Anyway, the meme that boys at the time commonly viewed Lara Croft as "sex object" is absurd. We did not. Sorry to say it like that, but that's just some feminists like Goulet being a bit paranoid. Boys would have fantasized about someone like Jennifer Lopez, not Lara Croft.
You may not have, but everyone else did. Designer Toby Gard literally designed her to appeal sexually to male gamers in order to offset the fear that they otherwise wouldn't want to play a female main character. Early Lara Croft had ridiculous proportions. Her outfit is a t-shirt and booty shorts, for goodness' sake. Gamers of the time were obsessed with the idea of a "Nude Raider" cheat.
https://gaming-urban-legends.fandom.com/wiki/Nude_Raider
"Ever since Tomb Raider's release, its heroine, Lara Croft, has been seen as a major sex symbol in the video game industry, and that has been a large focus of the franchise's marketing."
Surely there have been incremental instances of this before and after Tomb Raider was released, so choose your profile photo, build your avvie, and have at it.
Of course they will keep finding new details or interpretations to complain about.
’On the other hand, the same male gamers had for years been seeing images of almost equally unattainable masculine perfection on their screens, all bulging biceps and chiseled abs. How was this different? Many sensed that it was different, somehow, but few could articulate why. Michelle Goulet of the website Game Girlz perhaps said it best: Lara was “the man’s ideal image of a girl, not a girl’s ideal image of a girl.” The inverse was not true of all those warrior hunks: they were “based on the body image that is ideal to a lot of guys, not girls. They are nowhere near my ideal man.” The male gaze, that is to say, was the arbiter in both cases.’
For the same reason it is absurd for feminists like Goulet to demand changing Lara Croft. Those feminists weren't in the main audience in the first place. They could have ignored Tomb Raider like most guys ignored Sailor Moon.
