I didn’t hold it against him personally but- again- against a society that insists that male and female humans are so utterly different as to be beyond each other’s comprehension. Adams- like most of us- would have benefited from NOT being hindered by such an insecurity.
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Everyone? Of course not.
The majority of people, however? Most definitely.
Televised content couldn’t afford to offend or alienate the viewerbase in its heyday, because it was all about maximizing profits and ratings. If the average viewer had been shocked and offended by sexist programming or advertising, the ruthless profit machine would have responded to falling ratings and unpleasant letters from their angry fanbase. The fact that no such response occurred demonstrates just how accepting and innured to sexism people were.
Honestly, I think you’re overvaluing even today’s progressive stance. We’re not nearly as enlightened as we would like to think, and the significant changes that have occured have all been very, very recent. That’s not to say that there wasn’t any progress in earlier decades, but definitely the biggest gains in social equality and reduction of sexism have been within the past twenty years.
You have to remember, the 1970s were forty years ago. Sure, the decade saw some progressive, never-before-done things with television programming - like bringing audiences The Mary Tyler Moore Show, MAS*H, and The Jeffersons.
But this was also the same decade responsible for All In The Family, The Brady Bunch, I Dream of Jeannie, and Charlie’s Angels. And that’s to say nothing of the plethora of backward-looking shows glorifying the comfortable patriarchal values of America’s past, ranging from Little House on The Prairie and Bonanza, to Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley; nor, either, the absolute flood of terrible “romance” filled soap operas.
To suggest that sexism was anything other than broadly accepted by the American viewerbase at the time is absurd.
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Yeah, but men behave this way, and women behave this other way. If you write a man or woman the wrong way, you’ve written a man or woman with the wrong parts…no, there aren’t any men or women who don’t fit the traditional roles, nope nope nope.
The notion that it takes a woman to understand women, but women can write men and women, and about men and women…smh.
Part of the reason I get bugged about “not all men” getting shut down (though I understand, in this context, that it really would be derailing) is that so often, when I’m tempted to use a variation on it, it’s because an author has used a sweeping generalization that really is about a small number of people, or is some B.S. that is more urban legend than anything (“Men always orgasm!”) Sometimes, “not all men” really is a valid rebuttal. But obviously, not on this thread, and if it becomes valid, I’d hope that it would be shut down with the same fervor that has already been used.
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We are well into a new culture of condemnation. I posted something by H L Mencken on Facebook and was criticized for celebrating someone who wrote something anti-semitic in the Twenties.
Few people can emerge whole from the Sieve Of Condemnation.
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I didn’t realise it was quite so late in his life. I’d always thought it was just-postwar. Huh. Well, I guess that explains the maturity he had to say himself that he didn’t like doing that.
As a child of the sixties, I’m sure that I absorbed a lot of those kinds of attitudes as I was growing up, and I’m still not sure that I’m free of them now. So I can’t find it in me to condemn Feynman utterly.
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Let’s remember that in the 1960’s (and well into the 1970’s) married women couldn’t get a credit card, not even a store credit card, without their husband’s signature. Even if they made more money than he did. Even if they were the only breadwinner in the family. Sexism wasn’t just about sexual attraction at all: it was all-encompassing. In those days, a man who treated a woman he was attracted to as a sexual object but felt she was an equal in most/all other ways would have been extremely progressive for the times.
Not that I feel I know enough about Feynman to have an opinion on the level of his individual sexism.
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I was told that this story takes place during the lecture period, not when he was teaching - 1945-1950.
Even had it taken place in the Post War Era, that’s another period that was highly traumatic for men and women. In fact, the first time there was a large number of divorces was directly following WWII in 1946. What had happened is that during the war, women went out to work in large numbers, and found themselves comfortable out of the home. Then young soldiers came home from the war - often to wives they barely knew in marriage - and they expected the women to return to pre-war behavior. Add in some PTSD, and you have an explosion of divorces all across the country!
Feynman married his first wife while working on his PhD. She had tuberculosis, and died in July 1945, in Albuquerque. His depression from the loss of his wife was severe. He remarried in 1965, so it does make sense to say that he wasn’t actively seeking another woman right away.
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The problem with “not all men” isn’t that it’s false. Indeed, the fact that it’s obviously true is oftentimes why its defensive evocation is so derailing. It usually heralds the arrival of an insecure adolescent–not talking about anyone here, of course, old beans–who value the reputation of decent men (i.e. themselves) over the suffering of women and its consequences. It turns every focused discussion into a stupid generic one about the narrative implications of women’s suffering on cherished archetypes of male behavior.
