1. I love The Witcher. I've loved these games since the first one (which I bought and played at launch), and I'm currently playing through The Witcher 3 and savoring every moment. It's fantastic.
2. I think the world The Witcher depicts is a deeply patriarchal and misogynistic one, which accords with what we know about both medieval and modern society. This is okay. Depiction of patriarchal and misogynistic societies is not only (mostly, I guess; it's complicated) unproblematic, it's kind of the norm. The Witcher does cast a critical eye at times over some of these problematic aspects, and it certainly makes it clear that the world of The Witcher is a very, very bad place to be a woman.
3. Beyond what it depicts as its milieu, yes, The Witcher is a sexist game. It has an extremely and aggressively male gaze. It is beyond obvious that the people making it are heterosexual, cisgender men who are largely unthinking about the blinkers of their (majority) perspective. For example, it features consequence-free, uncritical and deliberately titillating prostitution that has no gameplay or plot value, and which does almost nothing to examine the status and conditions of medieval prostitutes (which were abysmal). Many, many women in the game are presented salaciously for reasons that have nothing to do with plot, characterization or gameplay. We're talking about game developers that turned (largely consequence-free, uncritical) sexual encounters into collectible cards in the first game. Yes, they've moved past that, but the game is still jam-packed with subtle sexism that many players won't even notice or consider, so inured are they to sexism and their sexist perspective.
4. The marketing of The Witcher games has consistently leaned on sexist, male-gaze tropes to draw in its (overwhelmingly heterosexual, cisgender, male) audience. Looks like Cyberpunk will, too! This isn't necessarily CDProjekt's fault, but it is tacky and lame.
5. All of this is pretty standard for the games industry and for the world we live in in 2016. I don't think The Witcher 3 is much worse in these respects than most games or other popular art. And it's actually smarter and more nuanced about women and gender and sex than many other videogames and its own source material. Admittedly, that is a very, very low bar to clear. It still sort of sucks at those things. We're making progress, though.
Great post. The majority of people are blind to this stuff and are more concerned about being accused of playing a sexist game than to actually evaluate the game itself. I mean, look how hostile some of the posters are.