The previous versions of GTA had the same option. This while we're being bombarded with how terrible the game GTA San Andreas is because it has a fully clothed sex game hidden in it. Meanwhile you can kill cops, little girls in girl scout outfits on the street, and prostitutes, either before or after using their services.

This is not new. And many of the kids playing GTA San Andreas were clamoring for a Rape function on the blogs. You know, starting the sexual scene with a girl who didn't invite it first by force.

Just FYI.

Lets not forget the lesbian and gay SM market which is fairly proportional to hetero SM per capita.

In San Francisco for example, my home town, there is a quite large SM fetish industry aimed at lesbians and gays. So this idea that violence + sex is "misogyny" is really nonsense and pandering from the "women's studies" brainwashed crowd.

SM is certainly kinky and freaky, but it's not "misogynistic" per se. The leather clad lesbians whipping each other in Folsom Street Fair and Pride parade aren't "misogynists."

Technically, it may have something to do with brain plasticity and the close proximity between pleasure and pain centers, overall irrationality especially pertaining to sex, sexual repression, and a whole bunch more psychological issues.

Violent video game hysteria is one of the stupidest issues people worry about. If anything people should be concerned about the sedentary nature of gamers, and couch potatoes generally, including book worms, TV viewers, web browsers, etc. That has real public health consequences.

It not as though gamers are generally violent people. Are many fat, with bad acne, and socially inept? Sure.

But violent? No. Quite the opposite in fact. Many are in fact incredibly shy and polite and the only time they do anything particularly outrageous is in video games.

It's as silly as theorizing book worms who read pulp fiction or comic books, will become violent. Would anyone look into the past of a campus shooter to see if they ever read a violent book, and then claim violent books make people killers? How stupid.

Salon's blogroll like Feministing are just idiots.

Yet another reporter jumping on the bandwagon of portraying the GTA series as the next evil media despite the fact that it's a game that they'll never play.

In discussing GTA4 (which I, a feminist, desperately want to play), everyone assumes that the guys who play this game can't tell fiction from reality.

I admit, when i first saw the video, I was scandalized. So was my bf. But reflecting back on it, it's just a videogame, it's not reality, and it would be silly to assume that what people see in videogames, they internalize and recreate in real life. Yes, i know, a tiny minority of mentally disturbed people actually do ("The Basketball Diaries"), but that is the price we pay for artistic freedom (and videogames are more and more becoming not just a technological accomplishment but an artistic one as well). I'd rather have freedom with the aberrant recreation/crime, than no freedom at all.

Good luck.

Some will say that if you look for something hard enough, you will find it everywhere.

Some advertising-analysing psychologists see hidden sex cues in every advertisement, and while I agree that sometimes the cues are conciously put there, sometimes the "cues" are just too convoluted to be real.

This article has exactly the same problem, but with mysoginism. The scenario described (killing a hooker after having business with her) is just a specific instance of the generic "kill who you want" scenario of the game. Imagine, you can kill the hispanic hot-dog stand guy who sold you his wares, or kill any black policeman you see, or run over the white car salesman, or, or, or... anything. Schoolchildren? Fair game. Couples? Twice the score! Mobsters? Hey, a guy has to reduce the competition to win. In fact, I could posit without tongue in cheek that this game is the most egalitarian you can find. The only place a mysoginist can be found is at the end of the controller, if any.

This is just a violent game. It is no more of a problem than the Doom movie (with the badass killer girl) or American Psycho (with the woman-killing psycho).

Now, as for the reported viral video... that is another story.

Or how even as a prostitute, can I then kill a bunch of men in GTA? Rip their penis's off and stuff them down their throat or up their ass? Hey, sounds fair to me.

i play gta, also consider myself a feminist. so in addition to this dreadful prostitute murder, one often carjacks police cars or civilian cars and punches (and perhaps dare i say kill) their rightful owners. yet for some reason, i have yet to carjack a police car or an ambulance in real life. the game is full of morally reprehensible behavior, and it's evident to anyone who plays the game that pretty much nothing in it should be emulated, whether it's killing prostitutes or starting race wars (never done that in real life either). i'm really sick of people ascribing societal problems to video games. humankind must have been fabulous before those damn games started happening the late 1970s.

. . doesn't mean they fantasize about it in real life.

And that is the problem I have with the idea that everyone who has sex with and then kills a hooker in GTAIV must actually fantasize about it. They don't. You kill the hooker after you have sex with her in GTA because it's GTA and often you kill people in game just to see what will happen.

This idea that fifteen year old boys are getting hard after killing hookers and desperately wishing they could do it in real life is getting old.

Pretty much all the stuides show it's no more than penny dreadfuls, video nasties, 50s horror comics or any other cause of a moral panic. Unless you believe that Jack Thompson guy.

"many young men are going to have their first ... sexual experiences via GTA". That, indeed, is the grand theft. No wonder this fantastical outlet of suppressed desire and frustration. Welcome to Christian America. Natural desire perverted by church and law until the domesticated find their pathetic relief in video games.

And women complain! Of course, they should complain - a good man is as hard to find as a good woman.

Women (a generality) have relatively easy access to sexual experience, and so, they do play games where they run over male whores. But, they do play mental games where they run over men. Why?

Oh well, something for cats and dogs to muse upon.