[PeterAlan]

Cyberyeti, on 2013-September-23, 14:36, said:

All my books are packed away in boxes while I'm being redecorated, but as I recall she gave some archetypes for bridge players who make particular mistakes, and assigned some as mainly male, some as mainly female.

The only one I remember as female was "The tight fist" where you ruff with a low card when you could obviously afford to ruff high and get overruffed in the face of an unexpected break.

The one I remember as male was "The peacock" the guy who can't possibly be wrong and will analyse endlessly to "prove" this after he's done something strange.

Cyberyeti, on 2013-December-02, 12:54, said:

It was 20+ years since I'd read this, but those were the two she assigned to genders, the others (the Sado-Masochist, the Ethical genius and the doorpost) were unisex.

Have you now unearthed your copy, Cyberyeti, because you're spot on!

It's the short chapter "Characters" towards the end of "Common-Sense Bridge" (pp 147-153 in my hardback copy) for those who want the reference.

[CamHenry]

mycroft, on 2013-December-03, 11:32, said:

ObXKCD. And yes, I've seen this in lots of places, including bridge. I will admit the dynamics of married-or-equivalent partnerships are very interesting, however. I find they fall into about 3 categories, and I'm really trying to avoid all of them in mine.

Which ones are you thinking of? The "can't stand each other at the bridge table, complete with name-calling" is one of the obvious stereotypes. In my marriage I'm by far the stronger player (I notice ahead of time which rebids will be a reverse, and I don't draw superfluous rounds of trumps one time in 3, and so on...), but we try to save lessons for after the session.

[Cascade]

helene_t, on 2013-December-03, 06:26, said:

Would anybody have thought of asking if gender is the issue if all the players in question had been male?

I think they might. Perhaps a 'typical' male is too aggressive (or some other stereotypical male characteristic) in some situations. Probably this leads to bad results for those males in those situations. And so such a question might be asked.

In the present discussion I would just answer no this is not a gender issue and the opening poster was resulting but not think the opening post was insulting even if the genders were reversed.

[Vampyr]

Cascade, on 2013-December-04, 05:13, said:

I think they might. Perhaps a 'typical' male is too aggressive (or some other stereotypical male characteristic) in some situations. Probably this leads to bad results for those males in those situations. And so such a question might be asked.

But it's unlikely that it would occur to anyone to ask it.

Quote

In the present discussion I would just answer no this is not a gender issue and the opening poster was resulting but not think the opening post was insulting even if the genders were reversed.

Well, sure. It's not as if men are in danger of being widely considered the inferior sex when it comes to bridge. If anyone wished to insult men as bridge players, they would simply be directed to a list of the top 10 bridge players in the world. Or the top 100.

[mycroft]

CamHenry, on 2013-December-04, 02:46, said:

Which ones are you thinking of? The "can't stand each other at the bridge table, complete with name-calling" is one of the obvious stereotypes. In my marriage I'm by far the stronger player (I notice ahead of time which rebids will be a reverse, and I don't draw superfluous rounds of trumps one time in 3, and so on...), but we try to save lessons for after the session.

I reiterate that this is stereotypical, and not defining any particular married pair.

• If the woman is much superior to the man, he ends up about 8 inches high by the end of the night.
  
• If the woman is somewhat or just a little superior to the man, he explains everything she did wrong. Including the ones he did wrong. This also applies when the man is somewhat superior to the woman, but he doesn't misanalyze quite as often.
  
• If the man is much superior to the woman, we get the "can't stand each other at the bridge table", or the belittle to the point of her never coming back as in the first case, or everything's very "quiet and tranquil", but the woman knows from body language every time she did something wrong. Not what, of course :-).
  
• In all the above cases, one admittance that you might have been wrong in this case means that you can never be right again.

There is one special case. For a year or so, my bridge partner was 4'10", 25-but-looked-18, dressed well to fit her shape and obvious beauty (and to not look 15), and smarter than I (although I think I was still the better player, but more by experience than skill). Married couples were worth at least half a board a round; either the man was looking at her and not paying attention to his cards, or the woman was looking at the man to make sure he wasn't looking at her and not paying attention to *her* cards. Add to that the points one gets when the opponents think "cute young thing, we can push her around", and we had our share of really over-our-skill sessions (plus, she took a beer off her partner while winning a (midnight, but still) match against Meckstroth).

[GreenMan]

mycroft, on 2013-December-04, 10:30, said:

• If the woman is much superior to the man, he ends up about 8 inches high by the end of the night.

My favorite married-couple story (secondhand) was when the wife was repeatedly telling the husband "I swear you don't have a brain in your head." The husband was a Nobel laureate in physics.

[Cascade]

Vampyr, on 2013-December-04, 05:25, said:

But it's unlikely that it would occur to anyone to ask it.

I must live in a different universe. I relatively frequently hear people asking gender stereotyped questions in which the negative stereotype is what is commonly perceived as a male trait.

[helene_t]

Cascade, on 2013-December-04, 16:32, said:

I must live in a different universe. I relatively frequently hear people asking gender stereotyped questions in which the negative stereotype is what is commonly perceived as a male trait.

Absolutely. If anything I would say that male stereotypes are more negative than female stereotypes, on balance. Of course it depends who you listen to. And it is also a bit apples vs oranges.

[GreenMan]

helene_t, on 2013-December-04, 16:54, said:

Absolutely. If anything I would say that male stereotypes are more negative than female stereotypes, on balance. Of course it depends who you listen to. And it is also a bit apples vs oranges.

I would say the opposite: Male stereotypes are overwhelmingly positive. But we don't notice it because such things are ingrained in the culture. When a negative male stereotype appears, it receives disproportionate attention because it's unusual, and seems more common than it is; this is knows as availability bias.