badio@ u find glamour completely useless for chess...and i dnt agree with ur opnion at all so i m goin to post an article of nytimes...which may help change ur view..

Hey, idiotboy (frendu)

The eighth-ranked player on the site, Ms. Manakova, 31, drew attention but also criticism when she posed nude in the men's magazines. Ms. Manakova said she thought the publicity might help women's chess.

So, how's all that sexy stuff working out for the game? 

time to take your masterbation fantasies elsewhere.

bam!

 Haven't changed my opinion...i think with my mind, not with the mind of NY Times...

Well, just to give the dead horse one more whack...

Q: "Does chess have beatiful female players????"

A: Yes.

OK. That ought to drive a stake into Dracula's heart. Anyone got a clove of garlic handy?

Leave it to echecs - always ready with the appropriate garlic, era, image. Let's hope that it's dead.

Depends on how 'good' is defined for women's chess.

It seems rather the argument you two are having is a moral argument foundationally with chess as a backdrop. Akin to whether nudity in a movie is moral or not, or pragmatically whether it would 'cheapen' or 'eroticize' the movie. 

The question, though, was stupid to begin with. It asked "Are their beautiful women chess players?" Another way of saying it is whether there are chess players who are women who are also attractive. It can be pointed out that the assumption in this question is that there are NOT women chess players who are known to be beautiful, therefore the burden of proof would be laid on those who would provide examples of said beautiful women. 

It should rather be assumed that people of any sport/hobby/pasttime has a bunch of ugly people and some hot ones, as per subjective notions of beauty as well as what recent science tells us is 'universally' attractive (though the science on this is nascent). 

Given a big enough sample size I'm sure there are alot of attractive men in the world who play chess, roughly equal to the number of attractive women. Though that is not the stereotype. We don't discuss whether or not men are attractive in chess because it doesn't much matter, they are judged on their ability to play chess. 

Because chess is seen as first and foremost an intellectual activity it is considered a 'man's game'. Because of that it is considered ok for an ugly man to have intellectual talents that allow him to reach greatness, in fact it is seen as necessary and proper for a man with those talents to accomplish such a feat.

With women though, because of sexism and patriarchy women are first and foremost designated by their level of attractiveness and not skill at an intellectual activity. I for one believe that the reason that there are not women champion players in the world is because of sexism. Women have the same intellectual capacities naturally as men but from an early age are inculcated to enjoy less intelelctual pursuits. It can be seen very early with the toys women are given in relation to men; small girls get dolls to play with and dress up pretty while boys get blocks to build with, and puzzles to solve in elementary forms. 

With that digression in mind, it appears that our asker looks upon a man's intellectal ambiton as right-minded, while a women's pursuit of chess is abnormal. And as per the forum's starter's assumption it would appear he's asking "Because women who play chess (by assumption) are unattractive, are there any women who are atractive but chose to focus on their intellectual talents?"

Now you may be saying I'm putting words in the asker's mouth; but then of course the asker could have formed his question as "I was wondering what women who play chess are attractive?". The assumption in that question is that there are women who play chess who are attractive. 

So, to conclude, if we lived in a society without sexism we wouldn't continue to value women primarily by their looks and all other talents secondarily, or at least when it comes to chess be able to assume that women champion players didn't 'fail' at being attractive and were relegated to playing chess as if it were somehow a punishment for being unattractive. Rather that women who play chess have an interest in or passion for the game and didn't consider their interest as consequent of their attractiveness.

My goodness! Dis someone say humour was dead in the world? They must have been watching too much CNN.

Ha-ha-ha! Having sex and playing chess at the same time!

stevedavenati: I won't copy your post (#411) here in order to save room. At first I didn't think I'd read such a lengthy post, being that my attention span is somewhat shorter than a knat's. However I tried and was surprised to find that I finished without too much mental drifting which is odd for me. That was a well written, clear opinion and I think well sumarizes what many on this thread have been trying to say, but perhaps failed to do. But those of us who think like that and agree with you might as well bark at a tree for all the good it will do.

It's the old religion-vs-rationalism debate that never gets resolved. Today's society ingrains a very firm code of equal treatment between the sexes (which is good), but this code very easily confounds people with a belief that there is absolute equality between the sexes (which is not good). Even though many people refuse to accept it, it's perfectly all right for men and women to be different. In events where physical strength is required, this difference is more widely accepted, because it is more obvious; hence the separation of sports into men's and women's events. For some reason, in events where a certain set of mental characteristics generalized by the term "intelligence" is required, it is currently widely regarded as unacceptable to acknowledge any difference between the sexes (even though there are many different kinds of mental prowess, some of which are typically associated with males and some with females). Refusal to acknowledge observations that may contradict one's world view is a characteristic of the religious mind, while the rational mind tries to correct these views with ardent debate. Unfortunately, both sides usually remain unmoved.

