This series has been attacked by right-wing, antiped feminists. For instance, Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse, who writes about gender's impact on society, states in "The Queen’s Gambit,’ a period drama that erases sexism from 1960, is the best fantasy show of the year":

Young Beth meets an odd, reclusive janitor in her orphanage’s basement. An experienced viewer wonders if he’s about to molest her; instead he introduces her to the chessboard. Teenage Beth follows a competitor she barely knows to his sketchy subterranean apartment and finds that the spare bed he’d promised her doesn’t seem to exist. Girl, watch out — but wait! He just needs to drag the air mattress out of storage. A former foe, whom she’d publicly humiliated by taking his title in her first-ever tournament, shows up at her door in the dark, but he only wants to loan her some strategy books. (emphasis added)

Additionally, remarks Carina Chocano of The New York Times Magazine in "I Want to Live in the Reality of ‘The Queen’s Gambit’", echoing similar sentiments:

We’ve already watched, in the first episode, as Beth wanders downstairs to the basement to find a taciturn janitor with a haunted expression brooding over a chessboard, but rather than molest her, he teaches her to play. . . . This story is so vanishingly rare in the real world that it comes across as utopian in fiction. (emphasis added)

Basically, both of these prudish, sex-negative traditionalists believe that the series is highly unrealistic, largely because it failed to depict the janitor attempting to engage with the girl sexually.

Really, while it is true that most men would want to fuck a cute, young girl like Beth, this idea that men in general, even impoverished janitors, would risk doing so, particularly considering our society's harsh stigma against such actions (which, incidentally, is crystallized in these idiotic articles), is ludicrous. Also, I wholly resent the notion that a world where men refrain from having sex with young girls is "utopian"; literally the precise opposite is the case. These braindead women need to be shamed and outcast to the fringes of society. Their socially harmful views are garbage and do not deserve a platform, let alone a mainstream one.