The flawed beliefs about gender that Dan Houser, Michael Unsworth, and Rupert Humphries demonstrate through RDR2 harm their efforts to write characters of both the genders the game depicts. They dismiss the women and damn the men rather than allow them to act in ways the Western codes as feminine. If they were able to understand that women are not lesser beings, perhaps their minds would be broad enough to imagine other endings for their male characters. But they aren't: women are not written well in RDR2.
Homophobia often shares roots with misogyny: patriarchal constructs define male homosexuality as inherently feminine, which patriarchy believes is bad, because, naturally, women are less than, other, prone to evil, etc. Rockstar's portrayals of women in Red Dead Redemption 2 don't significantly diverge from this viewpoint.
Paradise Lost and Arthurian legend are both so steeped in misogyny that removing it would transform either work unrecognizably. Eve, as Milton infamously writes her, is a dim-witted, sexy doll, if a doll could also be evil. This conception of Eve connects directly to the chivalric treatment of women. Many people take offense at the idea that chivalry is misogynistic because they think of it as “being nice to women,” when its real function is to infantilize and patronize women based on the presupposition that they are lesser beings that must be guided and taken care of – Eves who must be protected from their own sinful nature.
