Okay, I genuinely want to understand this mindset, because it's completely baffling to me.

You do realize that "people will complain" is not an argument for doing nothing, right? It's just the opposite. People are complaining now. If people are going to complain no matter what, then I want to live in the universe where people are still complaining, but the best-selling game in the entire medium doesn't seem like it's been written by a 13-year-old boy terrified of women.

If there needs to be a clear and concise reason to include a playable woman, then how about this: over half the population of the planet Earth are women. You keep saying "feminist media" and talk about a world where "feminist video game critics cease existing" as if it's appealing to some kind of niche group, which is just baffling. It's not some special interest, dude. Women are all around us, even in our families!. You've seen pictures.

If you want to say that anyone complaining about the juvenile gender imbalance in games is some special interest, like, say, the crass link-baiting jack-asses at Jezebel.com, then I can equate you with the cowardly shit stains who harass women in comments sections and on Twitter. Why don't we all stop trotting out the tired old accusations of agendas and "feminist media" and get to the core question: what's the real problem, guys?

What are you guys so afraid of that would get you so defensive? Why try to turn something completely obvious into a point of contention? What could possibly be lost by including women in the medium?

Even if women were a tiny percentage of video game players — and that's a huge if, since it's 2013 and video games aren't an obscure nice medium anymore — a tiny percentage of GTA's audience is still millions of people. What's lost by including them?

You say that a female protagonist in a GTA game would have to be gender neutral (ignoring my whole "Women: How Do They Work" section, apparently), but even if that weren't nonsense, it'd still be better than what they have now. Which is that the defining characteristics of a woman are being available for sex & lap dances while not being a total buzz kill.

All of GTA 5's characters are assholes, yes. But there's still a diversity of assholes from weasely white liberals to street thugs to greedy immigrants to career criminals (way to stretch, Rockstar!) Why not have a range of assholish women in the game?

There's more diversity on the box of the game than in the game itself. There's a woman cop arresting a Rebecca Romijn rip-off; why couldn't she be in the game? For that matter, why couldn't either of them be in the game?