Can’t we women just have spaces and places for ourselves? I think that is even more important than rankings.
No man can ever be a woman and can ever begin to understand what it’s like to be a women. And no one ever asked women if we wanted men barging in and treating women as “therapy dogs” for men who want to be women.
The law of unintended consequences bites again. Many have noted that trans is something the radfems brought down on their own heads. Claim equality between the sexes and there's no need for women's spaces, is there? The trans-positive feminists are at least sticking to the logic of their doctrine whereas the TERFS are trying to have their equality and their special status at the same time.
Here we go again ... “us verses them.” Trans-positive and the Turfs. We are a sad spoof of “Westside Story.” We are better than this regressed banter. Love>fear
Some say that, the chattering classes being entirely secure in terms of real issues like food and shelter, there's nothing to strive for/against and thus there's the need to invent trouble -- monkeys being, as they are, natural trouble makers. Good times make weak men. Weak men make bad times. As the saying goes.
"No man can ever be a woman and can ever begin to understand what it’s like to be a women."
And yet we've endured a century of feminism claiming sex is a social construct and feminists know exactly what it's like to be a man, because they know men are toxic and oppressive to women.
In fact patriarchy theory (the default treatise on men and women, which is taught in schools, defines our laws and informs every institution all the way up to the UN) defines men as PSYCHOPATHS. Only a psychopath would systematically oppress his own mother, sisters, daughters and wife ... which is what feminist theory asserts.
When it comes to respecting 'spaces' we need to recognise that feminism has never respected the 'space' that is the male psyche. Feminism tells men who and what they are (toxic oppressors, misogynists, would-be rapists etc) ... and that's before all the lesser invasions of male spaces (male social clubs, boy scouts, traditionally male careers etc).
If we have mixed sex competitive chess nobody will die. But pandering to feminists' gender bending LARPing, such as demanding the physical requirements to be a firefighter be lowered so they can be let into the service DOES cost lives. As many veteran firefighters have said, female firefighters cannot shoulder down a door and carry an unconscious adult from a burning building.
"no one ever asked women if we wanted men barging in and treating women as “therapy dogs” for men who want to be women."
Children also never asked to be abandoned in 'day abandonment centres' so that their mothers could compete with men in workforce. The effects on childhood (and therefore society) of mothers rejecting the role (the responsibility) of motherhood (while at the same time having children) is literally destroying society.
We chastise men for being deadbeat dads, but a women who abandons her children so she can have a 'fulfilling career' is a dead beat mother by the same criteria that we judge men by. And yet we celebrate such women for abandoning their parenting responsibilities.
On balance, men have been far more accommodating than women over the last century when it comes to having their spaces and their identities trampled on (and appropriated) by the opposite sex.... so much so that we can blame men for being TOO accommodating and not maintaining proper boundaries. Men's willingness to let women appropriate masculinity and put on 'male face' (just watch any Hollywood movie) has been detrimental to men, women, children and society as a whole.
Men are hard wired to self sacrifice and give women whatever they ask. But in a post industrial world this tendency (which used to ensure our survival as a species) is now just inviting women to be entitled narcissists.
The patriarchy's motto "Women and children first" somehow morphed into "he for she". One is traditionalism, the other is female entitlement.
And yes - as others have said - feminism's 'social construct' theory of gender has brought us to the current madness. Today's 'radical trans ideology' is just feminism carried out with hormones and surgery.
Feminism's demand for 'gender equality' and constant moaning about how oppressive female biology is has paved the way for the current solution of de-gendering the youth and erasing gender from our culture, our language and even from human physiology. 'Gender equality' will be reached when gender has been completely erased from the human race.
It should be clear by now that feminism was always a vehicle for transhumanism.
"Children also never asked to be abandoned in 'day abandonment centres' so that their mothers could compete with men in workforce."
That's not quite fair. My niece just but little Bo in daycare tho it breaks her heart because, like most working people these days, she can't put a roof over her head without both her and her husband working full time and even then it's tight.
"she can't put a roof over her head without both her and her husband working full time and even then it's tight."
I sympathise. And I accept that this is the norm for most couples (parents) today. But the reason why it's now the norm is that feminism enticed women out of the home and into the paid workforce with the promise of 'having it all'. But this was a lie.
Before feminism devalued the labour force a blue collar husband could afford to support an entire family on his wages alone, allowing mothers to provide full time care to their own children. Today this is a privilege only available to wealthy people.
What feminism called 'oppression' and 'enslavement of women' was actually the most beneficial arrangement for women and children. It gave women OPTIONS that simply are not available to most women today (as you point out).
Sure, there are compromises, but the 'fulfilling careers' that feminism promised women are a myth. Most women don't have fulfilling careers, they just have gruelling jobs (just like most men have).
A lot of younger women today are realising that a far better arrangement is to marry young (while you're hot enough to attract a high quality man), and squeeze out some kids while you are fit, healthy and fertile. And then after the kids are becoming less dependent (8+) start your higher education and/ or business enterprises then, which still leaves you a good 30+ years for a career. This is much more sensible than aiming for that 'fulfilling career' in your 20's and then trying to squeeze in marriage and kids as an afterthought - while potentially dealing with a loss of fertility (and loss of sexual market value) because you left it all too late.
But I agree, the current depreciation of wages and doubling of taxes (thanks to feminism) makes everything much harder these days.
What feminism failed to mention is that men's relationships to work is different to women's. Men can do a shitty or highly demanding job and still be rewarded by his ability to attract and support a wife and family. But for women the same ambition means having to sacrifice having a family, and make yourself less appealing to men.
Take a hugely successful (by feminist standards) woman like Emma Watson. She's made loads of money, she's super famous and has high social status. But no (decent quality) man is interested in her because she's hit the wall and is full of feminist baggage (and at least a dozen failed relationships that we know of). She's successful by male standards, not female standards. This is a problem as she is a woman, not a man.
A man of similar economic/ social status as Watson (who's 30 now) would easily be able to attract a high quality women in her mid twenties who wants to be a full time mother and wants to be supported by his money.
The feminist dream works for men...... but not for women. Feminist ideology assumes women are the same as men, but this is simply not true.
> Before feminism devalued the labour force a blue collar husband could afford to support an entire family on his wages alone, allowing mothers to provide full time care to their own children.
That was certainly the case in the 70s and we are told that productivity -- which should equal wealth creation -- is now 3X greater, yet we now need both parents working to even get close to the same standard of living. I submit that this is proof that (using simplistic arithmetic) 5/6 of the wealth that a couple now earn is going into pockets other than their own. Irrespective of women 'undermining' the labor market, *production is production!* What is produced must be consumed. If six times more is being produced (3X2), but the producers are only consuming 1/6 of that (standard of living is the same), it would seem to be mathematically necessary that 5/6 is going somewhere else. So who's wealth is going up, astronomically? The plutocracy. And, yes, governments suck up more money every year too. But the poor? Always blamed, but their drain on the economy is going down and is low anyway.
As to reproductive affairs I agree with you completely.
> That was certainly the case in the 70s and we are told that productivity -- which should equal wealth creation -- is now 3X greater, yet we now need both parents working to even get close to the same standard of living.
I think that's mostly a consequence of inflation since we got of the gold standard.
But what is produced is produced irrespective of the medium of exchange. If the entire economy consisted of apple pies, and I used to make ten a day and eat ten a day, but now I make 60, yet still only eat ten, then something's fishy. Who's eating the other 50?
Ive been a feminist my whole life and I figured out in 5th grade women aren't as strong. Don't lump everyone who cares about women's rights into the same bucket.
And I've witnessed plenty of men's spaces that are not intruded upon because men can kill women with their bare hands in seconds and, partly for good reasons, we are legally limited in our ability to acquire technology to defend ourselves. The result is that women, including trans identified women who look like men, instinctively know to avoid men's spaces.
I'll bet you believe that men are ridiculously stronger than women and ridiculously more prone to violent crimes against women than vice versa.
Yet I'm getting the feeling you feel threatened somehow about not having your own spaces?
"Ive been a feminist my whole life and I figured out in 5th grade women aren't as strong. Don't lump everyone who cares about women's rights into the same bucket."
Feminist ideology lumps all men in the same bucket by defining men as an oppressor class (patriarchy, toxic masculinity, rape culture etc).
Feminists literally define oppression, hardship and suffering as a masculine force (patriarchy). Intersectional feminists also like to talk about 'whiteness'. The original feminists from the late 1800's were also openly racist.
Feminism over the last 150 years has been nothing but lumping people into one bucket based on their race, sex, sexual orientation etc ("cis white heterorormative men" etc).
And let's not forget feminist theory also defines the category 'women' as oppressed, completely ignoring all the unique ways women specifically have power and privilege that men will never have, and all the women who enjoy those privileges and powers and are not the least bit oppressed.
By just about every metric men score lower than women in terms of standard of living (homelessness, suicide, life expectancy, access to welfare and socialised services, sentencing, child custody, reproductive autonomy) yet the narrative remains fixed that women = oppressed and men = privileged, based on the 0.00001% of men who are millionaire CEO's (and ignoring their privileged wives enjoying lives of leisure, because these kinds of women don't fit feminism's victim narrative).
Nothing lumps men and women into buckets more than feminism does.
Feminism (a broad ideology) is also not the same as 'women's rights' (a specific cause). Feminism was always a distinct movement completely separate to the Women's Rights Movement - that is, until feminism appropriated the WRM (just as they appropriated gay and racial issues and their respective movements too).
Feminism is a ideology (patriarchy theory etc) which hides behind 'women's rights' which is itself misrepresented in terms of 'gender equality'. Gender equality means equality BETWEEN men and women, and not 'women's rights'. When feminists talk of 'women's rights' they invariably mean 'women's privileges' (demands for special treatment, free stuff etc).
Feminist theory has done much to dumb down and misrepresent the issue of rights as they relate to gender. For a start feminists fail to mention that men's rights tended to be CONDITIONAL, such as being granted voting rights in return for agreeing to be cannon fodder (the draft). Feminists/ suffragettes fought for voting rights for women with no such obligations, thus they were fighting for (and won) female privilege over men.
For a century women have been able to vote for wars that only men were obligated to fight in. That's blatant female privilege, not gender equality.
The suffra-gettes were distinct from suffra-gists who were fighting for women AND men to have voting rights. Many men still did not have any voting rights at the time - another point passed over by feminist revisionist history.
Feminism is about putting all women in a bucket and labelling it 'oppressed victims with no agency' and putting all men in a bucket and labelling it 'all powerful oppressors with full agency'.
"And I've witnessed plenty of men's spaces that are not intruded upon because men can kill women with their bare hands in seconds"
This is just playing the victim. Men killing women with their bare hands is murder, and has always been treated as such. Everyone knows men are more strong than women which makes women more vulnerable in hand to hand combat. Everyone knows that! That's why men hitting women has always been a massive social taboo. Only feminists act as if men hitting women was normalised. The reality is the opposite. Women assaulting men is still viewed as a trivial matter, or even comedic as many social experiments have demonstrated.
The universal recognition of women's fragility relative to men gives women a social and legal advantage over men (and advantage you just tried to exploit). A woman only has to accuse her husband of DV and she can have him forcibly removed from the house, and denied access to his own children. This is all written into the law, based on the feminist Duluth criteria (women = victim/ men = aggressor by default, regardless of the evidence). Police advise male victims of DV to just run out the house when being beaten up by their frying pan wielding wives (rather than try to defend themselves), because if she so much as breaks a fingernail or gets a scratch on her face HE is the one going to jail.
Male/ female power is FAR more complex and nuanced than brute physical strength. Feminism has wrecked society with its dumbed down model. One of the reason's why (some) trans women have started to being so obnoxious and anti social in public is that they are copying a level of entitlement that was normalised by feminists over recent years. They simply assume female affectations will give them a free pass when it comes to acting entitled - because that is how modern 'empowered' women so often behave these days, and it generally works.
"we are legally limited in our ability to acquire technology to defend ourselves."
Every facet of our society, culture and legal system is geared to wards protecting women from harm. It was feminists who demanded an end to chaperones, marriage, chivalry, parental vetting of boyfriends/ husbands, strict social etiquette for dating, and many other conventions DESIGNED SPECIFICALLY to protect women from harm, from male predation and from the consequences of their own heady sexual desires and impulses.
Feminists said "we don't want any of those protections - we want to live dangerously". Then after a few decades feminists complained that living dangerously was traumatising (duh!) and that women needed more protection again. The best protection is to be sensible. But I suppose we could put an electric collar around all men and give you the remote so you can kill them instantly? Is that what you mean by technology?
"The result is that women, including trans identified women who look like men, instinctively know to avoid men's spaces."
I don't know what you are referring to here. But in general men have been very accommodating to feminists wanting females to join the boy scouts, men's social clubs and traditionally male workplace environments. Often women feel harassed simply because they are treated the same way that men treat each other, which is a lot more harsh than how men treat women. But it was feminists who wanted gender equality and an end to chivalry and patriarchy.
In general non feminist women seem to get on a lot easier with men and know how to respect their boundaries, and this respect is reciprocated by men.
It's the inappropriate dismantling of gendered boundaries (in the name of 'equality') that seems to lead to dysfunction and conflict. But this dismantling of traditional gender roles, spaces and identities, is what feminists have always fought for.
"I'll bet you believe that men are ridiculously stronger than women and ridiculously more prone to violent crimes against women than vice versa."
Both men and women are strong enough to inflict serious or even lethal damage to each other. Violent people (of either sex) are most likely to have been raised by single mothers with an absent father. Feminism fought for single motherhood to be de-stigmatised and incentivised by welfare. As a result we now have extremely violent and dysfunctional neighbourhoods wherever single motherhood is prevalent.
The best way to end violence against women (and men) is to raise children in a stable, loving home with both mother and biological father present and actively involved in the children's upbringing. No daycare. And preferably homeschooled. The data is very clear on this.
"Yet I'm getting the feeling you feel threatened somehow about not having your own spaces?"
I believe men and women are happier when they have their own spaces. It also makes sharing spaces more fun too. This is what traditional gender identities provided.
Feminism's 'social construct' theory of gender defined men and women as essentially the same, and gender to be arbitrary social conditioning which must be dismantled. But after several generations of living in each other's pockets, and trying to compete in a unisex culture, I think it's safe to say 'social construct' theory has been disproven. It's just caused misery, trauma, social breakdown and a completely unnecessary and pointless battle of the sexes.
You're making up these straw feminists and congratulating yourself on your righteousness but they aren't accurate. I'm a drill sergeant feminist. Im the only one I know of..it basically involves telling women to quit being such damn wimps and sellouts. Drill sergeant feminists are reviled by men and women alike as they blame women equally. Actually more so.. Trying to light a fire under the troops.
It is incredibly ineffective.
