Chess Grandmaster Says Men are 'Hardwired' To Be Better Players

British chess grandmaster Nigel Short told a chess magazine recently that men are just better at chess than women, because of their brains, because of evolution, because women have higher “emotional intelligence” while men zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. What? Sorry, no, I wasn’t sleeping, this is all so interesting and original! I’m awake. I swear. This is great.

Short, 49, who’s been a chess prodigy since age 12, told New in Chess magazine, a print publication, that men are “hardwired” to be better at the game, remarks that were picked up by the Guardian. He added:

Why should they [men and women] function in the same way? I don’t have the slightest problem in acknowledging that my wife possesses a much higher degree of emotional intelligence than I do. Likewise, she doesn’t feel embarrassed in asking me to manoeuvre the car out of our narrow garage.

One is not better than the other, we just have different skills. It would be wonderful to see more girls playing chess, and at a higher level, but rather than fretting about inequality, perhaps we should just gracefully accept it as a fact.

Several publications have pointed out that Short has been beaten eight times by Judit Polgar, a female grandmaster. Short has admitted that’s true, but says it’s not relevant and that girls are still bad at chess. (Polgar, meanwhile, told Time, “I grew up in what was a male dominated sport, but my parents raised me and my sisters [to believe] that women are able to reach the same result as our male competitors if they get the rights and the same possibilities.”)

In an interview with Sky News, Short doubled down, patiently explaining to a female interviewer that “women have better verbal skills, women have all sorts of skills that are better than men… But the gap (in chess) is quite large and I believe that’s down to sex differences.”

In the same interview he said that probably sexism in chess was a thing, but he didn’t really know anything about that. True! He’s also having a wonderful time on Twitter telling his female critics that they “suffer from incomprehension:”

As the Guardian points out, he’s not always so hard on women: in a controversial 2012 column for New in Chess, he enthused about a chess Olympiad tournament he once went to in the Philippines, using “totty,” the British slang for sexy bitches, to imply that some of them totally touched his dick.

“All Olympiads have their volunteers, but Manila 1992 was unsurpassed in the sheer volume of totty,” he wrote. “There were literally hundreds of smiling and invariably polite 18-20-something-year-old hostesses. Not a few liaisons were struck up during the course of two weeks.”

So women are good for “emotional intelligence” and touching Nigel Short’s penis, while men are good at chess, car-parking and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz—wha? Huh? No, please don’t wake me up again, I was having a wonderful dream where Nigel Short wasn’t talking.