The Queen’s Gambit — Fiction Masquerading as Fact
By: Muhanad Halvani
Tags: The Queens Gambit, Chess, Culture, Feminism, Netflix

Rambo mows down wave after wave of Spetsnaz commandos. John McClane picks off a group of terrorists, one-by-one, walks on glass, and saves the day. James Bond keeps his cool as he foils one supervillain after the other — and fools around with the fetching Bond girl du jour.

These are but a couple of examples. Popular culture provides a bountiful selection of this form of male power fantasy. Through video games and movies, whether in Call of Duty or Jason Statham’s latest flick, young males are spoiled for choice should they choose to live vicariously. Men stifled by the domesticity of modern life can — if but for an ephemeral hour or two — escape the drudgery of their existence.

That is what all these movies are: pure escapism. Men who indulge in this form of entertainment are fully aware that it is far removed from reality. No adult male in full command of his mental faculties sees Rambo or Bond and thinks, “Gee, I wonder if that’s a true story.”

Enter The Queen’s Gambit, the latest trending new series on Netflix. Facebook and Twitter are flooded with posts by women gushing about it. Clearly, the series has resonated with the ladies. But why? Why is the fairer sex so captivated by the story of a girl who plays chess?

Here is why: I posit that the main character in the series, Elizabeth Harmon, is for women, what Rambo, McClane, and Bond are for men. The Queen’s Gambit is nothing but a female power fantasy. It is a la-la land where circumstances do not matter, and consequences of one’s actions do not exist. Elizabeth Harmon receives zero parental guidance throughout her childhood: not from her mother, who commits suicide when Harmon is still a child; not from her father, who is absent; and not from anyone at the orphanage she gets sent to. Later, she is adopted by a couple, but the father soon takes off. This leaves Harmon with a navel-gazing caretaker who provides no counsel for her young ward, and literally drinks and drugs herself to death.

These circumstances alone should have scarred Harmon and messed her up psychologically. But no, she gets script immunity from any adverse psychological effects. On top of being inexplicably well adjusted, she is also prodigiously good at chess. Wave after wave of spindly white boys vie to thwart the rise of this upstart, yet she defeats them all with an air of ‘je ne sais quoi’ nonchalance, ultimately winning the world championship. How does she become better than her rivals? What is her motivation for excelling at chess? No explanation is offered. Why, she doesn’t need any. She’s a woman, and a woman can do anything. That is the premise of the show, and true to its premise, they show Harmon leading the life of a philandress while also carousing, smoking, and abusing drugs with nary any consequences. You can do all that, and no one will be hurt, Netflix reassures its female audience. Do as thou wilt, and you shall still maintain your looks, your form, your financial independence, your psychological and emotional well-being, and your superiority over everyone else. You will also get to don elegant dresses, travel the world, and have an entourage of mesmerized men at your beck and call, gawking at your sublime magnificence.

So, The Queen’s Gambit is a female power fantasy, but that is not the issue with it, per se — the issue is that the realization of it being a power fantasy seems to have eluded a large segment of its audience. Many women are watching the series as a documentary, or at the very least as a plausible plot with a plausible protagonist. Type in “Is Beth Harmon…” in Google and see the top search results.

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(and my favorite) Is Beth Harmon still alive

Brush aside all the consequences that would realistically stem from Harmon’s upbringing and her dubious life choices, what about her defeating the world champion — that, for sure, is plausible, isn’t it?

In the top one hundred chess players in the world, how many do you think are women? Take a guess. Fifty? I hear a white knight protesting that I must factor in the toll of the damned patriarchy — Fine, forty? Twenty? According to the International Chess Federation, out of the top one hundred chess players in the world, only one is a woman. And she does not hold the first, second, or third place; no, forget about any medals. Her rank is 88th. If she were a character in The Queen’s Gambit, she would not beat Benny, much less Borgov. In a tournament open to both genders, she would be lucky to get a participation certificate.

That does not show that men are smarter than women. Men and women both have an average IQ of about 100. It stems from the difference in the bell-curve distribution of intelligence between the genders. Men are over-represented at the tail ends of the bell curve. In simple terms, there are more male idiots than there are female idiots, but there are more male geniuses than there are female geniuses. That is why world champions in chess are always men. No patriarchy, sexism, or pernicious social ideology involved.

So, upon closer examination, even the central plot of The Queen’s Gambit falls apart. If the producers wanted to tell a realistic story of a woman thriving in a field dominated by men, chess is one of the worst domains they could have picked. Chess Olympiads are graciously segregated by gender for women’s sake, not to protect male world champions from being thrashed by the fictitious Elizabeth Harmons of the world.

Unfortunately, such details are lost on the show’s fans, thereby turning a female power fantasy into a morality play and skewing the worldview of millions of women around the world.