maybe something more along the lines of:
Resistance to, and complaints about casual sexism were still successfully stifled and stamped out of the public discourse by assholes as recently as the 70’s and 80’s…
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I don’t consider a comment section saying “ha ha nerds don’t get women” “Hey man, like half the nerds ARE women” to be on par with Wikipedia. I also don’t consider it an “assertion of facts” in need of a scientific citation. The conversation was literally just that the assumption that all nerds are socially awkward men is silly and insulting to both genders.
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This seems to boil roughly down to “At first I though Feynman was a sexist, but it turns out he was just a self-centered asshole” + “Douglas Adams couldn’t be bothered to talk to/listen to women enough to understand a reasonable female perspective” I’m not getting nuance…
It seems to me that Feynman was an asshole to rather a lot of Japanese people too.
I’m not just being flippant here - I have always wondered why we celebrate the man for being a maverick genius, but we treat the whole nuclear war thing as a bit of a awkward footnote.
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I wouldn’t bet on the book’s spine lasting for very long.
I don’t think I expressed that Feynman wasn’t sexist, just that when I first heard about that story, I knew virtually nothing else, so he appeared as a raging misogynist, which I don’t think is accurate either.
As far as Adams is concerned, I thought the fact that I blamed society’s pervasiveness and not as much Adams’ personal character was pretty obvious from my last statement, but I was obviously wrong. I see it can be ambiguous. So to clarify, I do think very highly of Douglas Adams. Last Chance to See is one of my absolute favorite works ever because of its amazing blend of sensitivity, humour and poignancy. The first HHG also filled me with joy. That is precisely why the fact that society’s treatment of men/women as separate universes prevented a brilliant craftsman of stories to access the full range of humanity- and give us the joy of hilarious, astonishing, memorable female characters along with his other creatures- is tragic to me. I do not vilify him for it, but I do mourn what could have been. And I take it as a cautionary tale of how toxic social beliefs pollute everyone, even the most astute and talented among us.
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This discussion made me wonder, if we live in a society where a non-trivial percentage of men think buying things like drinks for women will result in or entitles them to the woman having sex with them and women are aware of this attitude and are opposed to it, why do some women still accept drinks from strangers?
Is it optimism / giving benefit of the doubt, attraction to danger / thrill seeking, poverty? Are they exploiting that belief to get free drinks? Some other motive? It sounds like accepting drinks is risky for women.
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One of the positive things about this is that many people were the way they were not because they were incorrigible mysogynists, but because the culture at the time accepted or approved of this. Nowadays a man who tells any passing woman (or black person) to get him some food will be told pretty quickly that this is inappropriate. Feynman might not have had the same feedback, especially if the women he asked admired him for his other attributes. You’ll still get bigots in a better culture, but everyone will know them for what they are and you’ll have fewer people who are just clueless to the same extent.
A person can be both somebody you like hanging out with and be somebody who treats women he wants to fuck horribly.
I think this is an important point: if you have a twisted view of what women want in a relationship, you can be a pretty reasonable person generally and completely inappropriate in other ways, because you are responding in some ways rationally to very faulty information.
Exactly. I belong to one such group: legally denied human and civil rights so basic most people wouldn’t know to list them as such. I can’t even talk about it on open forums because the righteous indignation would flood the thread. But someday progressives will be on my side, and it’ll be somebody else’s turn next.
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Turning down a drink is not risk free.
Some people react very poorly when told no.
And by poorly, I mean potentially verbally or physically threatening.
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I’m the one who said approximately. When I wrote the original post, it occurred to me that I should probably include a reminder that women are taught to hide their true natures when they go against social norms, so most women you meet who ARE nerds won’t appear to be so. Guess I should have, after all.
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I wouldn’t just say “let it go”, rather, I would ask:
Why do we invest so much into someone as to build him/her up so impossibly that finding out the person’s a jerk makes us feel disillusioned?
The fact that he was born in another time isn’t an excuse so much as its misdirection, Why did we expect him to be any different? Certainly forgetting that it was a very short time ago that these attitudes were so prevalent that the best of us found it normal wont help us move on.
If we believe that his being smart would somehow allow him to see the folly of the era then, maybe, finding out that being smart doesn’t necessarily equal “enlightened” is a good thing, at least I now know it won’t take a genius to change the attitude of this generation.
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The issue with Card isn’t his Homophobia per-se, but that he is still alive, and still using his funds to promote that homophobia.
Whatever his faults, to my knowledge, there is no “Feynman Institute for the Suppression of Women”, that sales of Feynman books go to, or, profits on the use of his theories supports. In private, Hawkins might hate Redheads or deGrasse-Tyson might think Pastafarians should be persecuted, but, if they at a minimum don’t use their positions, influence, or actual funds to further those ends, or, even simply keep it to themselves, I don’t think anyone does or should give a shit. As someone said above, at least Feynman was just open about what he believed, judge him as you will, but, he wasn’t an activist on the position.