My point is that people who fall under the category of "wish women were higher in status" come in many flavors. More flavors and possibilities than a Vietnamese restaurant combined with a Cheesecake Factory. (Have you seen the menus at those places? So many pages.)
But I'm starting to think that all meninists have one thing to say... "you feminists think this" while pointing out a mix beliefs that has so little to do with my actual beliefs of myself or anyone I know that it's impossible to take offense.
This is very interesting. As a long-time corporate manager having worked with many intelligent and capable men and women, and as a near human behavior scientists from all the education I have pursued on the topic to help me unravel the puzzles of workforce performance and achievement, my observation has been that everyone is different with respect to what I call their basic foundational brain wiring… with much of the negative aspects able to be overcome with practice and persistence and maybe some therapy. Jordan Peterson might label it personality, but I see another layer of cognitive function that is influenced by personality but is malleable.
But the stronger the foundation brain wiring is, the more difficult is overcoming it… the less malleable it is.
And my observation for females in general is that their brain wiring tends to cause them to value more group affiliation and less individual competition. I suspect this is biological… probably evolutionary. It is not impossible to overcome, but many female bosses, coworkers and employees really struggled with it. For example, they would not speak up in a team meeting even though they had an important contribution preferring instead to not cause conflict with a coworker. They would refuse a promotion where their coworker friends would report to them (management is lonely).
I think this tendency to focus on the human aspect of things causes a difficulty to contemplate the big picture of challenge or opportunity. The female brain is thinking “how will everyone including me feel about this thing?” vs “what can I do to get this thing accomplished?”. This might be a subtle difference, but in the dog-eat-dog world of high competition, it is often the competitive disadvantage.
Obviously there are many competitive female athletes. But I agree that there is an imbalance of competitiveness. Males more often see individual competition as a requirement. Their MO is to completely destroy the competition but, if moral, respect the competition. Females more often have internal noise in consideration for how their competition and others might feel about them destroying the competition. This difference works when females are competing with females and visa versa, but is fraught with challenges when genders compete with each other.
A very thoughtful response. I agree with what you say. On the other hand, when it comes to chess at the highest level, we are talking about female outliers. So therefore, gendered personality traits *in general* are not really applicable to these outstanding players - maybe a few hundred out of millions - and so we have a pretty good control people that we know are: i) driven ii) highly competitive iii) extremely intelligent iv) single-minded v) necessarily not much interested in their social lives - and so forth. Out of this rarefied company : what is it that distinguishes the male players from the female? Is it simply that they are *more* driven etc? I don't buy that. Only sheer genius makes the difference at the summit, the same as in STEM.
Yes, I don’t see it as a general gender capability deficit or difference; more that the foundational brain wiring tendencies create general challenge differences. Obviously there are exceptions.
Frankly, in the history of humans females have less evolutionary experience with direct competition. We live in an unprecedented time where females have in a rather short period of time have rocketed to dominate society and the economy. I think instead of bristling at any suggestion that there is a difference and demand that the genders are cognitively the same, we would be better served being honest about these observable differences and tool society to accept them and exploit them.
I report to a board of 12 directors. In designing my compensation plan, the five female board members voted to weigh my performance on the annual employee engagement survey. They were overridden by the seven male board members that rejected that and wanted my performance based on bottle line financials and market share. These female board members valued a happy and satisfied workforce over hard competitive performance indicators that may in fact result in some lower employee satisfaction.
This is just one of many examples in my career where I observed this gender difference. The collective IQ of my five female board members is probably higher than is that of the seven male board members. Two of them have Harvard MBAs.
"Frankly, in the history of humans females have less evolutionary experience with direct competition."
Yes and no. On the one hand women naturally cooperate to look after kids -- the men are out hunting, even when they must cooperate to bring down the mammoth, each one still seeks to be the top hunter. Women, back in the cave all day, simply must get along. Yet, nothing men do to each other is as brutal as what women do to each other when they're competing over an alpha male.
Your last sentence 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣. Yeah right, Karen impales, crucifies, holocausts, enslaves and atom bombs Sharon to win Alpha Chad's affections. Bitter incel are we, Raymond? 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Hmmmm ... half a point. Ok, on the grand scale you are of course right, but I was thinking about interpersonal combat where, stereotypically, men will have a fistfight and women will methodically try to utterly destroy each other. We've all seen it.
"For example, they would not speak up in a team meeting even though they had an important contribution preferring instead to not cause conflict with a coworker. They would refuse a promotion where their coworker friends would report to them (management is lonely). "
Why can't this be explained as a result of social conditioning that rewards women for being nice and punishes them for being assertive? Why does it have to be "wiring"?
Come to think of it, how does being a "long-time corporate manager" qualify a person to opine on matters of human nature and behavior that are properly the province of PhDs in neuroscience, psychology and sociology, among other academic disciplines? This is anecdata dressed up as science in order to prove a point.
If we're looking for innate qualities that distinguish men from women in order to justify excluding men who say they're trans women from women-only chess events, it is unnecessary to use a characteristic as fraught as intelligence as the distinguishing factor. Let's use the obvious inborn trait instead. It's called biological sex.
"how does being a "long-time corporate manager" qualify a person to opine on matters of human nature and behavior that are properly the province of PhDs in neuroscience, psychology and sociology"
Good example of expertism. I'd take exactly the opposite stance -- real world experience is more credible than theorizing any day. The social 'sciences' are now so ideologically captured that their output is garbage.
As a female who is always thinking “what can I do to get this thing accomplished,” I believe much of the reason for women that consider how others will feel is because of the pressure to “act” that part. I do not dispute that men are more physically aggressive and more single-minded, but both men and women learn early in life what behavior and interests will be rewarded (according to sex) and respond accordingly. One has to exist in one’s environment after all, no matter how illogical.
I used to think it was conditioning, but not after I read Phyllis Chesler's book, Women's Inhumanity to Women. It's sobering. Girls socialize in very different ways from boys from a very early age, too soon for them to be "told" ow to interact. At school teachers give the same message to girls and boys, like "Be kind" and "Include everyone in games" and so forth. But girls come up with strategies on how to seem kind and yet be mean in the early grades. By Grade One, they form cliques and can make a non-conforming girl feel anxious and excluded in subtle ways. Boys socialize around their activities, and express their likes and dislikes far more straightforwardly. They fight faster and make up faster. There is no way a child can be programmed so quickly. And by whom? Nowadays mothers are telling girls they can do and be anything they want. The messages they get from society are to be confident and ambitious. Their more roundabout ways of getting to where they want to be is innate, IMHO.
This is Peterson's point about males being more directly disagreeable. I absolutely have experienced the female tendency for outward agreeablness but then backdoor effort to undermine the perceived competition. And competition might be social instead of professional. There is also a "rules" compliance difference... with males more often pushing boundaries and females more often policing the rules within the organization. Again, I don't see these traits as being cognitively less or more... just general differences I have observed, but also with many exceptions.
I did read it. She may have qualified, but nobody in the chess world believed Susan was in the same class as Judith, from what my sources indicate. Qualifying is fine, it means you are in the big leagues. Clearly the top women players in the world are better than 99% of the men who take chess seriously and who strive to arrive in the big leagues but fail. I recommend Sasha Chapin's 2020 memoir, "All the Wrong Moves: A Memoir about Chess, Love and Ruining Everything." It's funny and heartbreaking, but also hugely informative. He was a good player who plateaued out of the big leagues in spite of his blood, sweat and tears - he would never have beaten the Polgar sisters - but he is a brilliant observer of human nature, and of the astonishing demands a career in chess makes. We're not talking about the layer of talent underneath the Olympian summit, though, we're talking about the summit. I find that this nitpicking is a very good illustration of the hypothesis.
Sorry, but it's *audacious* to accuse me of nitpicking when your claim that only Judit "had a shot at the top prize" - a key part of your earlier comment - was true only because Susan qualified and *then FIDE refused to let her play because she was female*! You obviously intended for the readers to think that Susan just wasn't naturally good enough to be at the top, when in reality FIDE and Hungary were clearly making it impossible for her to succeed in a critical period for one of the sister's development. But acknowledging the extreme misogyny the sisters faced isn't helpful for the narrative that men are naturally so much smarter and more suited to the game, and that accounts for their superiority.
But all of this is more or less beside the point. You know that Judit and Susan didn't just happen to be born with a magic set of genes and prenatal hormones that gave them these abilities. Even if you maintain that they were naturally smart, you know that there are millions of other similarly naturally smart (or smarter) girls out there who *could* do as well as they did, competing with the top men, given the right supports. (As another reader pointed out, this would be unthinkable in any physical sport - nobody seriously believes a trans advocate could raise a female daughter to be a top 10 sprinter. This alone is enough to show that women do not face the same hard limits in mental "sports" as they do in physical sports!)
The fact that one person in a book you read claims he worked really hard and still couldn't make the top does not sufficiently counter the girls' achievements or this view. I certainly don't believe that just anyone can start training in chess really hard and become a top 10 player. Among other things, it probably requires a certain early childhood background in the field, extensive parental and social support, etc. You may also argue it requires a certain IQ threshold. Such barriers can no doubt be insurmountable for any particular individual, but the point is that they do not intrinsically prevent far more women and girls from performing at the very highest level.
"But acknowledging the extreme misogyny the sisters faced"
Absolute bullshit. All three Polgar sisters were every male player's wet dreams. Misogyny? On the contrary, the entire male chess world was delighted that such talent existed in -- let me be honest -- such attractive females. I can guarantee you that when Judit was playing some male grandmaster, that virtually every man watching the game was rooting for her. Misogyny my Zugzwang.
Ironically, your comment shows just how ignorant you are of the fact sexual harassment is actually a net negative for female players, not a fun bonus. Beyond this, the idea that the girls "only" faced sexual harassment and not serious, systematic attempts to stifle their success is easily falsified. Susan Polgar has written about the many bizarre and far-reaching ways the patriarchal chess community attempted to block their success, such as taking away Susan's passport so she couldn't compete in international tournaments and forbidding her from playing in the Men's WCC even after she had qualified for it.
Ray isn't just "ignorant" AF - he's downright creepy and pêrvy. He actually wrote about his "wet dreams" of the sisters. He actually experienced erection and êjåçülåtion from watching fully-clothed "attractive" women playing chess and typed about it. Ew. Ew. Ew.
God knows what roadblocks she might have faced -- few people go thru life on a magic carpet. At the end of the day Judit seems not to have suffered too much. I honestly don't know the details regarding Susan. Frankly I suspect she's crying in her beer due to her sister being, frankly, better than her -- and they are all very competitive, so ego is a factor.
Nope, you're not going to see this because you don't want to, but the kind of genius that makes a world champion in chess is statistically likely to be overwhelmingly present in males, and that's the simple truth of it. But one can always tell a tale of Oppression if one wants to. Someone wolf-whistled at Susan!! World-champion stifled! You seem intelligent but you're just not prepared to face the facts here.
Soooo the profound conclusion of this writer is “women are dumber than men.” Good god it’s not even worth a response -- but let’s do it anyway. Colin Wright should be ashamed publishing this drivel. If you’re going to make a claim as broad as “all differences between men and women in STEM and chess are due to inferiority of the female intellect” then at least prove it. This op ed (it is not even remotely close to an actual essay) is so thin its laughable and I’m fascinated people are even responding to this in a remotely serious way. Although i do appreciate the comments, and the fact that the writer is doubling down on her vapid argument by washing the thoughtful responses in “nah women are just stupider.”
Denying any potential role of socialization despite ALL the evidence of gendered differences, the ignorance of the many types of intelligence -- indeed who decided the genius philosopher or poet who can’t do math is less smart than the mathematician? -- the assumption that IQ tests, standardized exams, and STEM are universal, final markers of intellect and nothing else can be -- come on Colin this is just pathetic.
Demonstrate some nuance, some analysis of the potential flaws of your own argument, your own assumptions and blind spots. (I thought this was a publication of depth and nuance?)
Otherwise Barbara you’re really proving the point you’re making in this article, but not in the way you think.
Janelle, you could have just as logically written, "Sooo the conclusion of this writer is that *men are DUMBER than women*," since I made it perfectly clear that the variability of male intelligence puts them outside the distribution norms at BOTH the high IQ end and also at the low IQ end, the high end being the relevant factor for chess. The rest of what you write does not, therefore, merit further response, since it is all based on the fruit of a poisoned attitude.
By the way, I think it is significant to add that although I have heard from many women who - like Janelle - are infuriated at the idea that even a small minority of men are gifted with genius IQ that only a nugatory number of women ever approach, and who upbraid me for even suggesting it, I have yet to hear from a *single male* who gives a flying f*** that a small minority of men are dumber than most women. It isn't because they don't believe it. They quite readily believe it, and don't care. It has no impact on their lives. I wish women would *stop taking it personally* that this distribution of IQ is an actual *thing* and understand that it is not an insult to women in general or to them. It simply doesn't matter in the scheme of things.
Thanks. The radfems simply can't face the reality. The male brain -- like everything else about males -- is designed for 'succeed or die trying'. The female is designed for 'survive'. The female brain is as good on average, but tends to be average. The male brain 'rolls the dice' and is far more likely to be either brilliant -- or moronic.
That's not an argument. You know, the fems really should give ground to reality sometimes, it would make them look less silly and more secure. There are lots of things women do better than men and nobody tries to explain it away -- when women or Blacks are better they're just simply better, no? But where men or Whites are better, that's got to be explained away, yes? It seems to me the Real feminism would be to celebrate the female as she actually is, rather than measuring her against the male in everything. The male mind is deep but narrow -- we're good at being very good at tasks that involve absolute precision at rules-based things -- like shooting an arrow exactly to the bullseye, or winning at chess or writing computer code. When I'm writing code I find it overwhelming to have to get up to pee. But a woman can do half a dozen things at once and do them well. Why the insecurity?
Oh good grief. What an absurdly simplistic takeaway from this piece.
Why are some women so desperate to prove that we are “equal” to men in every last respect? We are better (in general) in some and not in others. Meaning- wait for it - we are DIFFERENT.
Wiring of the brain takes place in utero and the washing of testosterone makes for significant differences at a cellular- not to mention chromosomal- level.
You might as well step off the roof and argue with gravity.
But you're going to spray as much squid ink as you can.
> If you’re going to make a claim as broad as “all differences between men and women in STEM and chess are due to inferiority of the female intellect” then at least prove it.
She did in fact present evidence in the form of the relative chess rankings of men and women. What's your alternative explanation.
> Denying any potential role of socialization despite ALL the evidence of gendered differences, the ignorance of the many types of intelligence -- indeed who decided the genius philosopher or poet who can’t do math is less smart than the mathematician? -- the assumption that IQ tests, standardized exams, and STEM are universal, final markers of intellect and nothing else can be -- come on Colin this is just pathetic.
Classic example of special pleading. At lest you seem to implicitly concede that males and females differ in how their minds word, and that it's perfectly possible for one approach to be better for a particular problem.
