‘Chess is a beautiful mistress’ Bent Larsen
Being a man with a greater interest in life itself than chess, I’ve always thought that the saddest facet of our beautiful game is the lack of female players. Geographical and generational variations aside, you never see that many women around tournament halls, one or two here and there perhaps, but never too many. Why is that? Well, to use one of Larsen’s favourite words, the answer is ‘multiform’ -there is no straight answer. I’ve listed several of what I think are the more significant reasons, in an order of relevance.
Firstly, chess is still thought of as a man’s game, or perhaps more perniciously, as a man’s world. Chess culture is male-dominant, this puts a lot of women off: it doesn’t cause too many to drop out of the game but it deters a lot of women from starting in the first place. The good news is that this balance is being readdressed somewhat, the bad news is that its not happening globally. In the opulent gulf region, for example, girls and boys participate equally. In a tournament in Qatar that I recently played in, the ratio of girls to boys was about 8:1, putting them in the majority for once. In countries where chess is taught in schools, Armenia for example, girls compete with boys on an equal/near equal footing. Such places are an exception to the rule, on the whole women do not yet have a strong voice in the chess world.
Secondly, connected to the previous point is the fact that girls do not have many female exemplars in chess. What do I mean by an exemplar? In essence, someone who inspires you be like them or act as they do. A contemporary, though conceptually unsound alternative, is role-model. The primary difference being that a role-model often has the impartation of moral responsibility whereas an exemplar is an ammoral figure, distinguished by ability or excellence. In chess, we tend to adorn players for their ability over the board and not their conduct or fame away from it, hence the term exemplar is more appropriate. For example, when I was young, I wanted to be like Nimzovitch. Not because of who he was -of this I knew very little- but because of how he played.
Thirdly, unfortunately, there hasn’t been many females that have made it to the very top. Without such successes, young girls are denied a female figure who reveals to them how its done. Boys do not suffer from this problem. Of course, a young girl could admire, for example, Spassky’s play but the gender-based intimacy that enables girls to become like their exemplar (the looser term hero could be used here) isn’t there. Girls are also less inclined -though not entirely unwilling- to model themselves on a member of the opposite sex, therefore, they cannot appropriate success like boys can. By the same token, you don’t find many young boys saying they want to be like Judit Polgar or Hou Yifan, for example. Most young boys choose male exemplars and would probably be considered to be gay if they didn’t.
Fourthly, FIDE has never taken women’s chess as seriously as men’s. There are probably many reasons for this but given that chess has always been blighted by a lack of finances, promoting an area of the game with considerably less practitioners than the male side must seem like economic suicide. That’s a great shame if so. The women’s world championship suffers so greatly that the best female players tend to opt out of it. In his ‘How life imitates chess’, Kasparov points out that much of Judit Polgar’s rise in chess came about through her choosing not to play in all-female events, where the competition and interest was much less. Sadly, until FIDE get their own game together, this is something that is unlikely to change. Given how incompetent FIDE is, the future doesn’t look great for women. We can only wonder how the young Chinese star Hou-Yifan must feel being crowned world champion, knowing that she doesn’t even have the chance to compete against the women that have greater entitlement to it, again Mrs. Judit Polgar being the obvious example.
Fifthly, male chess players seldom make great husbands. Physically speaking, your average male chess player probably hasn’t got much going for himself. We don’t muscle up in the gym, tan ourselves up and drive around in fast cars. Instead, we stare at a board for hours, uninterested in what is around us and what it thinks of us. After doing this for years, we often become (more) anti-social, introverted, bookish, we may even need to wear glasses. When I was 16 -before I had to wear glasses- I clearly remember on guy fawkes night being asked to go to a bonfire party by a mate and a couple of girls (even though one of them thought I looked like a 70’s footballer). In retrospect that offer seems naive and utterly futile. I had been to the library and took out a book on Paul Morphy earlier that day and was yet to begin reading it. Even though I did consider the option of going to the party with beer, girls, music, bonfires, stolen cars aplenty, I was compelled to refuse and return home to read in solitude. I distinctly remember feeling in my stomach, a burning desire to read rather than party…life stayed that way for years. This is the sort of thing women can become exposed to if they hook up with a chess-player, and let’s be honest -it’s shit. Furthermore, chess players have, a subverted concept of masculinity. For us, masculinity manifests itself in our chess play. We want to become warriors over the board, not in life, but women, if they don’t play the game, cannot see this.
Lastly, from a woman’s perspective, chess itself provides a dubious model of marriage. At the beginning of a game of chess, the king and queen sit side by side in the center of the board. During play a king may legally have more than one queen, but a queen can never have more than one king. Knowing this, the king often shuffles side-ways to find shelter, sitting pensively at his leisure; whilst the queen does all the hard work, prepared to sacrifice herself to save her king if necessary.
‘Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.’ Soren Kierkegaard
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