Your Opponent
Live chess and Feminism
I spent a lot of time pondering about what I should write about for this particular blog, I am unsure if this violates chess.com uploading material criteria.
Today I came across a chess.com forumhttp://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/do-you-hate-or-love-your-opponents,I responded;
"Neither, I respect my opponents regardless during a game, their opinions and ideologies hold no weight or have any effect in terms of sportsmanship. I agree online chess and actually physically playing chess are totally different experiences, but in order to love/hate someone you would require a in-depth amount of information about their background and views. I have experienced on numerous occasions misogynistic and stereotypical insults during and after a game of live chess. "If your playing chess, whose cooking?", "Its ok darling, its not your fault your a women, chess is a mans game", "Its good to see you trying, good luck", "This is a first, a blond haired youth playing chess", "Its ok I'm sure you have better qualities, ie. washing and cooking", "Womens downfall in chess, is that they are pre-occupied thinking about shoes" (thus so far my favourite) and many more illogical sexist patriachal comments. During a chess game, the feeling should be mutual and mere folly mundane and uneducated remarks should be put aside. I suppose on chess.com disabling chat is a good idea if you don't want any verbal communication, in real life I would boldy state any additional rules I would like my opponent to adhere to."
I felt the need to explain myself and decided construct this blog. I thought that most if not all of the popular myths had already been written about but this was an issue I'd like to present. Which reminded me, I ran across this particular myth and decided that it must be exposed. The site posed it like this: If you’re a TRUE feminist, you can never ever, depend on a man or let him affect your emotions in ANY WAY!!! If you do, you’re a FAKE FEMINIST OMG!!! (http://community.feministing.com/2012/08/09/myths-about-feminism-among-the-younger-generation/ – #5) At first, I chose it because it sounded amusing but then I actually thought about it and found that I had heard this myth before in my debate society. Seeing as though a big percentile of chess.com users are male, I would like to take this opportunity to introduce feminism, I also want to make it abundantly clear, this particular post from that site I quoted from is clearly extreme and not very helpful for the cause.
Amongst online forums and other media outlets why are feminists portrayed as women with no emotions other than anger and no love for men? The only logical answer, because these myths are meant to dehumanize us, ie, “femi-nazi”, what?! However, we feminists are people too and we need emotional connections with others in order to survive, men included. We do not purposefully seek to make only strong female emotional ties. We want strong friendships and romance too and we do not find all men repulsive. If we lived life avoiding all men, our lives would be very boring and very difficult. In fact, we would probably need to just enter a nunnery in order to avoid all men. Also, what about the male feminists? Apparently, they do not exist in this myth. Regardless of this myth, I believe that everyone (regardless of gender) has different opinions on different subjects and we grow as people by sharing these views and learning from others.
To be a strong person, not just a feminist, means having the courage to put yourself out there and make deep connections with other people. People need to depend on others or else life would be very hard and unhappy. In order to have a fulfilling and meaningful life, we need to have others impact our lives as well as affecting others’ lives. Coming into contact with people who do not share our views but are willing to communicate civilly helps us grow and better understand the other parties. If we can understand our own weaknesses, it helps us better ourselves because then we know that we are not infallible. The willingness to acknowledge the weaker parts of our arguments makes us stronger people in the long run.
Becoming a feminist does not mean isolating yourself from all men. Feminists just want others to understand that everything is not fine and accepting in the world. We want both men and women to see that there are disparities in the way women are treated. We do not mean that women should never get married. We just want women to have a choice. If she wants to stay at home and take care of the kids, that’s fine. She should not feel that she needs to do this – she just needs to know that she has another option. As long as she knows that she had the choice of becoming a career woman and supporting the kids just as well as her husband does. I also believe that the principles of feminism surpass sex and gender: feminism is about equality, not about the domination of one gender over the other. Who said it is a womens prerogative to cook, clean and wash?
Feminism is for women, men, and anyone in between. Feminism is for everyone!
If you are reading this thinking what does she want me to take away from this blog, it is keep your misogynistic, sexist, patriachal comments to yourself, enjoy chess in its true form and to a lesser point remember feminists are people too.
kiwi
(Bring on the gloves)