It’s hardly banning material (though it often comes conveniently packaged alongside outright misogyny that makes that mandatory) but a “not all men” thread is likely on its way so that all instances of it can be moved there.
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Today in America, whether male or female, you’re equally punished should you choose to remain single.
And don’t worry, women are still getting harassed about having husbands and their names.
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Or possibly Philosophy.
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It’s still doesn’t mean typeface though, goddammit.
(at least not to me. EVER!)
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Sorry, he was married to a potato? That’s the real story here. Amazed no one mentioned this earlier.
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Suggestion, maybe dumb but looks logical to me. Whenever such not-all-whatever argument is possible, preempt it by listing of the attributes of the sub-group that is being talked about, so no further exclusion-attempts arguments are necessary, and no heavy-handed reactions to them.
Short sidetrack, but back to fonts. This article explains the difference between “font” and “typeface”. They really aren’t the same thing — in exactly the same way that a song isn’t an mp3.
http://www.will-harris.com/font_vs_typeface.html
To explain here:
“Arial” is a “typeface” - it’s a creative letter design.
“Font” refers to the application of the creative design. To describe Arial as a font, you should describe not just “Arial”, but also the type weight, width, and style. (Type is scalable now, so size is no longer an issue. Previously point size was also a characteristic.) So, “Arial” becomes “Arial Regular” if you want to define it as a font. The “Regular” tells people that all defining characteristics are standard.
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Errrrrm… what? In many online applications you commonly specify font-size in a scaling measure, but font size is just as important as ever, scaling or not.
Specifying font size, face, weight, leading, column width etc to your typesetter, so that they can set the type on a linotype machine and then send it back to you so you can adjust it and then finally incorporate the finished set type in your artwork that your paste up artist is producing on the bromide camera is a lot less common these days now that none of those things exist any more.
At one point people pulled actual metal dies of letters, so defining the font required defying the font size. The boxes held the individual sizes. Currently, size is specified in an application, but because it doesn’t affect scalability, it is no longer considered a typical requirement for identification of an item as a font. You do still have to tell people what size character you wish to print.
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Thank you, that’s very informative.
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You’ve lost me. I don’t have to tell people anything, I send them a pdf, usually with any type already converted to outlines. The whole need to specify a ‘font’ in the way you describe was only a requirement for mechanical typesetting processes, so I don’t get why you are singling out font size?
Edit: Oh and Feynman, what an asshole, right?
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Prior to digital publishing, metal letter sets were used to lay out designs. Since metal letters can’t be scaled, each size had to be identified. Early digital type wasn’t scalable either. Now, it is. That means that a person purchasing/using a font only needs to define the other characteristics - weight, width, and style - to identify the font they want.
For example, Arial Regular is a different font than Arial Narrow Regular, but they belong to the same typeface family.
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Not sure how this will be received but I’ve been turning this discussion over in my head all day.
True, but I would stress why giving them this conversational fodder is so bad. So lets start by talking about Truthyness and “All in the Family”. I was recently reading “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society” and in it he mentions that All in the Family was designed to mock bigots like Archie Bunker and show that they need to move on and adjust to the changing world. A noble idea but that’s not how the bigots saw it. They saw Archie as a voice of reason and a hero fighting for the American way. He was not a fool but a role model and proof that they were not alone. Much like what happens in presidential political debates or sporting events, what a person thinks effects how they interpret what they see. People who believed in equality saw Archie as a fool who was learning to move on while bigots saw him as proof that they did NOT need to move on because their views were acceptable. In other words in made their view of the world “more Truthy”.
It’s critical to note that these views are subconscious. People tend to read and watch what they agree with and it reinforces those views. We avoid ideas that run counter to what we already believe because changing our closely held beliefs is painful. If it’s a weak argument that counters our belief we actually enjoy it, because it’s easy to dismiss and makes us further believe our current view.
This is the problem with these “Not all Men” and “Blame the victim” arguments. They add undeserved Truthyness to the argument “We’re already equal under the law so we don’t need to change our ways. We just need to enforce the laws and have girls behave properly!”. This argument is obviously wrong. If you look at any noteworthy statistic you’ll see that while we are equal under the law we, on average, do not get treated equally in the real world. We have an established system where white males from affluent families are at an inherent advantage in just about every area because there is a subconscious belief that they are better. A major factor in this is that this inequality is no longer visible to those it does not effect who are causing it. Constantly pointing out obvious things like “well if she was not in that dive bar getting drunk…” or “Yes he did that but not every guy would…” makes the existing problems worse by reinforcing the subconscious views of people that most need to see the problem they are causing but are blind to.
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