I didn't play Hitman Absolution, and you know what.. the marketing guy who decided to promote it with fetish nun combat sequences is totally to blame for that.
I really fucking love the Hitman series and particularly how it evolved in the games leading up to Blood Money (the pinacle, in my opinion). It has this wonderful grindhouse feel, much more so than games which self-consciously adopt wierd camera filters and such in order to look like grindhouse movies, and yeah, it has a lot of fetish fuel, but it is actually kind of inventive in its fetishes. It's a game where you can go on a rampage in a really shitty Santa outfit, there's a whole mission set in a BDSM club inside a functioning abattoir. I'm sorry.. that is fucking epic.
That said, the games do kind of hate women, and they hate men. Men in the Hitman games are almost universally portrayed as cruel, cowardly, psychopathic, weak or a combination of the above, while women are almost universally portrayed as idiots, sex objects or erotic predators. This is exactly what a good exploitation movie does, it creates a caricature of the world we live in in which all the ugly bits are magnified. It's a sleazy, nasty, violent little game series which doesn't take itself too seriously..
..and then that fucking trailer happened.
You could not miss the point harder if the point was on the fucking moon, it's like it maybe heard of exploitation but has no idea how to do it. Kung fu kicking fetishwear stripper nuns is not the setup for an exploitation film, it's the setup for a B-porno. It is lazy, cliched, unimaginative and just shows none of the dry cleverness and nihilistic detachment we'd come to expect. Weirdly, I didn't have nearly such a problem with the "perfectly executed" campaign, it did seem a little more Hitman to me, but even then the sex is so. fucking. vanilla. There's nothing really twisted about it beyond the fact that the sexy women are dead.. and sexy (edgy). Come on people.
Heck, it's saying something if you can stick half the characters in fetishwear and still come off like "tease and denial" means "my wife has a headache".
Basically, what I'm saying is I can deal with sexism when it's presented in a way which is imaginative and explicit enough to kind of be a thing. It's when it just becomes a symptom of lazy, unconscious writing tropes that it starts to bother me, and that's definitely the vibe I got from Absolution.