CW: Sexual assault

This article contains spoilers for Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit. Note: this is only about the series, not the novel on which it’s based.

The Queen’s Gambit tells the story of chess prodigy, Beth Harmon, and the struggles she faces as she navigates and conquers the mostly male world of competitive chess in the 1960s. The show caught my interest for several reasons, not the least of which being I’m a sucker for gorgeous period pieces set in mid-20th century America. The chess scenes play out with an almost hypnotic power, and Anya Taylor-Joy is wonderful as Harmon.

Much of the show’s narrative hinges on the relationships Harmon builds with her male competitors, some of whom become mentors, lovers, and most importantly, supporters. Harmon is surrounded, and ultimately, celebrated by men, even as she comes to dominate them one by one in their own field. And this is not a marriage plot. None of these men emerge as her one true love. That role belongs to chess itself. The Queen’s Gambit is a love story between a woman and her craft, and the men in the story exist to encourage that love.  

So, naturally, it made me think about gangbangs.

Gangbangs have always been a conceptual conundrum for me. They have a reputation for being inherently degrading. “Woman as object” in its most literal form. The cultural assumption imagines a lone woman passed around, spat on, covered in ejaculate, called names, and ridiculed.  Even in a controlled fantasy atmosphere that isn’t overtly violent, it can still be unnerving to see a woman at the center of such aggressive male sexual attention. It drives home the idea that sex is not something women do; it’s something done to them by men.

I never thought gangbangs would appeal to me, even as a fantasy, until I started working in phone sex. I had a regular client who liked to imagine that all the other guys I talked to on the line were in a circle around us watching him fuck me. This scenario is more of an inverse gangbang, but it tapped into something I was just becoming aware of: how much time I spent (and continue to spend) consumed in maleness.

It’s odd to think of sex work as a male dominated environment, but what else do you call it when most of the people who do your job are women, but most of the people you interact with on the job are men? The image of a lone woman among men, displaying some sort of power over them, and the men affirming that power without fear or threat, felt appealing—and familiar—to me. I couldn’t put the reason why into words until a scene, late in the series, in which Harmon plays simultaneous games against several men. Then it felt obvious. This was a gangbang. A joyous, metaphorical, emotional gangbang. Not unlike my job.

Chess is sex for Harmon. It’s how she processes and experiences intimacy. I don’t mean to imply that Harmon feels sexual attraction for every man she plays chess with, or that she derives actual sexual pleasure from playing chess, but the show establishes that chess is her gateway to intimacy, with herself, and therefore, with others. It is how she comes to understand herself as a person, and so it’s natural that, as she becomes an adult, it becomes her primary way of communicating with others.

In the episodes the deal with Harmon’s childhood and teenage years, she displays a curiosity about sex that while not especially precocious, is still striking just for its mere existence. I found it refreshing that the show acknowledged that young women do not magically start feeling sexual attraction when a man puts the idea in their heads. Instead, those first inklings are clumsy and ill-formed, and when they arrive, there’s often no immediate place to put them and no one way to feel about them. These things can start at an early age, and then sit waiting until we’re old enough to process. It's telling that during one scene, in which Harmon observes a couple kissing, I interpreted her reaction as excited fascination, while a friend of mine interpreted it as terror. The more I think about it, it was probably both.

When discussing the show with girlfriends, I noticed a few common themes: we were all happy to see a show about a woman succeeding, to see men celebrate her success even when it meant she was succeeding over them, and we were all so fucking grateful there was no sexual assault.

Consider that we all expected assault to happen, at one point or other, and were all surprised that it didn’t. This is how low the bar is for stories about women in media, especially on premium television.

Which brings us back to gangbangs.

My takeaway image from The Queen’s Gambit, is a woman thriving in a male world, dominating individual men through skill and talent, not force. Imagine that scenario in porn: a lone woman in a group of men, smiling, enthusiastic, loving the attention she’s receiving, giving consent every step of the way, victorious in herself. It feels like an almost radical thing, an affirmation that women can and do enjoy being the center of such sexual attention, with their pleasure prioritized and their humanity celebrated; the men are there not to demean or diminish, but to lift up. Support. Pleasure.

The Queen’s Gambit has been criticized for not being realistic (though I’m always intrigued by complaints of ‘unreality’ in works of fiction), and it isn’t a perfect show (its depictions of POC characters and non-cis het sexuality leave a bit to be desired), but it’s a show I appreciated. We have a hard time imagining that men could be so encouraging to a woman. The show has a fairy tale atmosphere that makes it extremely satisfying to watch. Like most fairy tale heroines, Harmon endures more than her fair share of suffering: loss of loved ones, social alienation, addiction issues, but the show never makes a meal of her suffering, as so many stories about women in pain do. Chess is always there to save her, or rather to help her save herself. The men don’t save her, but they do support her, giving me all sorts of ideas about what support and pleasure can look like. In life, in porn, and beyond.