Grand Master Chess Player Refuses To Defend Her Title In Saudi Arabia. She is wrong

Having won several competitions Anna Muzychuk has proven herself to be a brilliant chess player. Nonetheless, when it comes to political correctness and irrational behaviour she doesn't seem to be quite as a sharp.

The competition is supposed to take place in Saudi Arabia. Due to the way the culture operates there, women are treated differently compared to the Western standard. This makes many people feel unease. The differences are so great that it appears as if women are being humiliated as second class human beings. More or less she refuses to be escorted by men outside of buildings or wear the traditional abaya. Her words:

Let's assume though that the competition was not hosted in Saudi Arabia but rather in some tribe in the Middle of Africa. Will would be so quickly political to judge those people by their ways? Would we scorn and compare them to our culture if we were asked to respect their culture while we were there?

Anthropologists evaluate these situations quite differently because they understand that every culture is a long-term byproduct of a myriad parametres that have come together over long periods of time. It will be silly to judge customs of other countries based on our own. This is why, in the short period they are within a culture context, they make sure to learn the few perks that they have to follow in order to contact their business.

Anna Muzychuk is obviously judging the matter from a western feminist point of view that deals with equality and respect. This line of thinking though is counter intuitive since as a feminist she should respect the cultural differences and not try to judge people based on the western cultural upbringing. In other words, she appears to look down on the differences of another culture, evaluating her own point as superior. This is exactly what racists do in her own country and I am sure she would disagree with them.

She is not wrong because I say so. She is wrong because she is intellectually dishonest when it comes to her own values. In Africa she would have to be careful not to point to people because that's rude. We wouldn't want to walk into a Japanese house with our shoes on. Heck in japan they can choose not to hire someone based on the colour of their skin but most people don't care about this because, you know..Japan!. Russia is against homosexuality yet she visited plenty of times. I bet that anyone could find something "offensive" from another culture in order not to visit. Ukraine, her own country, has not been a model country with human rights either.

Humans have different behaviours all around the world. These attitudes are not meant to be taken as personal attacks. We are all visitors on this planet and we have to accept that we all victims of past cultural upbringing. As the old saying goes "When in Rome, Do As Romans Do". Unfortunately our modern feminist culture of entitlement has turned this into "Fuck Rome, It doesn't deserve my intellectual dishonesty".

Let us not also forget that even her own league is segregated. Chess tournaments tent to be female or male exclusive.