I think the fact that people make such a big deal out of this is more unintentionally "sexist" than the game itself. Male video game characters have been flaunting their sexuality for years, but no one says a peep about it because most gamers are men and they don't think about it. Case in-point, pervy comments about the player character's ass abound while playing as Lara Croft or Jill Valentine, while no one even seems to notice (except jokingly) while playing as Solid Snake. There are extremely sexually charged characters like Dante in video games (say, Devil May Cry and Bayonetta were created by the same guy, what a mysterious coincidence), but no one raises a stink about them.
It's a cultural problem. Sexually confident male characters are normal while sexually confident female characters make men feel uncomfortable. We don't know how to react to them because they're uncommon. We think we're supposed to be upset and cry sexism.
Meanwhile, this has been the norm for male characters for a long time and I think Bayonetta is a pioneer for female video game characters. Take a look at that last picture, maybe you're familiar with it. It's obscene, it's from one of the most disgusting video games ever committed to cartridge (or disc). I also think it's fairly representative of many game scenarios: the man is the protagonist, the woman is a sex object. Obviously most games as a whole cannot be boiled down to such a simple equation, which is why that one stands out as an abomination. But there are many individual scenes in video games (and all media) in which this is the case. The problem is that there are very few reverse examples of this, where the sexually agressive protagonist is a woman.
Check that Asura's Wrath picture again, it's from the hot springs episode. That's a clear case of objectifying female characters in video games, right? But the men are also naked. They aren't being objectified even though they're naked. They are the characters you are meant to relate to, they are the aggressors. They are the ones doing the objectifying. Bayonetta is that character, she's just a woman, and (as far as I'm aware) there are no male characters in her games to take the place of those hot spring attendants as the 'sex objects.' Just because she's naked and flaunting her sexuality (as many male characters have done in many video games) doesn't mean that she's being objectified or that it's sexist. I think it's just the opposite.
It's hard to convey all of this, I hope I've gotten my thoughts across articulately enough.