Magnus is absolutely ruthless in the Endgame, winning 100+ move games thought to be draws. Look at some of Gotham Chess's videos. Look also at John Fish's satirical video on cheating in Oct 2022.
As well, I thought some of the Chess Federation discussions had to do with women who ideate a male persona, and the objection to one of them suddenly claiming she'd won previous points/standing/championships on the male side (or open category) rather than in women's. It will be an interesting process to watch. I used to avoid saying estrogen consumption caused my crossdressing ex-husband to go crazy and be the most self-involved human on the planet, but now that I've absorbed the fact that estrogen is a wrong sex hormone for him, I say it.
The solution I think is just to stop using the nonsense words "transwoman" and "transman." Among adults there are men and there are women. That's it. "Transwomen" are men. "Transmen" are women. Whether transgenderism is a real biopsychological "thing" (like depression) or just a pseudoscience like astrology and recovered memory syndrome is beside the point. Your sex is what you were conceived as and that's what governs what doors we open and close.
A sport (or a prison or a violence shelter or a public bathroom/locker room) that is designed to accommodate women ought not to accommodate men. No matter what gender they think they are. There is no need to parse whether the brain of a "transwoman" is more like that of a man or more like that of a woman. It is a man's brain. So he plays in the men's chess division. Full stop.
The activists have tricked us into saying that there are such things as transwomen -- even if we disagree with trans ideology, we are still bullied into calling them transwomen -- and this sucks us into bizarre discussions about whether they have an unfair advantage over women or whether they have the right to compete against women (and invade their other spaces, too) just because they "identify" as female "gender". This is nonsense and 10 years from now we will realize that we were all fools and cowards for letting this go on as long as it did.
When my brother and I were young, I (female), would usually win the first time around at any given game, probably because I am older. Then the little devil would *study the game* relentlessly until he could win every time! There were a lot of things I would rather do than spend that kind of time (and dogged attention) to win at something, and I don't need to be 'equal' to men on this level. We contribute different things!
Judith's two sisters were good players, but it was only Judith who had a shot at the ultimate prize. I wasn't aware of the hardships they faced. What is relevant that Judith did play at the top. And her privilege lay in her formation as a player. It is easy to say that there are "potentially" millions of girls who could perform at that level. I would settle for one world champion to get that particular ball rolling.
If you would have read the link I sent, you would have seen that Susan Polgar also qualified for the "Men's" World Championship cycle, but FIDE did not allow her to play. So she didn't have a shot at the ultimate prize...not because of her abilities, but because of the blatant discrimination she and other female players faced.
Yet her open ranking demonstrates that she'd not have had a chance, FIDE bureaucracy notwithstanding. The rankings computer neither knows nor cares what your sex/gender/race/species/politics, your sexual behaviors or your favorite color might be, there's only one's tally of wins. Susan didn't have the needed genius, but Judit did. Trying to bring misogyny into this is pathetic.
Crazy how you moved immediately from "There's no way Susan Polgar faced any misogyny because she was HAWT" to "It doesn't matter if she faced misogyny because she sucked anyways." No self awareness whatsoever or recognition of how obvious your kneejerk misogyny is. Here's a thought: maybe the fact Susan faced all these blockers to playing in high level tournaments actually resulted in her not attaining the same success her younger sister did.
"There's no way Susan Polgar faced any misogyny because she was HAWT"
I didn't say that, I said that on balance the Sisters were favored, not persecuted. Misogyny is like mosquitoes in summer,always there but easy to swat. But far more men supporting them.
"It doesn't matter if she faced misogyny because she sucked anyways."
I didn't say that either. She made grandmaster! But her global ranking kept her out of contention as a world champion. Face it, she was not world-class she was one level below that. You can tell a tale of woe if you like but it's just a tale. One does not hear Judit whining about anything, wolf-whistles or not. And I'm not a misogynist, I just think that you are loosing this debate very badly on the merits. The author is female too, and she's winning, gender notwithstanding.
Neither you nor Barbara Kay have actually answered as to what you think the most reasonable explanation for the Polgar success is. You both know that endorsing the idea that Laszlo Polgar just happened to get really lucky and have 1 in a billion daughters is highly implausible and a bad look for your theory. On the other hand, endorsing the more plausible idea that the Polgar girls were more ordinary "smart girls" raised in an environment friendly to female success requires endorsing the idea that millions of other girls could potentially play at this high level. That goes counter to the idea that men's testosterone levels and supposed genetic superiority make them uniquely suited to high level play. You don't want to admit this, and therefore hide behind vague statements about probability curves, without actually explaining the particular data given. This is a real problem for your theory.
"have actually answered as to what you think the most reasonable explanation for the Polgar success is"
Nature and nurture.
"Laszlo Polgar just happened to get really lucky and have 1 in a billion daughters"
Winning the lottery is really lucky too, but it happens all the time.
"requires endorsing the idea that millions of other girls could potentially play at this high level"
No question that, given the same support, we'd see more Polgars -- but we'd also see more male grandmasters too. Your arguments hold for boys as well as girls. The reason the Soviets dominated chess for so long is that they had a government policy of finding and developing talent. We do not dispute what you say, we only say that the fact that men are statistically superior is also due to factors in the male brain. BTW, I clobber my sister at chess, but she clobbers me at scrabble.
"hide behind vague statements about probability curves"
That's the problem with probability -- it is always vague, certainties are not to be had.
I agree with the male variability hypothesis, but can respect spaces for women while holding an open mind about the cause. I don't think the fact that a minority of men might be smarter then most woman necessarily has to be the answer. I don't think we have all the answers to intelligence. For example, I'm happy admitting that Asians outscore Caucasians on intelligence tests in America, yet I don't think they are smarter, as a group, then white people. I don't think we (collectively) have all the answers just yet.
Science can never be said to have been settled once and for all, but if *all the replicable evidence we can muster* keeps turning up the same conclusion according to the scientific method, then it is fair to say that that the extreme ends of the IQ distribution graphs exhibit both - both genius and unusually low IQ - are occupied by males. And it is also therefore fair to base policy on the assumption of male advantage in chess competition. Remember that these chess outcomes emerge, as I noted, from a vast control group: from every nation in the world, from every ethnicity, from every educational system, from every socio-economic stratum, etc. The scientific method rarely has such an embarrassment of riches in its "lab". So why resist? We make public policy in any number of areas on the basis of an extreme paucity of information by comparison. If we don't have all the answers yet, after so many years of chess competition, then when do you think we will? And how will we gather any further information? What are we missing here in terms of input?
I read an argument once to the effect that the male advantage in chess was a statistical illusion, owing to the asymmetry between total male and female players. In a word, the game is said to exponentially more popular among men than women. Anecdotally, that seems plausible to me. I've been playing chess for about 25 years in the Seattle area, and I've met many more players named Dave than female players. Still, that begs the question of why there are so many more male chess players. Is there just something about the game that appeals more to the male psyche? And if so, would that not compromise an advantage? Women might be as good, or for all I know better, at chess than men, if only they were as obsessed with it. But obsessiveness must be the greatest single advantage a chess player might have. If one sex is more prone than the other to obsessiveness, at least to abstract things, than that sex will have a relative advantage at chess, even if they're overall equally intelligent and creative.
It doesn't matter if there are 10 times as many male players as female. What matters is that the 10% of female players have never yet produced a world champion. You say "for all I know" women may be "as good or better" than men. On what basis do you make such a statement? Are there biogoted gatekeepers who weed out the genius female chess players and find some reason to de-select them from tournaments? Seriously, there is no basis for this "for all I know" statement. For all ANYONE knows, men are better at chess, since only men win world championships, and any decent male player in Canada, for example, could beat our current best female players quite easily. You can argue about why, or simply shrug and say it is just a coincidence (nobody believes this), but you can't simply hypothesize that women are better, only they so far have not shown their full mettle. The point about chess is that nobody is stopping them, so if you have another explanation for their failure to reach the top, please at least share your theory..
The basis of my statement was epistemological humility. I don't know, or pretend to know. To be clear, I have no emotional stake in the answer. I agree that men might well be innately better at chess, on average or at the extremes of ability, than women are. There are many things men excel at relative to women. Maybe chess is one of them. I don't think men's and women's relative chess performance is a coincidence, or that anyone else thinks so either. The argument, I presume, is between those who think the disparity is based in biology, those who think it's based in culture, and those who think it might be some mix of biology and culture.
I don't see how the relative numbers of male and female players can fail to be relevant. To begin with, in my experience, not even close to 10% of avid chess players are female. I doubt it's even 5%. Of course, my experience might be atypical, but it does seem to track with a general impression that the game is overwhelmingly played by men. Yes, that itself could be an indication that men are generally better at chess. People are drawn to activities they find they excel at. But it could also have a social or cultural component. What if only 1% of chess players were female? Would it the number be relevant then?
If the number were only 1%, it could not be culture stopping them, since chess is played in every culture and the women champions come from a variety of cultures. It then comes down to interest in things more than social interaction, the pleasure of performance in a mental arena one is already attracted to, comfort with aggression, etc, and to other innate characteristics that equip the player for the longterm single-minded dedication to a narrowly defined task.
Is it not interesting how people will try to make an argument to the effect that women are just as good, they are just less interested? Such a thing is not impossible, but very unlikely -- we are interested in things we are good at -- we are disinterested in things we are not good at. I have no interest in becoming a flower arranger and that's linked to the fact that I'd be terrible at it.
> I read an argument once to the effect that the male advantage in chess was a statistical illusion, owing to the asymmetry between total male and female players. In a word, the game is said to exponentially more popular among men than women. Anecdotally, that seems plausible to me.
Except nearly everyone growing up in the western world gets exposed to chess. The differences in the number of players are largely based on who chooses to play, which isn't independent of who has a talent for it.
"In a word, the game is said to exponentially more popular among men than women."
Own goal. This backfires. Following your logic, the women who do go into chess are already exceptional by virtue of even playing the game at all. There is zero discrimination, but even if there were, that too would only weed out the half-hearted players and narrow the pool to the deeply motivated and talented women.
The thesis of this article - that men simply are more naturally competitive, aggressive, spatially aware, etc and therefore will inevitably dominate at the top levels of chess, necessitating female-only chess spaces for biological reasons - was falsified decades ago by the Polgar sisters, in particular Judit Polgar. Raised by a father who was a social constructivist about genius and intelligence, Judit astounded the world by breaking Bobby Fischer's world record to become the youngest ever grandmaster at the time before breaking into the top 10 of "male" chess players. She did this in part by refusing to ever play in women's events, on the grounds that her abilities were on par with those of the best men, and her success is probably partly explained by this. Interestingly, Polgar was also primarily known for her relentless aggression on the chessboard, again defying gendered expectations.
Most "biodeterminists" about chess genius dismiss the Polgars as "exceptions". But of course, any plausible theory about the origins of genius and male success in chess needs to actually explain the exceptions, not simply dismiss them. (Imagine if a 19th century physicist dismissed the double slit experiment as an "exception" to the general success of Newtonian physics and therefore didn't feel the need to account for it in their theory!) That would be a terrible way to handle science, yet it is the norm among biodeterminists about genius when I ask them about this case. They simply think that describing something as an exception to the rule is enough to explain it.
One biodeterminist explanation for Polgar's success is that she simply happened to be born with an extremely rare set of genes and hormones that caused her success. This is too implausible to be taken seriously - the idea that a female child with a 1 in a billion set of genes and hormones simply happened to be born to a social constructivist father who believed women could be as successful as men at chess is too ludicrous to be taken seriously. The odds this would ever happen are astronomically low. This is doubly true considering that Polgar's sisters were also exceptional chess players.
A more plausible, biodeterminist-lite explanation is that Judit was born a very intelligent child - say in the 99th percentile of overall intelligence - and was then given the right set of environmental conditions to succeed in the top 10. But if this is true, there are *millions* of girls with equal or greater potential to be top 10 players. The difference is that those girls aren't being given the right conditions to succeed at that high level.
The thesis of this article should not be that it is *impossible* or unrealistic for women to succeed at chess at "male" levels, but that it's simply not important to create the conditions to cause those girls to succeed, and that we shouldn't alter our society to do so. That's a more honest and realistic position, but it's also more clearly anti-feminist.
"But of course, any plausible theory about the origins of genius and male success in chess needs to actually explain the exceptions, not simply dismiss them."
Except that no one 'dismisses' them. We are dealing with bell-curves of probability which *never* forbid anything, they simply predict probability. Judit was 'possible' but also 'rare', just as in theory, so also in fact. One day, statistically speaking, we will have a female world champion, it just won't happen very often.
You obviously didn't understand my post. I asked for an explanation. Is your explanation seriously the first one given: that the parents who believed in women's abilities in chess and set up the conditions for girls to succeed *just so happened* to have 1 out a billion freak daughters with the right set of prenatal hormones and chess genes to succeed? Do you understand how incredibly unlikely it would have been for the girls to succeed if your theories were true?
Now that's your first reasonable comment. Yes, the natalists have a problem there don't they? However there's countless other Laszlo Polgars who tried just as hard and did not produce a family of grandmasters. I myself think it's both -- the girls are the product of two very intelligent parents *and* they were brought up with one goal in mind -- chess supremacy. Nature, nurture and environment are always all significant.
I'm deeply skeptical of the idea that there are thousands of other Laszlo Polgars who are attempting, in the same systematic way and careful way, to produce chess prodigy daughters who compete on equal terms with boys and men, but failing miserably. What evidence is there that these families exist? This seems like a totally unfalsifiable claim made to avoid the uncomfortable challenge the Polgars presented to the idea of innate male superiority at high level chess.
Even if you could find thousands of other people claiming to be attempting and failing to raise prodigy daughters, it would be necessary to examine their methodology to see if they were actually doing so in an effective manner before one could draw any hard conclusions. Plenty of people talk big about their attempts and failures to become "geniuses", but a close examination of their lives often reveals more disorganization and dysfunction than they claim. But beyond this, I seriously doubt you could find more than a handful of "Polgar like" parents in the first place.
"What evidence is there that these families exist?"
Play fair. Offer me a match. I can't prove it any more than you can prove that Susan would have been world camp but for the misogyny. Let's be reasonable. You know as well as I do that LP is very unlikely to be the only person in history who took the 'nurture' doctrine and tried to prove it. It is after all a required belief for people like yourself. Nuts, if you had daughters you'd probably do the same. Besides, it is *at least* partially true! -- no question that nurture is important. But so is innate ability -- the Girls had both.
"This seems like a totally unfalsifiable claim made to avoid the uncomfortable challenge the Polgars presented to the idea of innate male superiority at high level chess."
Yes, unfalsifiable, just like your misogyny tales keeping Susan Oppressed -- but not absurd either, no doubt FIDE treated her ... what's the best word? I'd say 'bureaucratically'.
"the uncomfortable challenge the Polgars presented to the idea of innate male superiority at high level chess."
