Next year the competition will be in Somalia and the contestants will have to have their clitoris removed.
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Is it considered poor taste to put little teeny hijabs on all the queens, to preserve the modesty of the chessboard?
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What is…but…well why is he…uh…okay…
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No. Neither is telling women that they shouldn’t wear one. Both are indicators that the person demanding a dress code may be an authoritarian arsehole.
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What if that culture brainwashed those women into “wanting” to wear one?
Then they’re authoritarian arseholes.
What if a woman is wearing a headscarf by choice? My nana wouldn’t have been seen dead outside without hers, and she was a secular christian.
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I’m confused.
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She only went to church for Easter, Christmas and the harvest festival and she didn’t insist other people shared her beliefs.
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Ah, gotcha.
The equivalent term in my neck of the woods is “cultural christian”
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I feel sorry for your name, Nazi Paikidze.
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One of my favorite weird songs of the 80s.
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Eh. As far as brainwashing goes, “Cover your hair” is pretty harmless.
You should see the kind of stuff that Christians get brainwashed into on this side of the ocean (get this: they convince the followers of the “give all of your money to the poor, to do good works, and to love your enemies” god to either hoard their money or spend it all on themselves, to be saved through faith alone and forget the good deeds, and to hate anyone whose culture they can’t be bothered to understand). Given the choice between someone who has been habituated to wearing a piece of cloth in the name of their god, and someone who has been habituated to thoroughly be an asshole at all times in the name of their god, I’d take the former any day.
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It’s chess though. Can’t the competitors just stay at home & play each other online? FIDE could set up something like this for the cameras:
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Unfortunately, it’s part of a package deal that comes complete with state-enforced patriarchy and the devaluation of women. Granted that Christianity has a some of that too, but not nearly so uniformly enforced as in the Islamic world. The hair covering is just an outward symbol of the patriarchy not the actual problem in and of itself. Demanding that women wear this sexist symbol of patriarchy as a rule, and not as an optional symbol of cultural respect, it is too much.
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I understand people being upset at the current religio-political implications of holding the championship in Iran - and rightly so, but it’s not like the country is lacking in historical associations with the game. The expression checkmate came from the Persian expression shāh māt (شاه مات), “The king is helpless” (or defeated, broken, or dead).
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So the US wins the World Chess Olympiad for the first time in decades in a major upset, and FIDE responds by putting the Wold Chess Championships in a place Americans are specifically told to avoid.
Got it.
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Meanwhile, the French chess championship will be held on a beach. Women players will be required to wear a Bikini or less.
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Actually no, there’s no confliction. There’s not even any conflict.
Just try for a minute and apply a very simple principle to either case, by asking this question:
What do the women * concerned want?
* Edited to add clarification for @Skeptic. When I use the term women in this context I am referring to the women who are being asked to comply with the regulations. The use of the term women in this case does not exclude the complicity of women in their own oppression. It simply means that whether you are talking about the right of women to wear traditional attire of their choice in public spaces, or requiring them to wear traditional attire in public spaces, the issue at hand is their agency and freedom to choose for themselves.
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Well, there is a conflict by that standard. The woman president of the organization wants people to go to Iran and wear headscarves. And the two women chess champions quoted in the article do not. So yeah there’s a conflict. And that’s just three people.
