So today I watched the two most recent CP2077 trailers
Postcards from Night City and
Gangs of Night City and was struck by the sheer number of hypersexualised in-game ads there were. Not only were there so many, but they all appeared to feature women.
Curious, I decided to go back through each trailer frame by frame to collect every 'sexy' ad, just in case I missed something.
Combined the two trailers add up to almost eight minutes of footage and I managed to spot no less than TWENTY-ONE unique ads featuring sexualised women, only one of which featured a male body prominently (but was still about a straight male fantasy), and only one featuring a same sex interaction (two women of course).
These ads/images range from generic to actually pretty fucked up (the dog one and the 'king size' one are particularly gross) but I still think the sheer variety and uniformity of them is what shocks me the most. Worth nothing that all of the pole dancers and other sexualised characters in the footage of the game itself were also women.
Anyway here they are for your perusal (apologies for the quality, I just used the windows snipping tool):
What, if anything, are CD Projekt Red
trying to do here? If it's to reflect our own world they've failed because even 2020 advertising manages to be more diverse than this. Is it to depict a future where women are
still sexualised to a far higher degree than men? If so, why? We know our current world is homophobic, transphobic and sexist, do they really think ads like this are cutting satire, or nuanced critique?