No challenge. Again, the male superiority is *statistical* -- it's about probabilities. Again, one day we are almost certain to have a female champ, but it will happen rarely. The Polgars are comforting examples of how statistics work.
"it would be necessary to examine their methodology to see if they were actually doing so in an effective manner"
Fact is most chess geniuses 'find themselves' -- they are not nurtured from birth, they simply have the inborn talent and sooner or later it comes out. The question of how good Judit would have been 'anyway' remains open. You deny nature, I accept both nature and nurture. It's always a bit of both.
It's incredibly obvious is that your standard for proof here is just one step beyond whatever the best woman has accomplished. If she had won a WCC, you'd find some other reason to discount this. You don't really have a coherent theory for how your own views could possibly be falsified. You just come up with whatever standard allows you to discount women as not truly as great as men.
> But of course, any plausible theory about the origins of genius and male success in chess needs to actually explain the exceptions, not simply dismiss them.
True, however, even a theory that dismisses the exceptions but explains the common case is better than one that explains the exceptions but dismisses the common case.
My theory actually can explain both. But a theory that dismisses the exceptions but explains the common case is not a good theory. You are like a 19th century physicist who dismisses the Michelson Morley experiment because theories that assume waves need a medium to travel work well "most" of the time. You would instantly recognize how anti-scientific your thinking is if you applied your reasoning to any other field.
Oh, I agree with you that there are *billions* of boys and girls in the world who aren't receiving optimal care and instruction that would allow them to be as intelligent as possible. I agree with Laszlo Polgar that genius is largely socially constructed and probably a lot of healthy boys and girls could be "geniuses", given proper instruction and care.
But women and girls still face specific barriers that boys don't. For one, boys don't generally have to hear people opine about their biological inferiority. That alone obviously impacts how people perceive their daughters vs their sons and so on. That's in conjunction with the many other documented examples of oppressions women face around the world.
> I agree with Laszlo Polgar that genius is largely socially constructed
Not related to the main point, but note the non standard use of "socially constructed" to mean "heavily influenced by nurture" here.
> For one, boys don't generally have to hear people opine about their biological inferiority.
Um, outside of a few nonmainstream fora that hasn't been happening in over half a century. In fact for that long society popular culture has been going out its way to open doors for girls and give them "strong female role models".
I'm a woman and can tell you your impression of how good women have it in gender nonconforming spaces is totally wrong. Views like the one above - that the best men in a space are an elite group marked by biological superiority, and that women can never realistically expect to match them intellectually - are still the mainstream and obviously impact how men and women think about themselves and their daughters.
Being in engineering and physics has made me cynical about the way men wield these myths as forms of ego-boosting and as ways to exclude women from certain "elite" spaces. There are certainly many good men who do not act in this way, but it's a reality. These beliefs do have an impact.
> I'm a woman and can tell you your impression of how good women have it in gender nonconforming spaces is totally wrong.
By which you mean that since you feminists haven't managed to impose your views 100%, dissident views occasionally leak through. Classic case of self-blindness. (https://substack.com/@euginenier/note/c-39631508)
Great article on the uncomfortable issue of male dominance in chess. Magus Carlsen himself popped up on a Youtube short recently to assure us he doesn't believe in an innate male advantage. He might really think so, and if so he might be right. But given the secular pieties of the ruling class, and their enforcement by the Inquisition of cancel culture, any such declaration must be viewed with caution. Why risk your reputation, social standing, endorsements, and maybe even your livelihood by saying the wrong thing when you can be utterly safe by blaming it all on the Patriarchy? Carlsen didn't get where he is by making bad moves. And suggesting men even might be innately better at any cognitive task than women, even on average, or even only at the outermost extremes of ability--that would be a bad move in the current socio-political climate.
That said, if there is an innate difference, it can't be anywhere near what it is in, say, boxing. It's hard to imagine a woman, in any weight class, being in the world's top hundred, or top thousand if compared against men. Even a woman in the top ten thousand seems like a stretch, given the strength and aggression differential between the sexes. Certainly there has never been a female boxer who would have lasted a minute against a Mike Tyson or Muhammad Ali in their prime. But Judith Polgar was once one of the 8 strongest players in the world. She qualified for the candidates tournament to determine the challenger for the world championship. She has defeated Gary Kasparov, Magnus Carlsen, and other chess luminaries too numerous to list. Polgar also didn't deign to play women's tournaments. The woman's world championship was hers for the taking any time she wanted it, but she never bothered. It was beneath her.
That brings me to a criticism of this article. Could it be that women haven't closed the gap because of the existence of women's chess? Could it be that insisting on a separate chess competitions for women only reinforces the stereotype that women are innately disadvantaged, such that it becomes a self fulling prophecy? Maybe instead of keeping trans-identifying males out of women's chess, our efforts would be better directed at abolishing women's chess altogether?
I don't think anyone who regularly reads RLS has to be convinced of the male advantage in physical sport, so there is no need to address that issue. The only pushback is on the cognitive differences. You may not have seen my previous reply in which I mentioned Judith Polgar. I did say she had won games off the top male chess players and was for sure a prodigy, who did not feel sufficiently challenged in the women's division. But, as I said, "She was quite legitimately a top-10 player in the world at her peak, and a top-20 player over a significant number of years. But she also finished last in the only tournament she played in where a path to the World title was on the line - and she was at her peak then." Did she lose her nerve? Was she not sufficiently consistent? Who knows? What we do know about Polgar is that nobody in the world had a more privileged chess-related upbringing. She ate, slept and breathed chess from infancy onward. She was in a veritable chess bubble. Her father was bent on making her a world champion expressly to prove that a woman could do it. She achieved great things. But failed to reach the summit. Abolishing women's chess is not the answer. Women need it. Otherwise, they'll stop playing competitively. We have to face the music here.
The idea that Judit Polgar had the most privileged chess upbringing possible is ridiculous, for starters. I can't believe how ignorant this comment is, sorry. All the Polgar sisters faced enormous discrimination and harassment as a woman in the chess world. Susan Polgar, her older sister, has described on Twitter some of the ridiculous roadblocks the chess world threw in the family's way - like taking away Susan's passport so she couldn't compete in international competitions. The acts the girls faced weren't simply cruel and demeaning; they seriously affected the girls' opportunities for success. It's actually incredible just how much the patriarchal Hungarian government and chess world did to all three of them in an effort to keep them down. All the girls faced bullying, harassment, and abuse from the larger chess community, which for obvious reasons did not want them to succeed. You can read about Susan's experiences here:
Moreover, the idea that Judit's accomplishments don't disprove your thesis because she didn't win the world championship is also ridiculous. She made it into the top 10 and won numerous "men's" competitions. She was obviously on par with the other top men at the time. That's the important thing, not her performance in one competition. As I said before, the idea these girls just happened to be born with super-genes is a poor explanation for their success. There are potentially millions of other girls who could perform at that level.
It seemed to me worth reiterating that even if men have an innate advantage in chess (which they well might) it can't nearly be as great as it is in most physical sports. I chose boxing as a comparison not to convince anyone of the male advantage in this quintessentially masculine arena, but to the contrary, on the presumption that almost anyone would already be convinced. I suppose I didn't need to belabor the point but I wanted to illustrate that while a human female ever being one of the 8 best boxers in the world (or 800 best, or likely 8,000 best) would rightly seem absurd to almost any sane person, a woman being one of the 8 best chess players has already happened. But suppose it hadn't. Suppose an otherwise identical parallel universe where Judith Polgar had never been born. Someone there would probably write an article insisting that a woman couldn't possibly defeat a male world chess champion, let alone rank in the world's top ten. After all, it had never happened.
I've never been able to understand female-only chess tournaments and divisions. Your ranking is what defines you as a chess player, not your biological capabilities. It's a game that involves both spatial awareness AND strategy: something anyone can learn if they're dedicated to it. However, it takes a lot of time and interest to become a professional chess player. Pro players spend hours and hours every day studying chess moves--something most people aren't interested in. Who cares if most of the people that *are* interested and *win* matches just so happen to be male?
Well, obviously women chess players "care" - since without their own division, they never win the gold, and precious few of them ever win any high-level trophies. Creating their own division was a tacit admission - just as it never had to be spelled out in sport, since until 5 minutes ago it was obvious to everyone that males had an advantage physically over women - that stratospheric-level chess genius was and is a male domain. A few women have come tantalizingly close - that is, a few women have taken individual games off world champions - but they have never achieved the championship. It ain't social construction that is stopping them.
"a few women have taken individual games off world champions"
And again, to be crude, it's sexual to watch and no question who the world's rooting for. Remember in TQG when the match against the Russian is postponed, and every last male that Beth ever beat are sitting around on a floor covered in chess boards turning their brains to mush trying to figure out how to help her beat the Russian?
I remember that scene very well. I asked a grand master friend if that scene was realistic, and he said, "Absolutely." He claims that chess people are so worshipful of those who are a tier above where they know their limit is, they are happy to be part of the supportive cast to see "their" hero - male or female - succeed.
Sure, it's the other side of ego -- you beat me, so I want you to become world champ -- thus, I was beaten by the world champ, not some bum! Besides, ego aside, chess players tend to like each other, and to want to help each other improve their games. I taught my nephew to play -- now he kicks my ass and I'm proud to have made him what he is -- I *still* help him get even better. I'm bugging him to go for master.
Absolutely not. They are awesome players, and completely dedicated to the game. Take for example grand master Vera Menchik: The title of chess Grandmaster (GM) wasn't formalized until 1950, so she wasn't actually "defeating Grandmasters at the time of her death in 1944" as has been claimed. She was defeating men who were middling-strong players - some of whom might have earned the GM title had it been available. From wikipedia: "The biggest and strongest tournament Menchik played in was the Moscow tournament of 1935, which featured World Champions Botvinnik, Capablanca, and Lasker, as well as a host of elite players and future GMs like Flohr, Ragozin, Spielmann, Levenfish, Lilenthal, etc. Here, Menchik finished in last place, 20th out of 20 competitors, with a score of (+0−16=3)." To be clear, that's 16 losses and three draws; no wins. So, she was completely outclassed by this field, who were among the top 40 or 50 men in the world. By 1935, she had been Women's World Champion for 8 years, and would remain so for another 9 years. Which seems to confirm the thesis that the best women in the world are typically a full category or two below the best men in the world.
Nona was the first official female GM, but notice that it took 28 years after the title (and the qualifying rules for earning it) was first established for a woman to come along to earn it. Although a GM, Nona, like Menchik, was a category or two below the top male players of her day.
Judit Polgar really is the only exception, so far. Her chess-obsessive father homeschooled her from infancy, with hours and hours a day of chess, in order to prove that a woman could become a world champion. She was a prodigy for sure. She was quite legitimately a top-10 player in the world at her peak, and a top-20 player over a significant number of years. But she also finished last in the only tournament she played in where a path to the World title was on the line - and she was at her peak then.
I certainly don't doubt that women can play chess. But as we can both know, even GMs have their rankings. So what does it matter if the top players are male? It's still a great feat to get to grandmaster status, and I think it's almost insulting to put women in their own separate division where they're encouraged to play among inferior players. The goal of the game is to consistently get better, so without a women's division, I believe the female players would be encouraged to push themselves to be better. The game would have a chance to evolve.
Maybe I just can't understand it from a casual player's perspective.
You understand better than the author. Competitive people thrive, academically and athletically, when grouped with others of their ability, whether male or female. They will push each other to better performance. Set the bar low and they will meet the low bar. Raise it and they will rise above the bar.
The sad thing about this is the statement "The “greater male variability hypothesis,” according to which, on the basis of standardized intelligence tests, “more males than females get off-the-chart test scores—in both directions,” is philosophically anathema to them."
What kind of a person must one be to deny reality simply because you don't like it? And it's not just the male variability hypothesis (not really a hypothesis, by the way, but accepted fact: men and women share the same average IQ, but men have a broader distribution around it than women, thus more male geniuses and more male imbeciles) but pretty much any finding related to the field of intelligence research. People pretend differences don't exist, or even that IQ does not have anything to do with actual intelligence. They wriggle and squirm to find any explanation other than the simple fact that, as with any other biological attribute, people vary. Why are we so squeamish about intelligence? Is it because it is not immediately obvious, like height, or attractiveness? At the end of the day, it's just the luck of the genetic draw, and we can take no credit if we are taller than average, or smarter than average. But we tend to think research into IQ is evil, eugenic-tainted, or racist, when all we are doing is refusing to understand the one aspect of humanity that is our special gift. We don't have big teeth or sharp claws, we have big brains and co-operate with each other. And we cannot afford to waste good brains: they are the most valuable resource our species has. I should think we ought to study intelligence and do whatever we can to promote and exploit it.
> but pretty much any finding related to the field of intelligence research.
During the early part of the 20th century there were attempts to organize society on a technocratic basis with the high IQ in charge. That didn't work out so well, which lead to a reaction against IQ.
I have been a lifelong feminist but always had trouble dealing with imo extreme views of equality with males, not just politically but extending to the mathematical and physical. So I always muted my position on such things for the sake of being one of the bunch.
But biology is REAL, sex differences must not be easily dismissed, and we wonder why the sex revolution has not been all that was promised? And that's being kind.
But we did not foresee the horrific consequences of accepting every delusionary morsel of nonsense so I am silent no longer.
Lies in the name of 'social justice' are still lies and they will lead us to hell.
I think there is often confusion about the cognitive disparity between men and women. Men occupy the extreme ends of the bell curve. There will always be more male geniuses and more male imbeciles. Women occupy the middle ground more, with essentially no women at the ultra extremes.
This means men really have no competition from women when it comes to extreme cognitive endeavours, like composing classical masterpieces, designing cathedrals or becoming a grand master.
Women can compete with MOST men, but not those extreme outlier men.... who are the men who always walk away with all the prizes and have statues built of them.
Most men are in the same position as women in this regard. They also cannot compete with those extreme outlier men.
Can’t we women just have spaces and places for ourselves? I think that is even more important than rankings.
No man can ever be a woman and can ever begin to understand what it’s like to be a women. And no one ever asked women if we wanted men barging in and treating women as “therapy dogs” for men who want to be women.
> Can’t we women just have spaces and places for ourselves?
Well thanks to third wave feminism, men can no longer have all-male spaces. So why should women have all female spaces?
The law of unintended consequences bites again. Many have noted that trans is something the radfems brought down on their own heads. Claim equality between the sexes and there's no need for women's spaces, is there? The trans-positive feminists are at least sticking to the logic of their doctrine whereas the TERFS are trying to have their equality and their special status at the same time.
Here we go again ... “us verses them.” Trans-positive and the Turfs. We are a sad spoof of “Westside Story.” We are better than this regressed banter. Love>fear
Some say that, the chattering classes being entirely secure in terms of real issues like food and shelter, there's nothing to strive for/against and thus there's the need to invent trouble -- monkeys being, as they are, natural trouble makers. Good times make weak men. Weak men make bad times. As the saying goes.