I guess the point is, comparison of a dead person with outdated beliefs that they didn’t act on outside their personal lives with someone who is alive, can and should be influenced by changing circumstances, who puts his time and money toward spreading and enforcing those ideas… well, a disingenuous comparison at best.
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I wasn’t doubting that you thought highly of Adams, or had complex thoughts about Feynman, just that the reasons given fell a bit short of making them look any better. For Adams in particular, in the end, anyone complaining that women characters are too mysterious to write calls up similar words said about not designing female characters in video games. However, I don’t know much about either man, or their motivations in saying the things they did, and honestly, didn’t have a compelling reason to comment on your rumination. In fact, I’d withdraw my comment, if it wouldn’t leave your reply to me hanging out there…
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Mine arrived by mail, funny thing is, I didn’t know I had applied! 
…spelt ‘fount’, but still pronounced ‘font’ if you believe my (very old) Fowler’s- and apparently related to ‘foundry’ rather than ‘fountain’.
Which is supposed to be what proposing a hypothesis before you collect the data helps you with. I know that practically speaking scientists don’t always do good science. And certainly while authors don’t always fly their flags a la Rand in their work, I think I see a lot more of how Card sees people and culture in Ender’s game than I do in how Feynmann sees people and culture in quantum physics.
It may be a bad idea in some cases, on the other hand, if a woman is a whore for taking a drink and having sex with you and worse than a whore for taking a drink and not having sex with you, is she even worse for not taking the drink and not having sex with you? Men who feel they somehow deserve sex for being nice enough not to rape women aren’t going to react terribly well to being snubbed completely.
Sometimes when someone argued against gay marriage with a slippery slope argument (this will lead to blah blah blah) I’d look at some of the things they put on their slippery slope and actually agree that those things were coming. It’s just that rather than thinking that was scary, I think it can’t come quickly enough.
I think some people genuinely worry that they will create offensive stereotypes if they try to write about people who are different from themselves. I wrote a novel with a 12-year-old girl as the protagonist and was very worried that my sister was going to tell me that it turns out it was crazy sexist.
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While of it’s time hardly unsurprising. I find a few of the accusations against Feynman, having read the book and the whole chapter. The conclusions are really harsh. In context it seems that his how he describes everyone in that bar to himself so he can act that way. Not that he really believes that is what women are like.
Not great but read it in context and it’s not that bad.
Also it’s despised here (as it’s all dismissed as PUA) but there is a legit side of learning (or just practicing) how to interact with women/men in a romantic way if you are bad or socially awkward is not inherently bad. It’s not fundamentally different to How to Win Friends and Influence people.
He just mistook the incentives and what was at play but he got laid where he didn’t before.
I know someone who had a book bought for him by his brother and ended up meeting his now wife in a way that would have never happened otherwise.
The idea learning how to do something, when that something is hitting on women, is somehow wrong just because it is to do with a romantic interaction not anything else is just insane.
Wouldn’t you rather have people able to interact with people on a good level and engage in romantic relationships rather than get sad lonely and bitter?
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Because — and here’s the part where he really starts to sound like the modern pickup artist — what the women really wanted was to be disrespected. They wouldn’t sleep with a nice guy who bought them things and never said, “Hey, let’s fuck now.” They would sleep with the dude who treated them rudely and just asked for sex.
You know, there’s a grain of truth to it: there are women out there who seem to gravitate toward abusive men. And of course, there are guys the same way.
But I don’t get the Pick-Up Artists, taking those examples of women who gravitate toward abusive relationships, and just assume that the way to get into a relationship is to be an abusive dick.
I don’t buy the bullshit that the Red Pill types say, that it’s all about self-improvement. Yeah, some of them are into self-improvement, but then they throw being a massive douche into the mix.
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Most see it as a part of modern courtship because most guys that do this also see it that way. I’ve known many women who turn down drinks if they are not at all interested in the guy. They see “Let me buy you a drink” as “Are you interested in me?” a reply appropriately.
That said I have spoken with a few women who take the drink regardless. They are doing it for the free drinks and think it’s harmless because they don’t care that they are leading men on (One round of drinks is not a big deal is it?) and they don’t think anything bad will come of it. I’ve known some women who take this even further where they see no reason to learn basic skills like how to take care of their computer because, and I really wish i was kidding, “I’ll always have a guy friend who will can help me do that”. Basically some Women, like some Men, will take advantage of a situation without regard for the feelings of others or the danger it puts them self in.
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