Sony’s releasing a game called Fat Princess for PSN in the coming months. It’s a spin on capture the flag where, instead of a flag, you’re trying to rescue a fat princess. The spin is that it takes the work of your whole team, up to 15 players, to carry her back to your base.

So this premise upset some feminists who said that the game will, “reinforce nasty stereotypes about women and the obese.”

Jim Sterling, of the gaming blog Destructiod, recently responded to the anger of Feminist Gamers by saying, “Proving that you can’t dare to say or do anything these days without it offending someone, a bunch of gamer feminists are up in arms over the ‘fat-bashing’ PSN game, Fat Princess.”

Jim, like most dimwitted commentators (i.e. Rush Limbaugh), relies heavily on shock humor to get attention. During an episode of Podcastle, a video game podcast, called “the Controversial Episode” he said, referring to Black oppression: “You do not get Jewish people coasting through life with entitlement complexes because they were oppressed. And that was more recent.”

Not true. But go on.

“My theory is that offense is a choice. You can choose to be offended by something or you can choose not to be offended by something. You can make a racial joke and have some black people be okay with it, and some people decide to get all uppity about it.”

Hmmm…uppity may have been a poor word choice Jim. The fact is, Sterling doesn’t have a sense of historical context when talking about racial or sexual politics. If he did, he’d realize that Blacks have dealt with systemic racism, since slavery and colonization, that puts them at a social disadvantage to Whites. Women, similarly, have dealt with patriarchy for what seems like eternity and still struggle for equality to men.

(And Atheistium’s comment, in the same episode, that “we don’t have White history month” is just outright moronic. Don’t you know that every month is White history month?)

Sterling can’t pick on someone his own size and win. When Sterling was faced with an intellectual (I’m using this term lightly) debate with Jack Thompson, he got crushed. He relied on his “offense is a choice” argument and managed to lose to a right-wing lunatic.

I won’t ever play Fat Princess. Not because I’m offended by its premise (I’m not), but because I have no interest in saving royalty. Let her get fat. In fact, off with her head! We can redistribute her gold among the serfs. Also, anything involving fat people is funny, so it’s hard to get too upset. Case in point:

The Feminist Gamers where just making a valid point that women are poorly treated in video games. They’re either a damsel in distress, an all-boob-no-waist Lara Croft, or a hero’s weak-point love interest that’s held hostage by a villain. It was Jim who decided to get “uppity,” since he’s oppression-free, not the Feminist Gamers.