"No man can ever be a woman and can ever begin to understand what it’s like to be a women."
And yet we've endured a century of feminism claiming sex is a social construct and feminists know exactly what it's like to be a man, because they know men are toxic and oppressive to women.
In fact patriarchy theory (the default treatise on men and women, which is taught in schools, defines our laws and informs every institution all the way up to the UN) defines men as PSYCHOPATHS. Only a psychopath would systematically oppress his own mother, sisters, daughters and wife ... which is what feminist theory asserts.
When it comes to respecting 'spaces' we need to recognise that feminism has never respected the 'space' that is the male psyche. Feminism tells men who and what they are (toxic oppressors, misogynists, would-be rapists etc) ... and that's before all the lesser invasions of male spaces (male social clubs, boy scouts, traditionally male careers etc).
If we have mixed sex competitive chess nobody will die. But pandering to feminists' gender bending LARPing, such as demanding the physical requirements to be a firefighter be lowered so they can be let into the service DOES cost lives. As many veteran firefighters have said, female firefighters cannot shoulder down a door and carry an unconscious adult from a burning building.
"no one ever asked women if we wanted men barging in and treating women as “therapy dogs” for men who want to be women."
Children also never asked to be abandoned in 'day abandonment centres' so that their mothers could compete with men in workforce. The effects on childhood (and therefore society) of mothers rejecting the role (the responsibility) of motherhood (while at the same time having children) is literally destroying society.
We chastise men for being deadbeat dads, but a women who abandons her children so she can have a 'fulfilling career' is a dead beat mother by the same criteria that we judge men by. And yet we celebrate such women for abandoning their parenting responsibilities.
On balance, men have been far more accommodating than women over the last century when it comes to having their spaces and their identities trampled on (and appropriated) by the opposite sex.... so much so that we can blame men for being TOO accommodating and not maintaining proper boundaries. Men's willingness to let women appropriate masculinity and put on 'male face' (just watch any Hollywood movie) has been detrimental to men, women, children and society as a whole.
Men are hard wired to self sacrifice and give women whatever they ask. But in a post industrial world this tendency (which used to ensure our survival as a species) is now just inviting women to be entitled narcissists.
The patriarchy's motto "Women and children first" somehow morphed into "he for she". One is traditionalism, the other is female entitlement.
And yes - as others have said - feminism's 'social construct' theory of gender has brought us to the current madness. Today's 'radical trans ideology' is just feminism carried out with hormones and surgery.
Feminism's demand for 'gender equality' and constant moaning about how oppressive female biology is has paved the way for the current solution of de-gendering the youth and erasing gender from our culture, our language and even from human physiology. 'Gender equality' will be reached when gender has been completely erased from the human race.
It should be clear by now that feminism was always a vehicle for transhumanism.
"Children also never asked to be abandoned in 'day abandonment centres' so that their mothers could compete with men in workforce."
That's not quite fair. My niece just but little Bo in daycare tho it breaks her heart because, like most working people these days, she can't put a roof over her head without both her and her husband working full time and even then it's tight.
"she can't put a roof over her head without both her and her husband working full time and even then it's tight."
I sympathise. And I accept that this is the norm for most couples (parents) today. But the reason why it's now the norm is that feminism enticed women out of the home and into the paid workforce with the promise of 'having it all'. But this was a lie.
Before feminism devalued the labour force a blue collar husband could afford to support an entire family on his wages alone, allowing mothers to provide full time care to their own children. Today this is a privilege only available to wealthy people.
What feminism called 'oppression' and 'enslavement of women' was actually the most beneficial arrangement for women and children. It gave women OPTIONS that simply are not available to most women today (as you point out).
Sure, there are compromises, but the 'fulfilling careers' that feminism promised women are a myth. Most women don't have fulfilling careers, they just have gruelling jobs (just like most men have).
A lot of younger women today are realising that a far better arrangement is to marry young (while you're hot enough to attract a high quality man), and squeeze out some kids while you are fit, healthy and fertile. And then after the kids are becoming less dependent (8+) start your higher education and/ or business enterprises then, which still leaves you a good 30+ years for a career. This is much more sensible than aiming for that 'fulfilling career' in your 20's and then trying to squeeze in marriage and kids as an afterthought - while potentially dealing with a loss of fertility (and loss of sexual market value) because you left it all too late.
But I agree, the current depreciation of wages and doubling of taxes (thanks to feminism) makes everything much harder these days.
What feminism failed to mention is that men's relationships to work is different to women's. Men can do a shitty or highly demanding job and still be rewarded by his ability to attract and support a wife and family. But for women the same ambition means having to sacrifice having a family, and make yourself less appealing to men.
Take a hugely successful (by feminist standards) woman like Emma Watson. She's made loads of money, she's super famous and has high social status. But no (decent quality) man is interested in her because she's hit the wall and is full of feminist baggage (and at least a dozen failed relationships that we know of). She's successful by male standards, not female standards. This is a problem as she is a woman, not a man.
A man of similar economic/ social status as Watson (who's 30 now) would easily be able to attract a high quality women in her mid twenties who wants to be a full time mother and wants to be supported by his money.
The feminist dream works for men...... but not for women. Feminist ideology assumes women are the same as men, but this is simply not true.
So we gay women have to fake it and find a husband? What a disagreeable situation for both parties.
A reasonable reply sir. However:
> Before feminism devalued the labour force a blue collar husband could afford to support an entire family on his wages alone, allowing mothers to provide full time care to their own children.
That was certainly the case in the 70s and we are told that productivity -- which should equal wealth creation -- is now 3X greater, yet we now need both parents working to even get close to the same standard of living. I submit that this is proof that (using simplistic arithmetic) 5/6 of the wealth that a couple now earn is going into pockets other than their own. Irrespective of women 'undermining' the labor market, *production is production!* What is produced must be consumed. If six times more is being produced (3X2), but the producers are only consuming 1/6 of that (standard of living is the same), it would seem to be mathematically necessary that 5/6 is going somewhere else. So who's wealth is going up, astronomically? The plutocracy. And, yes, governments suck up more money every year too. But the poor? Always blamed, but their drain on the economy is going down and is low anyway.
As to reproductive affairs I agree with you completely.
> That was certainly the case in the 70s and we are told that productivity -- which should equal wealth creation -- is now 3X greater, yet we now need both parents working to even get close to the same standard of living.
I think that's mostly a consequence of inflation since we got of the gold standard.
But what is produced is produced irrespective of the medium of exchange. If the entire economy consisted of apple pies, and I used to make ten a day and eat ten a day, but now I make 60, yet still only eat ten, then something's fishy. Who's eating the other 50?
Ive been a feminist my whole life and I figured out in 5th grade women aren't as strong. Don't lump everyone who cares about women's rights into the same bucket.
And I've witnessed plenty of men's spaces that are not intruded upon because men can kill women with their bare hands in seconds and, partly for good reasons, we are legally limited in our ability to acquire technology to defend ourselves. The result is that women, including trans identified women who look like men, instinctively know to avoid men's spaces.
I'll bet you believe that men are ridiculously stronger than women and ridiculously more prone to violent crimes against women than vice versa.
Yet I'm getting the feeling you feel threatened somehow about not having your own spaces?
"Ive been a feminist my whole life and I figured out in 5th grade women aren't as strong. Don't lump everyone who cares about women's rights into the same bucket."
Feminist ideology lumps all men in the same bucket by defining men as an oppressor class (patriarchy, toxic masculinity, rape culture etc).
Feminists literally define oppression, hardship and suffering as a masculine force (patriarchy). Intersectional feminists also like to talk about 'whiteness'. The original feminists from the late 1800's were also openly racist.
Feminism over the last 150 years has been nothing but lumping people into one bucket based on their race, sex, sexual orientation etc ("cis white heterorormative men" etc).
And let's not forget feminist theory also defines the category 'women' as oppressed, completely ignoring all the unique ways women specifically have power and privilege that men will never have, and all the women who enjoy those privileges and powers and are not the least bit oppressed.
By just about every metric men score lower than women in terms of standard of living (homelessness, suicide, life expectancy, access to welfare and socialised services, sentencing, child custody, reproductive autonomy) yet the narrative remains fixed that women = oppressed and men = privileged, based on the 0.00001% of men who are millionaire CEO's (and ignoring their privileged wives enjoying lives of leisure, because these kinds of women don't fit feminism's victim narrative).
Nothing lumps men and women into buckets more than feminism does.
Feminism (a broad ideology) is also not the same as 'women's rights' (a specific cause). Feminism was always a distinct movement completely separate to the Women's Rights Movement - that is, until feminism appropriated the WRM (just as they appropriated gay and racial issues and their respective movements too).
Feminism is a ideology (patriarchy theory etc) which hides behind 'women's rights' which is itself misrepresented in terms of 'gender equality'. Gender equality means equality BETWEEN men and women, and not 'women's rights'. When feminists talk of 'women's rights' they invariably mean 'women's privileges' (demands for special treatment, free stuff etc).
Feminist theory has done much to dumb down and misrepresent the issue of rights as they relate to gender. For a start feminists fail to mention that men's rights tended to be CONDITIONAL, such as being granted voting rights in return for agreeing to be cannon fodder (the draft). Feminists/ suffragettes fought for voting rights for women with no such obligations, thus they were fighting for (and won) female privilege over men.
For a century women have been able to vote for wars that only men were obligated to fight in. That's blatant female privilege, not gender equality.
The suffra-gettes were distinct from suffra-gists who were fighting for women AND men to have voting rights. Many men still did not have any voting rights at the time - another point passed over by feminist revisionist history.
Feminism is about putting all women in a bucket and labelling it 'oppressed victims with no agency' and putting all men in a bucket and labelling it 'all powerful oppressors with full agency'.
"And I've witnessed plenty of men's spaces that are not intruded upon because men can kill women with their bare hands in seconds"
This is just playing the victim. Men killing women with their bare hands is murder, and has always been treated as such. Everyone knows men are more strong than women which makes women more vulnerable in hand to hand combat. Everyone knows that! That's why men hitting women has always been a massive social taboo. Only feminists act as if men hitting women was normalised. The reality is the opposite. Women assaulting men is still viewed as a trivial matter, or even comedic as many social experiments have demonstrated.
The universal recognition of women's fragility relative to men gives women a social and legal advantage over men (and advantage you just tried to exploit). A woman only has to accuse her husband of DV and she can have him forcibly removed from the house, and denied access to his own children. This is all written into the law, based on the feminist Duluth criteria (women = victim/ men = aggressor by default, regardless of the evidence). Police advise male victims of DV to just run out the house when being beaten up by their frying pan wielding wives (rather than try to defend themselves), because if she so much as breaks a fingernail or gets a scratch on her face HE is the one going to jail.
Male/ female power is FAR more complex and nuanced than brute physical strength. Feminism has wrecked society with its dumbed down model. One of the reason's why (some) trans women have started to being so obnoxious and anti social in public is that they are copying a level of entitlement that was normalised by feminists over recent years. They simply assume female affectations will give them a free pass when it comes to acting entitled - because that is how modern 'empowered' women so often behave these days, and it generally works.
"we are legally limited in our ability to acquire technology to defend ourselves."
Every facet of our society, culture and legal system is geared to wards protecting women from harm. It was feminists who demanded an end to chaperones, marriage, chivalry, parental vetting of boyfriends/ husbands, strict social etiquette for dating, and many other conventions DESIGNED SPECIFICALLY to protect women from harm, from male predation and from the consequences of their own heady sexual desires and impulses.
Feminists said "we don't want any of those protections - we want to live dangerously". Then after a few decades feminists complained that living dangerously was traumatising (duh!) and that women needed more protection again. The best protection is to be sensible. But I suppose we could put an electric collar around all men and give you the remote so you can kill them instantly? Is that what you mean by technology?
"The result is that women, including trans identified women who look like men, instinctively know to avoid men's spaces."
I don't know what you are referring to here. But in general men have been very accommodating to feminists wanting females to join the boy scouts, men's social clubs and traditionally male workplace environments. Often women feel harassed simply because they are treated the same way that men treat each other, which is a lot more harsh than how men treat women. But it was feminists who wanted gender equality and an end to chivalry and patriarchy.
In general non feminist women seem to get on a lot easier with men and know how to respect their boundaries, and this respect is reciprocated by men.
It's the inappropriate dismantling of gendered boundaries (in the name of 'equality') that seems to lead to dysfunction and conflict. But this dismantling of traditional gender roles, spaces and identities, is what feminists have always fought for.
"I'll bet you believe that men are ridiculously stronger than women and ridiculously more prone to violent crimes against women than vice versa."
Both men and women are strong enough to inflict serious or even lethal damage to each other. Violent people (of either sex) are most likely to have been raised by single mothers with an absent father. Feminism fought for single motherhood to be de-stigmatised and incentivised by welfare. As a result we now have extremely violent and dysfunctional neighbourhoods wherever single motherhood is prevalent.
The best way to end violence against women (and men) is to raise children in a stable, loving home with both mother and biological father present and actively involved in the children's upbringing. No daycare. And preferably homeschooled. The data is very clear on this.
"Yet I'm getting the feeling you feel threatened somehow about not having your own spaces?"
I believe men and women are happier when they have their own spaces. It also makes sharing spaces more fun too. This is what traditional gender identities provided.
Feminism's 'social construct' theory of gender defined men and women as essentially the same, and gender to be arbitrary social conditioning which must be dismantled. But after several generations of living in each other's pockets, and trying to compete in a unisex culture, I think it's safe to say 'social construct' theory has been disproven. It's just caused misery, trauma, social breakdown and a completely unnecessary and pointless battle of the sexes.
You're making up these straw feminists and congratulating yourself on your righteousness but they aren't accurate. I'm a drill sergeant feminist. Im the only one I know of..it basically involves telling women to quit being such damn wimps and sellouts. Drill sergeant feminists are reviled by men and women alike as they blame women equally. Actually more so.. Trying to light a fire under the troops.
It is incredibly ineffective.
My point is that people who fall under the category of "wish women were higher in status" come in many flavors. More flavors and possibilities than a Vietnamese restaurant combined with a Cheesecake Factory. (Have you seen the menus at those places? So many pages.)
But I'm starting to think that all meninists have one thing to say... "you feminists think this" while pointing out a mix beliefs that has so little to do with my actual beliefs of myself or anyone I know that it's impossible to take offense.
You are making assumptions that are not true.
"You are making assumptions that are not true."
I'm happy to address any specifics.
This is very interesting. As a long-time corporate manager having worked with many intelligent and capable men and women, and as a near human behavior scientists from all the education I have pursued on the topic to help me unravel the puzzles of workforce performance and achievement, my observation has been that everyone is different with respect to what I call their basic foundational brain wiring… with much of the negative aspects able to be overcome with practice and persistence and maybe some therapy. Jordan Peterson might label it personality, but I see another layer of cognitive function that is influenced by personality but is malleable.
