Today’s Vintage Chess Humor
Unlikely Attractions
An old ChessReview sketch from the 1960’s. In those days there were almost no females playing the game in North America and so it was quite natural that a pretty woman and a chess set were seen as an awkward, even unnatural, fit. This gave rise to lots of hilarious comedy sketches…
Fast forward to 2020 and how times have changed. The chess world is now in the midst of some sort of polarizing, artificial sexual revolution! This is very different from the chess world that I joined back in 1970!
Girls only play with girls. Boys only with boys. BUT sometimes — if the girls want to — they can play with the boys. Not the other way around. ABSURD!
HOW DID THIS COME ABOUT?
Starting in the early 1980’s FIDE began to enthusiastically embrace a culture of sexist ideology. Within just a few short years, tens of thousands of females were playing chess…but ONLY against OTHER females!
The FIDE president, the controversial Florencio Campomanes, is the architect of this controversial system. Florencio is also guilty of introducing many other radical changes in how chess is promoted.
Including randomly changing the rules and regulations for World Championships every cycle until it became unrecognizable and even unpredictable. Numerous scandals broke out, but Campomanes loved to respond to critics that as long as people talk about chess it does not matter if it is positive or negative for its image!
Some of these autocratic changes resulted in the chess world practically being split in half in 1993 when World Champion Kasparov decided to leave FIDE and form a separate organization.
Today in 2020, FIDE organizers are making millions of dollars from youth events that are segregated along sexual lines and paid for by parents who are unwittingly supporting a sophisticated policy of sexual discrimination.
There is a darker side to this ‘deal with the devil” . FIDE has sold it’s soul. Today there is an artificial gender barrier in chess that threatens to destroy the very credibilty of this ancient game.
Little by little, people are beginning to question why girls should play chess with other girls, and not with boys.
Women players today have different grandmaster titles, norms and requirements than men. Women often receive special conditions when they play, superior to what men are acustomed to receiving.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to defend this. I am talking about the very definition of sexual discrimination.
And worse, FIDE has allowed other abuses to flourish without any checks and balances. For example, a popular chess event in Russia witnesses the colour of pubic hair as a criteria for participation in a women’s tournament! (See links below for more information)
Of course, all of this is very controversial (as today sexual discrimination is frowned up) but most of the top female players in the world would agree 100% with what I have written above!
I suggest the reader who is new to this topic do some research on this via Google. Below are just a few articles that have appeared here on this blog…
