The patriarchy of board and card games

Billy/ / Cultural Marxism, Gender Politics, General, Transgender Regret Industry (c)

This piqued my interest this weekend:

Wait, what?

Geir Helgemo, who is Norwegian but represents Monaco in bridge events, tested positive for synthetic testosterone and the female fertility drug clomifene at a World Bridge Series event in Orlando in September.

Now I’m really confused, but probably not as confused as Geir sounds.

We could wander down the well-worn path of laughing at the logical knots the Cultural Marxists tie themselves into trying to square mental illness as normal, but we’ve been there enough times recently.

What’s more interesting is looking at the inconvenient facts that undermine the claims that gender is a social construct.

If that were the case, and that a “male brain” can exist in a female body and vice versa, we might expect competence to be reasonably well-distributed across human endeavours not requiring the physical advantages of a male body.

Bridge being one such example. Chess and Scrabble are others.

Bridge then; we’ve just ascertained that the top player in the world is male, albeit a little confused about things.

Full disclosure; I have no idea about the game of bridge and I must also report that the world ranking system seems equally as impenetrable to the outside observer.
However, it would seem that there isn’t a female in any of the 21 players listed as the best of the best.
Chess rankings are a little easier to decipher, fortunately. We can categorically state that Hou Yifan is the 59th best player in the world and the best female player.

Here’s the Scrabble player world rankings. 

They don’t state a gender and some of the names are a bit ambiguous but, helpfully, there are profile pictures. 
The first woman on the list? Lisa Odum at #64.
What does this all mean?
Bill’s Opinion
I suppose there are multiple explanations that might help us understand what’s going on here; the first is the Cultural Marxist go-to answer that there’s no difference between men and women (the tabla rasa argument) AND that a pernicious patriarchal conspiracy has and is preventing any and all women from moving 16 chess pieces across an 8×8 playing board better than men.
The alternate explanation is that men and women have innate differences which manifest themselves at the extremes of the distribution.
Our razor suggests the fewest assumptions point the way……

Oh, if you aren’t convinced, go to the Twin Galaxies leaderboard for any arcade game hi-score and see if you can find a female name.

I’ll wait.

5 Replies to “The patriarchy of board and card games”

  1. Yeah I was confused about the clomifene too. But apparently it’s used to offset some of the estrogen production caused by the metabolism of certain anabolic steroids.

    Confusingly in small doses it inhibits estrogen, and in large doses it can promote it. Must be true, it was on the interweb.

    So seems he was just trying to pile on the beef. As if being the world’s best bridge player still isn’t enough to get the chicks

    Reply

  2. How much human misery is perpetuated by our lack of an innate understanding of statistics? Our brains are still wired for living in groups of less than 500 people and, short of a firmware update, we are doomed to keep repeating the same mistakes.

    Reply

    1. Quite.

      It’s one of my personal crusades to explain the difference between median and average to people.

      I worked for a client a year or so ago that reported performance on resolving reported process failures using averages. ie “on average we fix all client issues within 2 days”.

      The trouble is, on a volume of 5,000+ a month, some poor sucker is sitting on the outlier at 3 weeks without satisfaction.

      Reply

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