But the stronger the foundation brain wiring is, the more difficult is overcoming it… the less malleable it is.
And my observation for females in general is that their brain wiring tends to cause them to value more group affiliation and less individual competition. I suspect this is biological… probably evolutionary. It is not impossible to overcome, but many female bosses, coworkers and employees really struggled with it. For example, they would not speak up in a team meeting even though they had an important contribution preferring instead to not cause conflict with a coworker. They would refuse a promotion where their coworker friends would report to them (management is lonely).
I think this tendency to focus on the human aspect of things causes a difficulty to contemplate the big picture of challenge or opportunity. The female brain is thinking “how will everyone including me feel about this thing?” vs “what can I do to get this thing accomplished?”. This might be a subtle difference, but in the dog-eat-dog world of high competition, it is often the competitive disadvantage.
Obviously there are many competitive female athletes. But I agree that there is an imbalance of competitiveness. Males more often see individual competition as a requirement. Their MO is to completely destroy the competition but, if moral, respect the competition. Females more often have internal noise in consideration for how their competition and others might feel about them destroying the competition. This difference works when females are competing with females and visa versa, but is fraught with challenges when genders compete with each other.
A very thoughtful response. I agree with what you say. On the other hand, when it comes to chess at the highest level, we are talking about female outliers. So therefore, gendered personality traits *in general* are not really applicable to these outstanding players - maybe a few hundred out of millions - and so we have a pretty good control people that we know are: i) driven ii) highly competitive iii) extremely intelligent iv) single-minded v) necessarily not much interested in their social lives - and so forth. Out of this rarefied company : what is it that distinguishes the male players from the female? Is it simply that they are *more* driven etc? I don't buy that. Only sheer genius makes the difference at the summit, the same as in STEM.
Yes, I don’t see it as a general gender capability deficit or difference; more that the foundational brain wiring tendencies create general challenge differences. Obviously there are exceptions.
Frankly, in the history of humans females have less evolutionary experience with direct competition. We live in an unprecedented time where females have in a rather short period of time have rocketed to dominate society and the economy. I think instead of bristling at any suggestion that there is a difference and demand that the genders are cognitively the same, we would be better served being honest about these observable differences and tool society to accept them and exploit them.
I report to a board of 12 directors. In designing my compensation plan, the five female board members voted to weigh my performance on the annual employee engagement survey. They were overridden by the seven male board members that rejected that and wanted my performance based on bottle line financials and market share. These female board members valued a happy and satisfied workforce over hard competitive performance indicators that may in fact result in some lower employee satisfaction.
This is just one of many examples in my career where I observed this gender difference. The collective IQ of my five female board members is probably higher than is that of the seven male board members. Two of them have Harvard MBAs.
"Frankly, in the history of humans females have less evolutionary experience with direct competition."
Yes and no. On the one hand women naturally cooperate to look after kids -- the men are out hunting, even when they must cooperate to bring down the mammoth, each one still seeks to be the top hunter. Women, back in the cave all day, simply must get along. Yet, nothing men do to each other is as brutal as what women do to each other when they're competing over an alpha male.
Your last sentence 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣. Yeah right, Karen impales, crucifies, holocausts, enslaves and atom bombs Sharon to win Alpha Chad's affections. Bitter incel are we, Raymond? 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Hmmmm ... half a point. Ok, on the grand scale you are of course right, but I was thinking about interpersonal combat where, stereotypically, men will have a fistfight and women will methodically try to utterly destroy each other. We've all seen it.
"For example, they would not speak up in a team meeting even though they had an important contribution preferring instead to not cause conflict with a coworker. They would refuse a promotion where their coworker friends would report to them (management is lonely). "
Why can't this be explained as a result of social conditioning that rewards women for being nice and punishes them for being assertive? Why does it have to be "wiring"?
Come to think of it, how does being a "long-time corporate manager" qualify a person to opine on matters of human nature and behavior that are properly the province of PhDs in neuroscience, psychology and sociology, among other academic disciplines? This is anecdata dressed up as science in order to prove a point.
If we're looking for innate qualities that distinguish men from women in order to justify excluding men who say they're trans women from women-only chess events, it is unnecessary to use a characteristic as fraught as intelligence as the distinguishing factor. Let's use the obvious inborn trait instead. It's called biological sex.
"how does being a "long-time corporate manager" qualify a person to opine on matters of human nature and behavior that are properly the province of PhDs in neuroscience, psychology and sociology"
Good example of expertism. I'd take exactly the opposite stance -- real world experience is more credible than theorizing any day. The social 'sciences' are now so ideologically captured that their output is garbage.
Exactly!
As a female who is always thinking “what can I do to get this thing accomplished,” I believe much of the reason for women that consider how others will feel is because of the pressure to “act” that part. I do not dispute that men are more physically aggressive and more single-minded, but both men and women learn early in life what behavior and interests will be rewarded (according to sex) and respond accordingly. One has to exist in one’s environment after all, no matter how illogical.
I used to think it was conditioning, but not after I read Phyllis Chesler's book, Women's Inhumanity to Women. It's sobering. Girls socialize in very different ways from boys from a very early age, too soon for them to be "told" ow to interact. At school teachers give the same message to girls and boys, like "Be kind" and "Include everyone in games" and so forth. But girls come up with strategies on how to seem kind and yet be mean in the early grades. By Grade One, they form cliques and can make a non-conforming girl feel anxious and excluded in subtle ways. Boys socialize around their activities, and express their likes and dislikes far more straightforwardly. They fight faster and make up faster. There is no way a child can be programmed so quickly. And by whom? Nowadays mothers are telling girls they can do and be anything they want. The messages they get from society are to be confident and ambitious. Their more roundabout ways of getting to where they want to be is innate, IMHO.
This is Peterson's point about males being more directly disagreeable. I absolutely have experienced the female tendency for outward agreeablness but then backdoor effort to undermine the perceived competition. And competition might be social instead of professional. There is also a "rules" compliance difference... with males more often pushing boundaries and females more often policing the rules within the organization. Again, I don't see these traits as being cognitively less or more... just general differences I have observed, but also with many exceptions.
I did read it. She may have qualified, but nobody in the chess world believed Susan was in the same class as Judith, from what my sources indicate. Qualifying is fine, it means you are in the big leagues. Clearly the top women players in the world are better than 99% of the men who take chess seriously and who strive to arrive in the big leagues but fail. I recommend Sasha Chapin's 2020 memoir, "All the Wrong Moves: A Memoir about Chess, Love and Ruining Everything." It's funny and heartbreaking, but also hugely informative. He was a good player who plateaued out of the big leagues in spite of his blood, sweat and tears - he would never have beaten the Polgar sisters - but he is a brilliant observer of human nature, and of the astonishing demands a career in chess makes. We're not talking about the layer of talent underneath the Olympian summit, though, we're talking about the summit. I find that this nitpicking is a very good illustration of the hypothesis.
Sorry, but it's *audacious* to accuse me of nitpicking when your claim that only Judit "had a shot at the top prize" - a key part of your earlier comment - was true only because Susan qualified and *then FIDE refused to let her play because she was female*! You obviously intended for the readers to think that Susan just wasn't naturally good enough to be at the top, when in reality FIDE and Hungary were clearly making it impossible for her to succeed in a critical period for one of the sister's development. But acknowledging the extreme misogyny the sisters faced isn't helpful for the narrative that men are naturally so much smarter and more suited to the game, and that accounts for their superiority.
But all of this is more or less beside the point. You know that Judit and Susan didn't just happen to be born with a magic set of genes and prenatal hormones that gave them these abilities. Even if you maintain that they were naturally smart, you know that there are millions of other similarly naturally smart (or smarter) girls out there who *could* do as well as they did, competing with the top men, given the right supports. (As another reader pointed out, this would be unthinkable in any physical sport - nobody seriously believes a trans advocate could raise a female daughter to be a top 10 sprinter. This alone is enough to show that women do not face the same hard limits in mental "sports" as they do in physical sports!)
The fact that one person in a book you read claims he worked really hard and still couldn't make the top does not sufficiently counter the girls' achievements or this view. I certainly don't believe that just anyone can start training in chess really hard and become a top 10 player. Among other things, it probably requires a certain early childhood background in the field, extensive parental and social support, etc. You may also argue it requires a certain IQ threshold. Such barriers can no doubt be insurmountable for any particular individual, but the point is that they do not intrinsically prevent far more women and girls from performing at the very highest level.
"But acknowledging the extreme misogyny the sisters faced"
Absolute bullshit. All three Polgar sisters were every male player's wet dreams. Misogyny? On the contrary, the entire male chess world was delighted that such talent existed in -- let me be honest -- such attractive females. I can guarantee you that when Judit was playing some male grandmaster, that virtually every man watching the game was rooting for her. Misogyny my Zugzwang.
Ironically, your comment shows just how ignorant you are of the fact sexual harassment is actually a net negative for female players, not a fun bonus. Beyond this, the idea that the girls "only" faced sexual harassment and not serious, systematic attempts to stifle their success is easily falsified. Susan Polgar has written about the many bizarre and far-reaching ways the patriarchal chess community attempted to block their success, such as taking away Susan's passport so she couldn't compete in international tournaments and forbidding her from playing in the Men's WCC even after she had qualified for it.
Ray isn't just "ignorant" AF - he's downright creepy and pêrvy. He actually wrote about his "wet dreams" of the sisters. He actually experienced erection and êjåçülåtion from watching fully-clothed "attractive" women playing chess and typed about it. Ew. Ew. Ew.
God knows what roadblocks she might have faced -- few people go thru life on a magic carpet. At the end of the day Judit seems not to have suffered too much. I honestly don't know the details regarding Susan. Frankly I suspect she's crying in her beer due to her sister being, frankly, better than her -- and they are all very competitive, so ego is a factor.
Nope, you're not going to see this because you don't want to, but the kind of genius that makes a world champion in chess is statistically likely to be overwhelmingly present in males, and that's the simple truth of it. But one can always tell a tale of Oppression if one wants to. Someone wolf-whistled at Susan!! World-champion stifled! You seem intelligent but you're just not prepared to face the facts here.
Soooo the profound conclusion of this writer is “women are dumber than men.” Good god it’s not even worth a response -- but let’s do it anyway. Colin Wright should be ashamed publishing this drivel. If you’re going to make a claim as broad as “all differences between men and women in STEM and chess are due to inferiority of the female intellect” then at least prove it. This op ed (it is not even remotely close to an actual essay) is so thin its laughable and I’m fascinated people are even responding to this in a remotely serious way. Although i do appreciate the comments, and the fact that the writer is doubling down on her vapid argument by washing the thoughtful responses in “nah women are just stupider.”
Denying any potential role of socialization despite ALL the evidence of gendered differences, the ignorance of the many types of intelligence -- indeed who decided the genius philosopher or poet who can’t do math is less smart than the mathematician? -- the assumption that IQ tests, standardized exams, and STEM are universal, final markers of intellect and nothing else can be -- come on Colin this is just pathetic.
Demonstrate some nuance, some analysis of the potential flaws of your own argument, your own assumptions and blind spots. (I thought this was a publication of depth and nuance?)
Otherwise Barbara you’re really proving the point you’re making in this article, but not in the way you think.
Janelle, you could have just as logically written, "Sooo the conclusion of this writer is that *men are DUMBER than women*," since I made it perfectly clear that the variability of male intelligence puts them outside the distribution norms at BOTH the high IQ end and also at the low IQ end, the high end being the relevant factor for chess. The rest of what you write does not, therefore, merit further response, since it is all based on the fruit of a poisoned attitude.
By the way, I think it is significant to add that although I have heard from many women who - like Janelle - are infuriated at the idea that even a small minority of men are gifted with genius IQ that only a nugatory number of women ever approach, and who upbraid me for even suggesting it, I have yet to hear from a *single male* who gives a flying f*** that a small minority of men are dumber than most women. It isn't because they don't believe it. They quite readily believe it, and don't care. It has no impact on their lives. I wish women would *stop taking it personally* that this distribution of IQ is an actual *thing* and understand that it is not an insult to women in general or to them. It simply doesn't matter in the scheme of things.
Thanks. The radfems simply can't face the reality. The male brain -- like everything else about males -- is designed for 'succeed or die trying'. The female is designed for 'survive'. The female brain is as good on average, but tends to be average. The male brain 'rolls the dice' and is far more likely to be either brilliant -- or moronic.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
That's not an argument. You know, the fems really should give ground to reality sometimes, it would make them look less silly and more secure. There are lots of things women do better than men and nobody tries to explain it away -- when women or Blacks are better they're just simply better, no? But where men or Whites are better, that's got to be explained away, yes? It seems to me the Real feminism would be to celebrate the female as she actually is, rather than measuring her against the male in everything. The male mind is deep but narrow -- we're good at being very good at tasks that involve absolute precision at rules-based things -- like shooting an arrow exactly to the bullseye, or winning at chess or writing computer code. When I'm writing code I find it overwhelming to have to get up to pee. But a woman can do half a dozen things at once and do them well. Why the insecurity?
Oh good grief. What an absurdly simplistic takeaway from this piece.
Why are some women so desperate to prove that we are “equal” to men in every last respect? We are better (in general) in some and not in others. Meaning- wait for it - we are DIFFERENT.
Wiring of the brain takes place in utero and the washing of testosterone makes for significant differences at a cellular- not to mention chromosomal- level.
You might as well step off the roof and argue with gravity.
> Good god it’s not even worth a response
Because you don't have one.
> but let’s do it anyway.
But you're going to spray as much squid ink as you can.
> If you’re going to make a claim as broad as “all differences between men and women in STEM and chess are due to inferiority of the female intellect” then at least prove it.
She did in fact present evidence in the form of the relative chess rankings of men and women. What's your alternative explanation.
> Denying any potential role of socialization despite ALL the evidence of gendered differences, the ignorance of the many types of intelligence -- indeed who decided the genius philosopher or poet who can’t do math is less smart than the mathematician? -- the assumption that IQ tests, standardized exams, and STEM are universal, final markers of intellect and nothing else can be -- come on Colin this is just pathetic.
Classic example of special pleading. At lest you seem to implicitly concede that males and females differ in how their minds word, and that it's perfectly possible for one approach to be better for a particular problem.
Magnus is absolutely ruthless in the Endgame, winning 100+ move games thought to be draws. Look at some of Gotham Chess's videos. Look also at John Fish's satirical video on cheating in Oct 2022.
Love to see that video...
As well, I thought some of the Chess Federation discussions had to do with women who ideate a male persona, and the objection to one of them suddenly claiming she'd won previous points/standing/championships on the male side (or open category) rather than in women's. It will be an interesting process to watch. I used to avoid saying estrogen consumption caused my crossdressing ex-husband to go crazy and be the most self-involved human on the planet, but now that I've absorbed the fact that estrogen is a wrong sex hormone for him, I say it.
