny. Unlike most nefarious games, Bioshock starts off relatively benign. Only when your character acquires new weapons; called “plasmids”, does the misogynistic world of Rapture become embarrassingly obvious. You see, every plasmid comes with a tutorial demonstrating its abilities. In each video, players are treated to watching a poor innocent woman being eviscerated by a patriarchal, plasmid-wielding woman-hater.

References alluding to male privilege are laced throughout; the victim is always dressed as a housewife (misogynists love their women subservient) and overtly feminine, the male assailant is always seen with a smug grin of satisfaction as he overpowers the “uppity” woman. Even the presentation is done in a stylized 1940’s manner, referring to an era in which women were seen as property.

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