Today’s Vintage Chess Humor

Gender Benders

The sixties were a time of much social upheaval in America and Europe. The traditional role of women in the work place was being questioned openly for the first time. Women’s liberation was just beginning to take off.

Fifty years later you had better be careful of how you behave in the presence of a woman…social media has become a powerful tool in calling out old fashioned sexism. 

Has the chess world changed with the times? Not withstanding the fact that many more women play chess today than decades before, has female stereotyping in the chess community been reduced correspondingly?

I believe that there is the answer we would all want to hear (the politically correct one), and then there is the truth.

FIDE openly embraces the spicy ‘Blondes versus Brunettes‘ tournament held in Moscow each year, and yet argues that one of its biggest priorities is the promotion of chess to school children as young as 6 years old.

Sounds like some hypocrisy here? And how does FIDE explain to 6 year olds and their parents that boys play with boys and girls play with girls while all the time promoting gender equality?

I think that FIDE has not kept up with the times, and still makes full use of double standards whenever gender issues are involved.

Separate female ‘grandmaster’ titles, ‘special’ female prizes and conditions and what not on the one hand…and on the other hand FIDE simultaneously trying to align with Judy Polgar and her laudable female ‘empowerment‘ movement?

What is going on? You do not ’empower’ any group that already has ‘special’ status unless you first take that ‘special-ness’ away. That ‘special-ness’ is their handicap. The empowerment can only follow their independence of it.

But FIDE won’t even discuss these contradictions here! When was the last time you heard a FIDE officer mention the word ‘SEXISM’? It is forbidden  to discuss this in FIDE? … You wonder why? It is good for business! FIDE makes money from double standards!