The solution I think is just to stop using the nonsense words "transwoman" and "transman." Among adults there are men and there are women. That's it. "Transwomen" are men. "Transmen" are women. Whether transgenderism is a real biopsychological "thing" (like depression) or just a pseudoscience like astrology and recovered memory syndrome is beside the point. Your sex is what you were conceived as and that's what governs what doors we open and close.
A sport (or a prison or a violence shelter or a public bathroom/locker room) that is designed to accommodate women ought not to accommodate men. No matter what gender they think they are. There is no need to parse whether the brain of a "transwoman" is more like that of a man or more like that of a woman. It is a man's brain. So he plays in the men's chess division. Full stop.
The activists have tricked us into saying that there are such things as transwomen -- even if we disagree with trans ideology, we are still bullied into calling them transwomen -- and this sucks us into bizarre discussions about whether they have an unfair advantage over women or whether they have the right to compete against women (and invade their other spaces, too) just because they "identify" as female "gender". This is nonsense and 10 years from now we will realize that we were all fools and cowards for letting this go on as long as it did.
When my brother and I were young, I (female), would usually win the first time around at any given game, probably because I am older. Then the little devil would *study the game* relentlessly until he could win every time! There were a lot of things I would rather do than spend that kind of time (and dogged attention) to win at something, and I don't need to be 'equal' to men on this level. We contribute different things!
Judith's two sisters were good players, but it was only Judith who had a shot at the ultimate prize. I wasn't aware of the hardships they faced. What is relevant that Judith did play at the top. And her privilege lay in her formation as a player. It is easy to say that there are "potentially" millions of girls who could perform at that level. I would settle for one world champion to get that particular ball rolling.
If you would have read the link I sent, you would have seen that Susan Polgar also qualified for the "Men's" World Championship cycle, but FIDE did not allow her to play. So she didn't have a shot at the ultimate prize...not because of her abilities, but because of the blatant discrimination she and other female players faced.
Yet her open ranking demonstrates that she'd not have had a chance, FIDE bureaucracy notwithstanding. The rankings computer neither knows nor cares what your sex/gender/race/species/politics, your sexual behaviors or your favorite color might be, there's only one's tally of wins. Susan didn't have the needed genius, but Judit did. Trying to bring misogyny into this is pathetic.
Crazy how you moved immediately from "There's no way Susan Polgar faced any misogyny because she was HAWT" to "It doesn't matter if she faced misogyny because she sucked anyways." No self awareness whatsoever or recognition of how obvious your kneejerk misogyny is. Here's a thought: maybe the fact Susan faced all these blockers to playing in high level tournaments actually resulted in her not attaining the same success her younger sister did.
"There's no way Susan Polgar faced any misogyny because she was HAWT"
I didn't say that, I said that on balance the Sisters were favored, not persecuted. Misogyny is like mosquitoes in summer,always there but easy to swat. But far more men supporting them.
"It doesn't matter if she faced misogyny because she sucked anyways."
I didn't say that either. She made grandmaster! But her global ranking kept her out of contention as a world champion. Face it, she was not world-class she was one level below that. You can tell a tale of woe if you like but it's just a tale. One does not hear Judit whining about anything, wolf-whistles or not. And I'm not a misogynist, I just think that you are loosing this debate very badly on the merits. The author is female too, and she's winning, gender notwithstanding.
Neither you nor Barbara Kay have actually answered as to what you think the most reasonable explanation for the Polgar success is. You both know that endorsing the idea that Laszlo Polgar just happened to get really lucky and have 1 in a billion daughters is highly implausible and a bad look for your theory. On the other hand, endorsing the more plausible idea that the Polgar girls were more ordinary "smart girls" raised in an environment friendly to female success requires endorsing the idea that millions of other girls could potentially play at this high level. That goes counter to the idea that men's testosterone levels and supposed genetic superiority make them uniquely suited to high level play. You don't want to admit this, and therefore hide behind vague statements about probability curves, without actually explaining the particular data given. This is a real problem for your theory.
"have actually answered as to what you think the most reasonable explanation for the Polgar success is"
Nature and nurture.
"Laszlo Polgar just happened to get really lucky and have 1 in a billion daughters"
Winning the lottery is really lucky too, but it happens all the time.
"requires endorsing the idea that millions of other girls could potentially play at this high level"
No question that, given the same support, we'd see more Polgars -- but we'd also see more male grandmasters too. Your arguments hold for boys as well as girls. The reason the Soviets dominated chess for so long is that they had a government policy of finding and developing talent. We do not dispute what you say, we only say that the fact that men are statistically superior is also due to factors in the male brain. BTW, I clobber my sister at chess, but she clobbers me at scrabble.
"hide behind vague statements about probability curves"
That's the problem with probability -- it is always vague, certainties are not to be had.
I agree with the male variability hypothesis, but can respect spaces for women while holding an open mind about the cause. I don't think the fact that a minority of men might be smarter then most woman necessarily has to be the answer. I don't think we have all the answers to intelligence. For example, I'm happy admitting that Asians outscore Caucasians on intelligence tests in America, yet I don't think they are smarter, as a group, then white people. I don't think we (collectively) have all the answers just yet.
Science can never be said to have been settled once and for all, but if *all the replicable evidence we can muster* keeps turning up the same conclusion according to the scientific method, then it is fair to say that that the extreme ends of the IQ distribution graphs exhibit both - both genius and unusually low IQ - are occupied by males. And it is also therefore fair to base policy on the assumption of male advantage in chess competition. Remember that these chess outcomes emerge, as I noted, from a vast control group: from every nation in the world, from every ethnicity, from every educational system, from every socio-economic stratum, etc. The scientific method rarely has such an embarrassment of riches in its "lab". So why resist? We make public policy in any number of areas on the basis of an extreme paucity of information by comparison. If we don't have all the answers yet, after so many years of chess competition, then when do you think we will? And how will we gather any further information? What are we missing here in terms of input?
I read an argument once to the effect that the male advantage in chess was a statistical illusion, owing to the asymmetry between total male and female players. In a word, the game is said to exponentially more popular among men than women. Anecdotally, that seems plausible to me. I've been playing chess for about 25 years in the Seattle area, and I've met many more players named Dave than female players. Still, that begs the question of why there are so many more male chess players. Is there just something about the game that appeals more to the male psyche? And if so, would that not compromise an advantage? Women might be as good, or for all I know better, at chess than men, if only they were as obsessed with it. But obsessiveness must be the greatest single advantage a chess player might have. If one sex is more prone than the other to obsessiveness, at least to abstract things, than that sex will have a relative advantage at chess, even if they're overall equally intelligent and creative.
It doesn't matter if there are 10 times as many male players as female. What matters is that the 10% of female players have never yet produced a world champion. You say "for all I know" women may be "as good or better" than men. On what basis do you make such a statement? Are there biogoted gatekeepers who weed out the genius female chess players and find some reason to de-select them from tournaments? Seriously, there is no basis for this "for all I know" statement. For all ANYONE knows, men are better at chess, since only men win world championships, and any decent male player in Canada, for example, could beat our current best female players quite easily. You can argue about why, or simply shrug and say it is just a coincidence (nobody believes this), but you can't simply hypothesize that women are better, only they so far have not shown their full mettle. The point about chess is that nobody is stopping them, so if you have another explanation for their failure to reach the top, please at least share your theory..
The basis of my statement was epistemological humility. I don't know, or pretend to know. To be clear, I have no emotional stake in the answer. I agree that men might well be innately better at chess, on average or at the extremes of ability, than women are. There are many things men excel at relative to women. Maybe chess is one of them. I don't think men's and women's relative chess performance is a coincidence, or that anyone else thinks so either. The argument, I presume, is between those who think the disparity is based in biology, those who think it's based in culture, and those who think it might be some mix of biology and culture.
I don't see how the relative numbers of male and female players can fail to be relevant. To begin with, in my experience, not even close to 10% of avid chess players are female. I doubt it's even 5%. Of course, my experience might be atypical, but it does seem to track with a general impression that the game is overwhelmingly played by men. Yes, that itself could be an indication that men are generally better at chess. People are drawn to activities they find they excel at. But it could also have a social or cultural component. What if only 1% of chess players were female? Would it the number be relevant then?
If the number were only 1%, it could not be culture stopping them, since chess is played in every culture and the women champions come from a variety of cultures. It then comes down to interest in things more than social interaction, the pleasure of performance in a mental arena one is already attracted to, comfort with aggression, etc, and to other innate characteristics that equip the player for the longterm single-minded dedication to a narrowly defined task.
Is it not interesting how people will try to make an argument to the effect that women are just as good, they are just less interested? Such a thing is not impossible, but very unlikely -- we are interested in things we are good at -- we are disinterested in things we are not good at. I have no interest in becoming a flower arranger and that's linked to the fact that I'd be terrible at it.
> I read an argument once to the effect that the male advantage in chess was a statistical illusion, owing to the asymmetry between total male and female players. In a word, the game is said to exponentially more popular among men than women. Anecdotally, that seems plausible to me.
Except nearly everyone growing up in the western world gets exposed to chess. The differences in the number of players are largely based on who chooses to play, which isn't independent of who has a talent for it.
"In a word, the game is said to exponentially more popular among men than women."
Own goal. This backfires. Following your logic, the women who do go into chess are already exceptional by virtue of even playing the game at all. There is zero discrimination, but even if there were, that too would only weed out the half-hearted players and narrow the pool to the deeply motivated and talented women.
The thesis of this article - that men simply are more naturally competitive, aggressive, spatially aware, etc and therefore will inevitably dominate at the top levels of chess, necessitating female-only chess spaces for biological reasons - was falsified decades ago by the Polgar sisters, in particular Judit Polgar. Raised by a father who was a social constructivist about genius and intelligence, Judit astounded the world by breaking Bobby Fischer's world record to become the youngest ever grandmaster at the time before breaking into the top 10 of "male" chess players. She did this in part by refusing to ever play in women's events, on the grounds that her abilities were on par with those of the best men, and her success is probably partly explained by this. Interestingly, Polgar was also primarily known for her relentless aggression on the chessboard, again defying gendered expectations.
Most "biodeterminists" about chess genius dismiss the Polgars as "exceptions". But of course, any plausible theory about the origins of genius and male success in chess needs to actually explain the exceptions, not simply dismiss them. (Imagine if a 19th century physicist dismissed the double slit experiment as an "exception" to the general success of Newtonian physics and therefore didn't feel the need to account for it in their theory!) That would be a terrible way to handle science, yet it is the norm among biodeterminists about genius when I ask them about this case. They simply think that describing something as an exception to the rule is enough to explain it.
One biodeterminist explanation for Polgar's success is that she simply happened to be born with an extremely rare set of genes and hormones that caused her success. This is too implausible to be taken seriously - the idea that a female child with a 1 in a billion set of genes and hormones simply happened to be born to a social constructivist father who believed women could be as successful as men at chess is too ludicrous to be taken seriously. The odds this would ever happen are astronomically low. This is doubly true considering that Polgar's sisters were also exceptional chess players.
A more plausible, biodeterminist-lite explanation is that Judit was born a very intelligent child - say in the 99th percentile of overall intelligence - and was then given the right set of environmental conditions to succeed in the top 10. But if this is true, there are *millions* of girls with equal or greater potential to be top 10 players. The difference is that those girls aren't being given the right conditions to succeed at that high level.
The thesis of this article should not be that it is *impossible* or unrealistic for women to succeed at chess at "male" levels, but that it's simply not important to create the conditions to cause those girls to succeed, and that we shouldn't alter our society to do so. That's a more honest and realistic position, but it's also more clearly anti-feminist.
"But of course, any plausible theory about the origins of genius and male success in chess needs to actually explain the exceptions, not simply dismiss them."
Except that no one 'dismisses' them. We are dealing with bell-curves of probability which *never* forbid anything, they simply predict probability. Judit was 'possible' but also 'rare', just as in theory, so also in fact. One day, statistically speaking, we will have a female world champion, it just won't happen very often.
You obviously didn't understand my post. I asked for an explanation. Is your explanation seriously the first one given: that the parents who believed in women's abilities in chess and set up the conditions for girls to succeed *just so happened* to have 1 out a billion freak daughters with the right set of prenatal hormones and chess genes to succeed? Do you understand how incredibly unlikely it would have been for the girls to succeed if your theories were true?
Now that's your first reasonable comment. Yes, the natalists have a problem there don't they? However there's countless other Laszlo Polgars who tried just as hard and did not produce a family of grandmasters. I myself think it's both -- the girls are the product of two very intelligent parents *and* they were brought up with one goal in mind -- chess supremacy. Nature, nurture and environment are always all significant.
I'm deeply skeptical of the idea that there are thousands of other Laszlo Polgars who are attempting, in the same systematic way and careful way, to produce chess prodigy daughters who compete on equal terms with boys and men, but failing miserably. What evidence is there that these families exist? This seems like a totally unfalsifiable claim made to avoid the uncomfortable challenge the Polgars presented to the idea of innate male superiority at high level chess.
Even if you could find thousands of other people claiming to be attempting and failing to raise prodigy daughters, it would be necessary to examine their methodology to see if they were actually doing so in an effective manner before one could draw any hard conclusions. Plenty of people talk big about their attempts and failures to become "geniuses", but a close examination of their lives often reveals more disorganization and dysfunction than they claim. But beyond this, I seriously doubt you could find more than a handful of "Polgar like" parents in the first place.
"What evidence is there that these families exist?"
Play fair. Offer me a match. I can't prove it any more than you can prove that Susan would have been world camp but for the misogyny. Let's be reasonable. You know as well as I do that LP is very unlikely to be the only person in history who took the 'nurture' doctrine and tried to prove it. It is after all a required belief for people like yourself. Nuts, if you had daughters you'd probably do the same. Besides, it is *at least* partially true! -- no question that nurture is important. But so is innate ability -- the Girls had both.
"This seems like a totally unfalsifiable claim made to avoid the uncomfortable challenge the Polgars presented to the idea of innate male superiority at high level chess."
Yes, unfalsifiable, just like your misogyny tales keeping Susan Oppressed -- but not absurd either, no doubt FIDE treated her ... what's the best word? I'd say 'bureaucratically'.
"the uncomfortable challenge the Polgars presented to the idea of innate male superiority at high level chess."
No challenge. Again, the male superiority is *statistical* -- it's about probabilities. Again, one day we are almost certain to have a female champ, but it will happen rarely. The Polgars are comforting examples of how statistics work.
"it would be necessary to examine their methodology to see if they were actually doing so in an effective manner"
Fact is most chess geniuses 'find themselves' -- they are not nurtured from birth, they simply have the inborn talent and sooner or later it comes out. The question of how good Judit would have been 'anyway' remains open. You deny nature, I accept both nature and nurture. It's always a bit of both.
