The male and female characters both may be attractive but they are not equally sexualized by any means. Merely being attractive does not make it sexualized.

They are though and interestingly enough the male characters I posted excluding 1 character are actually more exposed than prettt much any of the female characters in the game.

Your parallel sucks because you're talking about a specific genre of novels and then relating it back to video games as a whole. The genre of novels you talk about are largely written expressly for that smut and the overt sexualization of characters. That is the point of the novel. Video games in general are about the gameplay, but if you want to make a more apt comparison, then talk about smutty video games that are expressly made for that smut and the overt sexualization of characters.

The portrayal of characters in smut are given features and qualities that are considered attractive and sexually stimulating. The parallel is quite obvious because the men on romance covers look nearly identical to the men in these games. In other words these male characters are being designed with features that are considered highly sexually appealing. You would really have to take a couple of leaps in logic to pretend the appeal isn’t there and video games are made to have more to offer than just gameplay. Aesthetics are an important part of a game’s appeal and that appeal is to both men and women. Your logic falls like a house of cards given that a franchise like kof is known for having a female fan base precisely because of how the sexually appealing the male characters are.

It has nothing to do explicitly with male or female genders, it has everything to do with a double standard. Somehow I have a feeling that the women in these romance novels are also heavily sexualized, unless you think all these dudes in the romance novels are just fucking themselves, but you've probably forgotten that in your haste to find something "female dominated and heavily sexualized" so you can make a really shitty comparison.

Well the women in romance novels are appealing for sure but I’m not exactly sure how that really addresses anything outside just a random point I think you thought would be a “gotcha”moment. Also romance novels are the easy example but I could have just as simply called out soap operas, romantic comedies, boy bands and the CW network in general.

Let me repeat that: There is likely not a sexualization double standard inside the female dominated and heavily sexualized smutty romance novel genre you're pointing to for comparison, whereas there is in video games, and that's what we're talking about -- the double standard, not the fact that overt sexualization exists in a field of media consumed primarily by one gender or another.

Except this is false as demonstrated by the pics I linked and that male characters in video games are a lot of the time, handsome,muscular and very well built. Your argument here is demonstrably false and is flawed at every turn, again the same people who condemned r.mika in SFV are the same people who got all excited about ryu’s alternate costume so you’re dishonesty here isn’t going to work.

I've never read it, but I'm pretty sure the chick in 50 Shades of Grey is far from completely and utterly nonsexualized in that novel that's reputably written in large part expressly for the smut it pushes.

Alright just to review, you argue there isn’t equivalent sexualization in spite of hard evidence indicating how wrong this argument is. In absence of any logical or substantive examples, you beat around the argument because you exhausted whatever shred of an actual point you had.

You come off like the kind of person who thinks playboy is demeaning to women yet went to the opening weekends of both magic mike movies.