Bald, bearded man in Florida wins women’s poker tournament. So blatant.

Bald, bearded man in Florida wins women’s poker tournament. So blatant. By Jeanette Settembre.

David Hughes participated in a $250 buy-in Ladies No-Limit Hold’em (Re-Entry) event at the World Series of Poker’s Ladies event at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida, over the weekend. …

Hughes, a 70-year-old from Delton, Florida, was allowed to enter the all-female tournament alongside 82 women.

Per its anti-discrimination legislation, Florida casinos by law cannot ban men from entering into a women’s tournament. …

Hughes took home $5,555, beating out poker player Dayanna Ciabaton, who placed second. …

Pro-poker player Ebony Kenny took to Twitter to put out a bounty — which rewards players for trying to eliminate another — on Hughes.

Hughes isn’t the first man to go all-in on a women’s poker tournament. Former World Series of Poker circuit event winner Abraham Korotki won the pot in a ladies no-limit Hold ’em event at Atlantic City’s Borgata Poker Open.

Seems fair enough, really, as noted by Janice Fiamengo:

Well before women had their single-sex spaces threatened, something similar had already happened to men. Beginning in the 1970s, men’s spaces were usurped, their maleness was denigrated, and policies and laws forced changes in male behaviour that turned many workplaces into feminised fiefdoms in which men held their jobs only so long as women allowed them to.

No one thought seriously, then, about the disappearance of men’s single-sex spaces. The idea that men and boys need places where they can be with other men (defended, for example, in Jack Donovan’s The Way of Men) would have been cause, amongst the women I knew, for scornful laughter. …

By the late 1980s, ‘eliminating discrimination’ had essentially been broadened in law to mean equal access by women to anything positive men had made that women now wanted, including the networking opportunities and associations men had built over decades. …

It had been male because men had built it. In North America, men had, within living communal memory, hewn civilisation out of the wilderness, building roads, bridges, mills, farms, centres of trade, industries, sewer lines, and the electrical grid; establishing law, a police force, a judiciary, a military, markets, hospitals, food processing plants, and centres of learning. They had invented labour-saving technologies and had built highly complex city-systems. They had done it because that’s what men do — not as an act of exclusion but because, as Roy Baumeister argues persuasively, ‘system-building and empire-building appeal to the male mind’ (Is There Anything Good About Men? p. 155). …

It’s not clear that men were under any moral obligation to admit women to the spaces they had made theirs — many men have never felt at home in feminine domestic spaces — and if men had wanted to, they could have resisted women’s call for equal access; for the most part, however, men welcomed and supported women’s professional and business advancement. …

Feminists’ next step was to discover that workplaces were not always perfectly welcoming. Some women didn’t like their bosses or the men they worked with; some felt uncomfortable with men’s sense of humour or manners. With the help of policy-makers and legislators, feminists created an arsenal of rules designed to empower working women under the guise of protecting them from harassment and hostile environments.

So it’s rather hypocritical for the progressives to even allow a women’s-only poker tournament — there’s no body strength involved. Besides, the women might discuss business at their tournament, which would exclude men from economic opportunities — which is the reason feminists gave for banning male-only golf clubs.

Personally, I’d prefer that the right to associate with whomever you please be respected. Men can have their male-only spaces, so can women, and so can every type of group.