lisa has a lot to say about gender (or, rather, assigned gender, as non-cis people aren't referenced. for the sake of simplicity i'll just be using "gender".), and for a male-dominated story it actually has very little good to say about men. almost all of them are painted as savages who allowed modern society to completely collapse with the absence of women. we don't really know how much time passed between the flash and the scene where brad and his friends are all living in what looks like a mud hut, but because of buddy's age, it can't be more than a few months after the flash (presuming buddy was born at the exact moment her mother died, but there are potentially surviving women, but i just won't go there for now). so, we can assume that it didn't take long for everything, at least in olathe and its surrounding areas, to fall apart.
what does that say about men, that months or even days without women is all it took for modern society to just stop existing? it's terribly sad when a loved one dies, and it makes sense that some people would withdraw from the world with the loss of their mothers, sisters, wives, daughters, and friends. but the men of lisa are so blatantly sex-crazed that the implication is that not having anyone to fuck drove them nuts, which is a very poor opinion of men.
men, just like people of all genders, are multifaceted people, and it's misandrist to reduce men to the harmful stereotype that men are always horny and always wanna fuck. it falls into gender essentialism, which comes with a big dose of predetermination, and it conveniently ignores asexual men and men who are survivors of sexual assault. there's this idea expressed often by so-called "alpha males" and those who defend rapists that men have a deep intense primal urge to BONE and that they're entitled to it, especially if a woman has made herself "available" (existing near them and minding her own business). this is wrong on many levels that i won't go into here, but the point of this section is explaining the stereotype of men as sex-crazed horny maniacs, and that's how a lot of men are portrayed in lisa.
the misogyny goes hand in hand with the misandry. men fit the stereotype of being too horny to live, and everyone is after buddy because...y'know, which reduces buddy (and women in general) down to their bodies existing as sexual objects for men to pursue. i do think that some of the men are after her for political power, but it's impossible to deny that much of the dialogue implies wanting her sexually. we don't know how old she is, but i personally headcanon her as around 13 based on her behavior, and all we know for sure is she is not an adult. so, the idea of men lusting after her is pretty gross. age of consent aside, since it wouldn't even exist in this society, i don't think it's controversial to say that adults wanting to fuck children is disgusting. not only are men horny maniacs, many are also willing pedophiles, not necessarily because buddy is a child, but because they view her as a sexual object to the extent that they don't care how old she is.
this also loops back to where it all started, with lisa being a victim of child sexual assault and how it destroyed her life and affected everyone around her. it's pretty clear that brad sees buddy as a lisa proxy, so it makes sense that he would go axe crazy at the idea of buddy being sexually assaulted. the only misogyny i see with brad is a kind of "dad misogyny", but this is also pretty easily explained away by the realities of the world buddy grows up in. brad insisting that buddy wear her mask, stay inside, learn to fight, etc. isn't because he thinks girls can't protect themselves, he just knows that this girl absolutely needs to. despite his best intentions, brad is also guilty of dehumanizing her, albeit in a much less disgusting way. at least initially, he saw her as a way to redeem himself, not as a child who will one day be her own person. this girl is also in constant danger of being assaulted, but at least he can prevent it from happening this time.
i am a pretty fervent Brad Apologist TM but i will absolutely recognize that even if he didn't physically abuse buddy it's very likely that substance abuse affected how he treated her. but i'll always think that brad's intentions were always correct. hiding buddy away was always the only sensible option. acting like any other option wouldn't lead to her being sexually assaulted ignores how men in this universe behave. acting like freeing her is because she's the savior of the human race also ignores their behavior AND conveniently forgets that if she really is the only girl left on the planet, there would just be a lot of fucked up incest babies. there is no way to save the human race. acting like she is somehow their savior is an extremely poor mask for the true, really gross desire others have for her. buddy is not some divine gift, she's a person. and there's a lot of misogyny in not treating a woman like a person.
*i am not accusing game dev austin jorgensen of misogyny or misandry. i do not know how he views men or women and won't make assumptions based on this work of fiction.
the most obvious and most heartbreaking canonical and metatextual theme of lisa is intergenerational abuse - that is, abuse that is passed on from parent to child and so on. watching brad act like marty and buddy act like brad shows that abuse left marks that did not disappear and was never dealt with properly, leading it to affect the next generation. dustin is included in some of these scenarios but not all, at least in canon. there are a few ways this theme is visibly evident in canon, so i'll go over those first.
the first is substance abuse. we learn pretty early on that marty is an alcoholic; the bar full of marty's in first, the bottles scattered around in the opening scene and the island scene in painful, and the one ending of painful where marty forces young brad to drink alcohol. the logical reason for there being alcohol all over the place in post-flash olathe is that it's sterile, but there is clean water available if you pump enough for it. men are sad, they're angry, they're hopeless, they drink. we know that brad took recreational painkillers before the flash so it's easy to assume he was drinking during that time too, and early on in painful we see him passed out with joy and bottles, so we know he's been abusing drugs and alcohol for a long time. buddy, who witnessed how drugs and alcohol affected brad as she grew up, chooses to take joy and (probably) drink alcohol anyway. just as brad self medicated to forget about trauma and try to escape his pain, so does buddy. i wonder if, canonically, she recognizes this. there is no evidence of substance abuse with dustin.
the second is physical violence. we know that marty sexually abused lisa, and he has no problem with hurting brad, depriving him of necessities, and verbally abusing him, and he may have sexually abused him as well. brad became a martial artist and spends the vast majority of painful beating the shit out of people, and he taught buddy how to fight and kill. dustin is also an accomplished martial artist and the leader of a gang, a position that has probably required violence, and buddy enthusiastically kills a lot of people with a big sword. we don't know what drove marty to violence, but brad's violence is a sort of post-hoc trauma reaction he directs towards anyone he perceives as a threat (any marty proxy to buddy's lisa proxy - so most men, really), and buddy's was initially out of necessity but then became part of her crusade, and she seems ambivalent to violence and may even enjoy it.
i like how buddy and dustin's reactions to their trauma and pain are contrasted but neither is given a bias. society likes to judge survivors of trauma, and values some survivors over others; it likes those who don't speak up, who are "strong", who move past it and don't kick up a fuss, when it likes them at all. but expecting survivors of traumatic events to just deal with it results in poorer mental health for them and for those around them, too. all survivors deserve help and resources, even the loud, messy, aggressive ones, because if they got help, maybe they wouldn't be aggressive. dustin's non-violent, passive trauma response(s) differ from buddy's violent, active trauma response(s), but the narrative doesn't necessarily frame either of them as the "correct" way to respond. after all, dustin dies, and buddy survives, in one way or another
there is nuance there, of course, as buddy is the one of the two who is a child being constantly hunted and threatened with sexual and non-sexual violence, so it makes sense that she would have a much more pessimistic and aggressive response to threats. whether or not you agree with her quest in joyful, her actions are very easily justified by the depictions of the people and the world, and by what they did to her. when most of the men in this universe are sex crazed rapists because that's part of the narrative, of course it makes sense for buddy to believe that killing them is the only option.
consider brad's trauma response, too. like his daughter after him, his trauma drove him to substance abuse. his quest in painful is just him committing tons of violence, a lot of which is hardly justified in-game or metatextually.