Yesterday, while the completely inexplicable announcement that Alejandro Arbona and Jody LeHup (among many) had been laid off from Marvel in a decision that I absolutely cannot understand no matter how hard I try because those men are pure gold was making its way around the internet, another thing was getting people upset: Batman: Arkham City.

This wasn’t just the standard internet “this-is-awful-even-though-I-haven’t-played-it” complaining, though. Well, okay, there are some of those that I know about because I suspended my usual “no comments sections” rule earlier in the week while checking out reviews, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I am talking about reasonable, rational people having a pretty understandable uncomfortable response to the fact that inArkhamCity, thugs and villains call Catwoman “bitch” with considerable frequency.

Laura Hudson, the inestimable editor-in-chief of ComicsAlliance, wrote a very good and very interesting article about that part of the game and her reaction to it. I agree with her in many ways, but disagree with her in a few others. Now, a very key distinction to be made when considering my own reaction to Laura’s is that I am not a woman and I have not been randomly called a bitch while walking down the street like she does, so I am automatically coming at it from a different direction and background, one that is a tad more fortunate in that people very rarely shout slurs at me just for my gender. Nobody should go have to go through with that and they certainly shouldn’t have to be reminded of it when they play a video game. I absolutely will not say that someone who is made uncomfortable or is offended by thugs calling Catwoman a bitch doesn’t have a right to be. I just won’t. That said, I think there is an important middle ground, where I can disagree with some of what Laura says, in between finding her wrong as a person (seriously, what is wrong with you, Internet jackasses?) and writing a long, all-caps Film Critic Hulk rant where I call the game and the people who made it sexist.

Because here’s the thing: I don’t think the word usage makes Arkham City a sexist game and while there’s a statistical possibility that some of the staff are sexist, I don’t think it’s because of what some thugs say. Part of that, of course, is because being disrespectful of women is exactly the kind of thing a thug would do. These aren’t your coworkers, these are murderers who spend their free time talking about betraying their bosses and, you know, actually murdering people. They are villains. Even the Arkham City guard that says “Bitch,” as articles have mentioned as an example of a “good guy” saying something reprehensible, is a member of a shadowy private security firm employed by the game’s primary antagonist, members of which are first seen beating a handcuffed Bruce Wayne and threatening to murder him. When one of the few good security guards, Aaron Cash, is in trouble, they gleefully leave him to die because they hate him. Which is to say: they are not good guys.

Do you know how I know the game doesn’t approve of this kind of person? Because the majority of the game is spent busting their skulls and breaking their arms. When I am playing as Catwoman and someone calls me a bitch, literally the next thing I do is beat them within an inch of their lives. When I am playing as Batman and someone calls Selina a bitch, I also beat them within an inch of their lives except I might use a batarang instead of a whip and bolas. The game is quite literally built around disapproving of these men’s speech and behaviour.

This doesn’t take away from the discomfort of the word and its connotations, it just contextualizes them. When talking about context, Hudsonasks, “If it’s ok to call Catwoman a b*tch, why aren’t we at least hearing Batman get called an a**hole?” Part of that might simply be the bizarre rules of standards and practices. In US TV, “bitch” can get thrown around like candy, and so can the word “ass”, but “asshole”, being a reference to anatomy, isn’t allowed despite meaning the exact same thing as “ass”. I don’t know if it’s similar for videogames, but Arkham City leads me to believe it is, since it pretty closely follows what primetime television allows [Ed. Note: How messed up is that?]. So instead, Batman gets called a coward and a douchebag.

This does not carry the same uncomfortable weight that “bitch” does, but that’s not the game’s fault. It is society’s. It is fucked up that we live in a world where the gendered terms surrounding women carry a disproportionate seriousness, whereas words like “dick” and “prick” have no weight whatsoever. It is a sign that there are serious things wrong with our world and that we have a lot of work to do to improve things for women everywhere. An indictment of society, however, is different from indicting the game and its makers. The sad reality is that to make an equivalent for “bitch”, writer Paul Dini would have had to make words up, which wouldn’t have rang true anyway.

Honestly, faced with this, I would have preferred that the makers of Arkham City would have left out the word entirely. And probably “douchebag”, too. I would also have preferred that Catwoman was fully zipped up because not only is that kind of loose cleavage incompatible with acrobatics, but also because the game takes place during winter and it just looks cold. Also, it’s cheap and unworthy of what is in many other ways a very good game. I tend to try and avoid having to notice the front of her outfit and the ensuing discomfort by keeping the camera centred behind Selina at all times.

I know the game is rated T for Teen, and that the makers wanted to have it look “real” and “gritty”, but I think the game would have been fine without the inclusion of a word that upsets people who legitimately want to enjoy a game featuring characters they love. It doesn’t have to be appropriate for kids (though there should be more games and comics that are), but Rocksteady, the game’s developer, should have realized the negative reaction that part of the game has had. It can look “real” without being “reality”, you know?

I think it was a mistake to include the word “bitch” in Batman: Arkham City because it is such a gendered term with very unpleasant connotations. I also think it was a mistake that was made worse by the repetitive nature of nameless villains’ sound bytes in video games, which not only presents the unpopular term but also adds grating repetition to it. People are very understandably uncomfortable with it; hell, I am uncomfortable and I am not even someone who has to deal with that word being used against me on an ongoing basis. However, I think it was just a mistake, one that was easy to make because it in some ways is so contextually appropriate for the game as it was designed. I don’t think the game is sexist and I don’t think its developers are sexist. Moreover, I think it’s important not to call them sexist so readily because it automatically kills any rational discussion just like calling someone a Nazi does [Ed. Note: Is this a Meta-Godwin’s Law?]. Name-calling is the nuclear option of debate; it fucks things up beyond salvation. There’s no rational debate with someone like Film Critic Hulk, and rational debate is what is needed. Calling a developer sexist shuts down most hope of change. Even if a developer is sexist, they probably don’t see themselves as it. They probably think they are alright people who try to do a good job and calling them a bad person will hurt them, make them angry or both. I think a discussion needs to happen, both in popular media and in culture in general, about the very real problems we face. It needs to be a discussion, though, because if we are busy drawing lines across the apartment we’re just writing bad I Love Lucy fanfic instead of solving anything.

I am loving most of Batman: Arkham City. It has a fantastically well-designed and well-realized environment, top-notch voice acting and exciting gameplay that makes you feel like you are Batman and Catwoman, and that is just awesome. I like that it doesn’t make Selina helpless; in fact, the worrying part of the trailer that showed her tied up and at the mercy of Two Face is, thankfully, followed in the game by her freeing herself without any help other than the distraction of Batman getting shot in the head. It is not a perfect game, and it raises gender politics in a way that I think could have and should have been left out. Luckily, whenever someone calls me a bitch in it I can absolutely wreck them, and that feels pretty good.

Plus, it’s nowhere near as problematic as the Catwoman short animated film that comes with Batman: Year One.