Aronian: Women Cannot Play Chess

somebody said women have contributed just as much as men in chess...no... just... no

He didn't do anything wrong from what I read. He was just dancing with Miss Caoili (who later became his girlfriend) & GM Gormally that had had too much to drink hit him. He apologized later & said he regretted it & that he just had too much to drink & he was in love with Miss Caoili... blah, blah, blah... Yasser Seirawan was there & stopped another GM (sticking up for Levon) from retaliating against GM Gormally & escorted Gormally outside to calm the whole thing down. Apparently nothing else happened that night over it. But the next day.......well, rumor has it that players from Armenia (where Levon Aronian is from) beat Gormally up or "roughed" him up & he felt like going back to England for some reason (they were all there for the olympiad). I know, it's like a soap opera or something. There just isn't enough excitement in the chess world so we gotta get it where we can, amirite y'all?

Must have been a guy, as no woman would be that stupid.

He looked stoned in those photos from that party where he got hit. He looks like he can hardly stand up in the 2nd one. Good times.

Hey, I liked vance's post, although I also tend to post walls of text :)

Here we go again - another "women can't play chess" thread.

GM Aronian is entitled to his opinions, even the misogynist, myopic and moronic ones. I guess he never heard of Vera Menchik or the Polgar sisters...

I am only going to say that whoever claims that "women cannot play chess' is a sexist square.

Misogny at its best. Women have not yet won the world chess championships though. Until they do the geeks won't accept them. Plain and simple.

Reb wrote:

If women played chess as well as men there wouldnt be a "womens section" in events like the Olympiad and world championships for them. Some people are so blinded by current PC that they cant see facts right in front of their face. I am not one of them. Judit is one of the very few exceptions that prove the rule. Also, such titles as WIM, WGM and WFM wouldnt exist if they were truly equal to men in chess. nuff said

Spot on......

We can always make ourselves useful as a bad example, can't we? 

Yes, or: I did not fail, I just found 10.000 ways that did not work 

It is not sexist to say that women are not, in general, as good at chess as men. This is simply a fact.

Now we can argue about why this is, maybe it is because fewer women play chess and they actually aren't worse ability wise.

But we could use the same argument to show that women are as good at football (american football that is, with tackling and stuff, I'm sure we all agree that women would not be as good as pro football players) as men, so you cannot say that it shows that women are as good at chess either, or use it to refute the first fact. You can simply use this as a plausible explanation of why women are not as good at chess as men, but it is not proven as the reason, and it does not make someone stating the above "sexist".

I hope my argument makes some sense, as I am writing this at 2:30 am.

ihihih this topic

i think that FIDE should go ahead and create special kid-only titles (just like there are woman-only titles) - KCM (1900), KFM, KIM, KGM, KWCM (1700), KWFM, KWIM, KWGM. yeah, that's definitely a great idea.

of course they should lose the title as soon as they hit puberty, so that FIDE cashes in twice.

...just what am i writing and why? i must be drunk or something.

Males were usually raised to be competative and adventerous females were not firstly it was socially unacceptable for females to waste their time on recreational ideas such as schess. They were programmed to seek security, nurtering conservative roles such as cooking and cleaning for the male provider. Thus their education was not aimed at science or math as strongly as a males, plus feel less need to be combative compared to males in general; instead realising that team work usually achieves better results than solo efforts. These ideas towards female education and roles is changing and this is why so many more females are becoming strong chess players, in fact females (i think) enjoy killing males on the chess board behind the invisible internet. 

One strong reason Judit Polgar does not play female tournaments is simple as a teenager she was "forced" to compete in female only events and at one such event her group wons their matches and then had an agonising five hour wait to see if their team won the tournament. Thus Judit Polgar simple gave female events away and never looked back, it must be remembered her father sort out a 'wife' partly as a social experiment to "raise world champion children" he chose chess as that vehicle and all the three kids became extremely strong players.

I believe Judit Polgar is even 'on-record' as saying one of the main reasons females do not do well in chess is that "females get distracted with other things like cooking and cleaning". Remember while amazing the Polgar sisters are artificial constructs, they spent their entire childhood thinking and playing chess for at least 6+ hours per day, plus all has specialist chess trainers for different aspects of chess not to mention their father who was the owner of over ten thousand chess books. 

If you have researched the Polgar sisters their story is simply amazing and their results are all their own achievements but also i think any  'average' person would become an extremely strong player as a result of such an obsessive training program over many years.

So simply females were under many social restrictions that delayed or prevented them from huge chess results, people cannot expect this to change in the space of a single generation...

too much of a good thing is bad for you, guys just never get that.

It reminds me to computers. If not prepared it will be tough for some people. IM, then GM, then super GM, ... .  Keep in mind how fast go information and changes in these days.

Pretty inevitable that would get brought up in this discussion! I've heard a first hand report, someone from my club was at the party. Apparently the offender got a bit of a duffing from the rest of the Armenian team later on as well.

Well, Fischer also made antisemitic and anti-American statement, things that already were not well-accepted in his time. And he never stopped them until he died, which was not so long ago (2008 from memory ? too lazy to check).

The football analogy is a bad one, because there are biological reasons for separate categories in football or sports in general. None would except women to compete in the same category as men for racing, swimming, etc.

So indeed, the fact that women who compete in chess get worse places than men while being vastly outnumbered does not prove that they could do equally, or worse, or better, if the gender ratio was 1:1. Saying that women would do as good under equal social conditions is just idle speculation ; but it is still the most rational assumption, unless you assume that women are less intelligent or more emotional, both of which are just sexism.