Did Polgar ever win a World Chess Championship title against men? The answer is no. "Biodeterminism" wins again.
It's incredibly obvious is that your standard for proof here is just one step beyond whatever the best woman has accomplished. If she had won a WCC, you'd find some other reason to discount this. You don't really have a coherent theory for how your own views could possibly be falsified. You just come up with whatever standard allows you to discount women as not truly as great as men.
"You don't really have a coherent theory for how your own views could possibly be falsified."
Easy: Women coming to equality in the rankings. You've seen The Queen's Gambit? No reason it *couldn't* happen, it's just not likely.
Her theory on the other hand, can't be falsified at all. As it consists of attributing all failures to "patriarchal oppression".
> But of course, any plausible theory about the origins of genius and male success in chess needs to actually explain the exceptions, not simply dismiss them.
True, however, even a theory that dismisses the exceptions but explains the common case is better than one that explains the exceptions but dismisses the common case.
My theory actually can explain both. But a theory that dismisses the exceptions but explains the common case is not a good theory. You are like a 19th century physicist who dismisses the Michelson Morley experiment because theories that assume waves need a medium to travel work well "most" of the time. You would instantly recognize how anti-scientific your thinking is if you applied your reasoning to any other field.
> My theory actually can explain both.
Only if one calls unfalsifiable ranting about "patriarchal oppression" an explanation.
Someone doesn't understand the concept of statistical distribution.
> But if this is true, there are *millions* of girls with equal or greater potential to be top 10 players.
That also implies that there are even more boy with equal or greater potential who aren't being given the right conditions to succeed.
Oh, I agree with you that there are *billions* of boys and girls in the world who aren't receiving optimal care and instruction that would allow them to be as intelligent as possible. I agree with Laszlo Polgar that genius is largely socially constructed and probably a lot of healthy boys and girls could be "geniuses", given proper instruction and care.
But women and girls still face specific barriers that boys don't. For one, boys don't generally have to hear people opine about their biological inferiority. That alone obviously impacts how people perceive their daughters vs their sons and so on. That's in conjunction with the many other documented examples of oppressions women face around the world.
> I agree with Laszlo Polgar that genius is largely socially constructed
Not related to the main point, but note the non standard use of "socially constructed" to mean "heavily influenced by nurture" here.
> For one, boys don't generally have to hear people opine about their biological inferiority.
Um, outside of a few nonmainstream fora that hasn't been happening in over half a century. In fact for that long society popular culture has been going out its way to open doors for girls and give them "strong female role models".
I'm a woman and can tell you your impression of how good women have it in gender nonconforming spaces is totally wrong. Views like the one above - that the best men in a space are an elite group marked by biological superiority, and that women can never realistically expect to match them intellectually - are still the mainstream and obviously impact how men and women think about themselves and their daughters.
Being in engineering and physics has made me cynical about the way men wield these myths as forms of ego-boosting and as ways to exclude women from certain "elite" spaces. There are certainly many good men who do not act in this way, but it's a reality. These beliefs do have an impact.
"Being in engineering and physics"
And yet you have no idea how to understand a probability curve??
You didn't understand my post.
> I'm a woman and can tell you your impression of how good women have it in gender nonconforming spaces is totally wrong.
By which you mean that since you feminists haven't managed to impose your views 100%, dissident views occasionally leak through. Classic case of self-blindness. (https://substack.com/@euginenier/note/c-39631508)
Great article on the uncomfortable issue of male dominance in chess. Magus Carlsen himself popped up on a Youtube short recently to assure us he doesn't believe in an innate male advantage. He might really think so, and if so he might be right. But given the secular pieties of the ruling class, and their enforcement by the Inquisition of cancel culture, any such declaration must be viewed with caution. Why risk your reputation, social standing, endorsements, and maybe even your livelihood by saying the wrong thing when you can be utterly safe by blaming it all on the Patriarchy? Carlsen didn't get where he is by making bad moves. And suggesting men even might be innately better at any cognitive task than women, even on average, or even only at the outermost extremes of ability--that would be a bad move in the current socio-political climate.
That said, if there is an innate difference, it can't be anywhere near what it is in, say, boxing. It's hard to imagine a woman, in any weight class, being in the world's top hundred, or top thousand if compared against men. Even a woman in the top ten thousand seems like a stretch, given the strength and aggression differential between the sexes. Certainly there has never been a female boxer who would have lasted a minute against a Mike Tyson or Muhammad Ali in their prime. But Judith Polgar was once one of the 8 strongest players in the world. She qualified for the candidates tournament to determine the challenger for the world championship. She has defeated Gary Kasparov, Magnus Carlsen, and other chess luminaries too numerous to list. Polgar also didn't deign to play women's tournaments. The woman's world championship was hers for the taking any time she wanted it, but she never bothered. It was beneath her.
That brings me to a criticism of this article. Could it be that women haven't closed the gap because of the existence of women's chess? Could it be that insisting on a separate chess competitions for women only reinforces the stereotype that women are innately disadvantaged, such that it becomes a self fulling prophecy? Maybe instead of keeping trans-identifying males out of women's chess, our efforts would be better directed at abolishing women's chess altogether?
I don't think anyone who regularly reads RLS has to be convinced of the male advantage in physical sport, so there is no need to address that issue. The only pushback is on the cognitive differences. You may not have seen my previous reply in which I mentioned Judith Polgar. I did say she had won games off the top male chess players and was for sure a prodigy, who did not feel sufficiently challenged in the women's division. But, as I said, "She was quite legitimately a top-10 player in the world at her peak, and a top-20 player over a significant number of years. But she also finished last in the only tournament she played in where a path to the World title was on the line - and she was at her peak then." Did she lose her nerve? Was she not sufficiently consistent? Who knows? What we do know about Polgar is that nobody in the world had a more privileged chess-related upbringing. She ate, slept and breathed chess from infancy onward. She was in a veritable chess bubble. Her father was bent on making her a world champion expressly to prove that a woman could do it. She achieved great things. But failed to reach the summit. Abolishing women's chess is not the answer. Women need it. Otherwise, they'll stop playing competitively. We have to face the music here.
The idea that Judit Polgar had the most privileged chess upbringing possible is ridiculous, for starters. I can't believe how ignorant this comment is, sorry. All the Polgar sisters faced enormous discrimination and harassment as a woman in the chess world. Susan Polgar, her older sister, has described on Twitter some of the ridiculous roadblocks the chess world threw in the family's way - like taking away Susan's passport so she couldn't compete in international competitions. The acts the girls faced weren't simply cruel and demeaning; they seriously affected the girls' opportunities for success. It's actually incredible just how much the patriarchal Hungarian government and chess world did to all three of them in an effort to keep them down. All the girls faced bullying, harassment, and abuse from the larger chess community, which for obvious reasons did not want them to succeed. You can read about Susan's experiences here:
https://twitter.com/SusanPolgar/status/1645026095056449538
Moreover, the idea that Judit's accomplishments don't disprove your thesis because she didn't win the world championship is also ridiculous. She made it into the top 10 and won numerous "men's" competitions. She was obviously on par with the other top men at the time. That's the important thing, not her performance in one competition. As I said before, the idea these girls just happened to be born with super-genes is a poor explanation for their success. There are potentially millions of other girls who could perform at that level.
It seemed to me worth reiterating that even if men have an innate advantage in chess (which they well might) it can't nearly be as great as it is in most physical sports. I chose boxing as a comparison not to convince anyone of the male advantage in this quintessentially masculine arena, but to the contrary, on the presumption that almost anyone would already be convinced. I suppose I didn't need to belabor the point but I wanted to illustrate that while a human female ever being one of the 8 best boxers in the world (or 800 best, or likely 8,000 best) would rightly seem absurd to almost any sane person, a woman being one of the 8 best chess players has already happened. But suppose it hadn't. Suppose an otherwise identical parallel universe where Judith Polgar had never been born. Someone there would probably write an article insisting that a woman couldn't possibly defeat a male world chess champion, let alone rank in the world's top ten. After all, it had never happened.
I've never been able to understand female-only chess tournaments and divisions. Your ranking is what defines you as a chess player, not your biological capabilities. It's a game that involves both spatial awareness AND strategy: something anyone can learn if they're dedicated to it. However, it takes a lot of time and interest to become a professional chess player. Pro players spend hours and hours every day studying chess moves--something most people aren't interested in. Who cares if most of the people that *are* interested and *win* matches just so happen to be male?
Well, obviously women chess players "care" - since without their own division, they never win the gold, and precious few of them ever win any high-level trophies. Creating their own division was a tacit admission - just as it never had to be spelled out in sport, since until 5 minutes ago it was obvious to everyone that males had an advantage physically over women - that stratospheric-level chess genius was and is a male domain. A few women have come tantalizingly close - that is, a few women have taken individual games off world champions - but they have never achieved the championship. It ain't social construction that is stopping them.
"a few women have taken individual games off world champions"
And again, to be crude, it's sexual to watch and no question who the world's rooting for. Remember in TQG when the match against the Russian is postponed, and every last male that Beth ever beat are sitting around on a floor covered in chess boards turning their brains to mush trying to figure out how to help her beat the Russian?
I remember that scene very well. I asked a grand master friend if that scene was realistic, and he said, "Absolutely." He claims that chess people are so worshipful of those who are a tier above where they know their limit is, they are happy to be part of the supportive cast to see "their" hero - male or female - succeed.
Sure, it's the other side of ego -- you beat me, so I want you to become world champ -- thus, I was beaten by the world champ, not some bum! Besides, ego aside, chess players tend to like each other, and to want to help each other improve their games. I taught my nephew to play -- now he kicks my ass and I'm proud to have made him what he is -- I *still* help him get even better. I'm bugging him to go for master.
This just poses an even bigger question: Are the female grandmasters inferior players? If so, why is the standard not being raised?
Absolutely not. They are awesome players, and completely dedicated to the game. Take for example grand master Vera Menchik: The title of chess Grandmaster (GM) wasn't formalized until 1950, so she wasn't actually "defeating Grandmasters at the time of her death in 1944" as has been claimed. She was defeating men who were middling-strong players - some of whom might have earned the GM title had it been available. From wikipedia: "The biggest and strongest tournament Menchik played in was the Moscow tournament of 1935, which featured World Champions Botvinnik, Capablanca, and Lasker, as well as a host of elite players and future GMs like Flohr, Ragozin, Spielmann, Levenfish, Lilenthal, etc. Here, Menchik finished in last place, 20th out of 20 competitors, with a score of (+0−16=3)." To be clear, that's 16 losses and three draws; no wins. So, she was completely outclassed by this field, who were among the top 40 or 50 men in the world. By 1935, she had been Women's World Champion for 8 years, and would remain so for another 9 years. Which seems to confirm the thesis that the best women in the world are typically a full category or two below the best men in the world.
Nona was the first official female GM, but notice that it took 28 years after the title (and the qualifying rules for earning it) was first established for a woman to come along to earn it. Although a GM, Nona, like Menchik, was a category or two below the top male players of her day.
Judit Polgar really is the only exception, so far. Her chess-obsessive father homeschooled her from infancy, with hours and hours a day of chess, in order to prove that a woman could become a world champion. She was a prodigy for sure. She was quite legitimately a top-10 player in the world at her peak, and a top-20 player over a significant number of years. But she also finished last in the only tournament she played in where a path to the World title was on the line - and she was at her peak then.
I certainly don't doubt that women can play chess. But as we can both know, even GMs have their rankings. So what does it matter if the top players are male? It's still a great feat to get to grandmaster status, and I think it's almost insulting to put women in their own separate division where they're encouraged to play among inferior players. The goal of the game is to consistently get better, so without a women's division, I believe the female players would be encouraged to push themselves to be better. The game would have a chance to evolve.
Maybe I just can't understand it from a casual player's perspective.
You understand better than the author. Competitive people thrive, academically and athletically, when grouped with others of their ability, whether male or female. They will push each other to better performance. Set the bar low and they will meet the low bar. Raise it and they will rise above the bar.
The sad thing about this is the statement "The “greater male variability hypothesis,” according to which, on the basis of standardized intelligence tests, “more males than females get off-the-chart test scores—in both directions,” is philosophically anathema to them."
What kind of a person must one be to deny reality simply because you don't like it? And it's not just the male variability hypothesis (not really a hypothesis, by the way, but accepted fact: men and women share the same average IQ, but men have a broader distribution around it than women, thus more male geniuses and more male imbeciles) but pretty much any finding related to the field of intelligence research. People pretend differences don't exist, or even that IQ does not have anything to do with actual intelligence. They wriggle and squirm to find any explanation other than the simple fact that, as with any other biological attribute, people vary. Why are we so squeamish about intelligence? Is it because it is not immediately obvious, like height, or attractiveness? At the end of the day, it's just the luck of the genetic draw, and we can take no credit if we are taller than average, or smarter than average. But we tend to think research into IQ is evil, eugenic-tainted, or racist, when all we are doing is refusing to understand the one aspect of humanity that is our special gift. We don't have big teeth or sharp claws, we have big brains and co-operate with each other. And we cannot afford to waste good brains: they are the most valuable resource our species has. I should think we ought to study intelligence and do whatever we can to promote and exploit it.
> but pretty much any finding related to the field of intelligence research.
During the early part of the 20th century there were attempts to organize society on a technocratic basis with the high IQ in charge. That didn't work out so well, which lead to a reaction against IQ.
I have been a lifelong feminist but always had trouble dealing with imo extreme views of equality with males, not just politically but extending to the mathematical and physical. So I always muted my position on such things for the sake of being one of the bunch.
But biology is REAL, sex differences must not be easily dismissed, and we wonder why the sex revolution has not been all that was promised? And that's being kind.
But we did not foresee the horrific consequences of accepting every delusionary morsel of nonsense so I am silent no longer.
Lies in the name of 'social justice' are still lies and they will lead us to hell.
Which, imo, is pretty much where we are now.
"The International Chess Federation has placed a moratorium on trans-identified males competing in women’s chess events."
A "moratorium" in this case is just as unacceptable as Tariq Ramadan's infamous "moratorium" on Islamic stoning during a televised debate with Sarkozy in 2003 (see for more details, https://hesperado.blogspot.com/2011/01/fourest-for-trees-translation-of.html ).
I think there is often confusion about the cognitive disparity between men and women. Men occupy the extreme ends of the bell curve. There will always be more male geniuses and more male imbeciles. Women occupy the middle ground more, with essentially no women at the ultra extremes.
This means men really have no competition from women when it comes to extreme cognitive endeavours, like composing classical masterpieces, designing cathedrals or becoming a grand master.
Women can compete with MOST men, but not those extreme outlier men.... who are the men who always walk away with all the prizes and have statues built of them.
Most men are in the same position as women in this regard. They also cannot compete with those extreme outlier men.