If Frendu were more eloquent, this is probably what he would want to say: as has been stated previously, competitive events get their income from spectators and sponsorship, both of which require visibility. Men's sports events currently enjoy anywhere between four to twenty times more attention than similar women's events. It's probably safe to assume that the reason for this is the higher quality of sports that can be attained with a collection of stronger (male) bodies. In other words, people want to see the best if they have a chance - if not, they need other features to catch their interest. For instance, the popularity of women's beach volleyball as opposed to indoor men's volleyball can probably not be attributed to the quality of play, since it is a sport requiring physical strength.

Chess is currently a hybrid of unisex and segregate playing fields: women have their own tournaments and titles, but they can also participate in the "main events". If one is inclined only to follow the latter, one will find the number of women in the top events lacking. The highest-rated match-ups are always exclusively between males; so, if one wants to see women play chess, shouldn't there be another reason for it?

Frendu aside, the difference between chess and sports is that laymen such as you and I will be intellectually satisfied by chess games played between any two GMs - the intellectual feats of Carlsen and Anand have too much finesse for us to appreciate anyway. Unless Frendu is a GM in the top 100 of the FIDE list, this is the main reason why he is in the wrong, instead of any voluntarily perceived sexism.

I was with you up to that last sentence and then you lost me. What do it mean?

no one's ever said ...YES... to me how do you expect me to understand?

Well said! Now come to think of it: Tal, Kasparov, Anand, Kramnik and a host of other world champions were not the ugliest players on the circuit. Not to mention many of the top male players as well. Of course, even the many women swooning over them probably did not even follow the game, unless they were already involved before meeting those guys. As for the women side, I still say it here: if you do not give a hoot about chess, seeing the hottest women play it will not make you become an enthusiast for it, even if you were some sexually-fledgling juvenile. Kosteniuk and co. are advertising their bodies, their merchandise and their fame, not that of chess. What glamour are they talking about? If this were football or some high adrenaline sport we might even consider it. Not for chess. For the OP, yes, there are beautiful female players--so what? Maybe if they create beach chess, crowds will come to watch half-clad women slouching over pawns and pieces. Alright, let's see it translate into the most popular game on the planet on that account. We're waiting for the crew pushing it along to make it reality.

Ludicrous. Absolutely ludicrous. Your powers of argument are:

Define position as (A). Define counterposition as (B). Define position (A) as grounded in fact without any evidence. Define position (B) as imbued with mystical intransigence. Conclude position (A) must be correct because it is willing to "acknowledge observations that may contradict one's world view".

How much do you kow about the philosophy of science? Maybe when you're at your coffee house spouting off Karl Popperisms about falsifiabilty you think yourself smart but it outside of charts and graphs you can't compute why women do 70% of the labor in the world and get 10% of the pay. 

As Mark Twain said, "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics." 

Whatever snapshot you prefer to take and show men are 'superior' to women, no matter how many strawmen arguments you build around 'equality' to justify inequality, it would satisfy MY RATIONAL MIND that the culture and history of every human civilization on Earth has oppressed women and that we are only recently making strides against it. 

Of course because we cannot create another data set of women's oppression to satisfy your myopic mind then it has to be 'unsicentific', characteristic of a religious mind. Well to be quite honest I am a secular humanist personally but find your binary between religion and rationality laughable. Sounds like the smug remarks of a graduate student in mathematics.

There are deeper and more enticing theories about how to find truth based on fact and they don't always rely on charts and graphs. For example, Darwinian evolution is not based on charts and graphs. Popper's one-dimensional empiricism would say that because you cannot claim falsibiability of the fossil record you cannot only use inductive reasoning to make hypotheses and theories about the history of life on the planet. Thus your 'rational' mind would claim Darwinian evolution 'unscientific' because it cannot create a second or third data set of which to falsify against the actually exisiting record. 

The same would be true of sexism and women's inequality against that of men's. (By the way no one mentioned the sheer biological fact that men are larger and stronger than women, it's is a measureable fact; that was his strawman argument to muddy the waters). Because we cannot create another data set about gender inequality we can't use deductive reasoning to prove that it exits against a history that it does not. Positivism is a dead end street because it justifies inequality and ironically does to you what you see as your enemy: mystifying the obvious.