I apologize for the tardiness of this post. I shan't bother you with excuses.
Topic for today: Judit Polgar. I was analyzing a chess game yesterday; one of my more arcane hobbies. The game was one of Polgar's best. Judit is a Hungarian chess grandmaster and her work on the board is an exercise not only in proficiency but beauty. The relevance here is that I remembered signing up for my first chess tournament in which the form allowed me to choose, if I was female, the female section of the tournament. It struck me as odd, even then as an ignorant youth, that we should divide an activity, a purely mental activity into two engendered sections. It shows that despite our immense progress on gender issues, there is much work yet to be done. Chess is in no way a physical activity, not that there would exist merit in the distinction if it were, but it deflates some of the more convoluted "women are physically inferior" arguments. Polgar is not merely the best female chess player; she is one of the best chess players in the world. Should she be in a different section than Anand and Carlson? I think not.
Of course, chess is in a robust sense a physical activity as it makes use of the brain, though it doesn't require furniture-moving muscles. There is some recent research about possible differences in male and female brains with respect to mathematical reasoning that would be relevant, if it proves fairly conclusive, to the question of whether we need two tournaments. What is most likely is that such differences are statistical averages with huge overlap, which means merely that even in a world free of gender bias there would probably be a few more men than women playing great chess. Then again, your observation about the aesthetic qualities of Polgar's playing suggest that great women players may tend to bring something new to the game -- a style of playing that courts elegance along with victory, or even achieves victory through elegance... an argument for inclusion and difference at the same time. Midgley might like that possibility.
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