The Fun We Had
I’ve been thrust into social distancing, working from home, etc. I consider myself lucky because my wife was recently relieved of caring for her aunt, and so has moved back in with me. So I’m not completely alone. Still I miss the little conversations I had with coworkers during the day. Oh yeah, so far I still have a job. So, I’m really lucky.
My mind soon turned to some science fiction I had read as a child. It always does. One was a mystery about a murder in a future society where Spacers, on colonized planets like Solaria, dislike seeing each other face-to-face, instead preferring viewing each other on holographic screens. Hardcore SciFi fans probably remember The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov. I had to do a little digging. I remembered the name R Daneel Olivaw, which led me to all the rest. The R meant that Olivaw was a humanoid robot, but the detective was a human, named Elijah (Lije) Baley. They had previously worked together in The Caves of Steel, which my mother and I both read. These two novels are now considered part of Asimov’s Robot series, beginning with the short stories in I, Robot, and hew to his Three Laws of Robotics.
So these spacers – living far apart on low population planets – hated and avoided being in each other’s presence, making grudging exceptions for procreation, and even more grudging exceptions for being interviewed by Lije Baley. Conversely, they had little modesty while being viewed holographically, which seems unsurprising in the age of selfies and dick pics, but made for spicy reading material in 1956. Spacers were also not averse to being around robots – in a later book, one woman considered herself married to a robot. I guess we aren’t at that stage, though I have seen reports of guys who are very attached to their adult sex dolls, like Julietta and Saori. Man, how did I get there?
The other story I thought of also turned out to be by Asimov, his 1951 short story, The Fun They Had. You can read it from an instructional PDF, with a series of questions afterwards. Essentially a young girl of the future is surprised to learn that students used to gather in schools led by human teachers, instead of learning at home from machines.
The Fun They Had strikes home more than ever, as I am currently designing buildings for colleges and universities, most of which have sent their students home, and are rapidly implementing distance-learning for the time being. One of our core beliefs in campus planning, architecture and other services, is that students learn a great deal from residential life as well as from the academic curriculum that we usually see as the goal of education. I suppose I did, though I didn’t know it at the time. So while I suppose there may something to be learned from distance-learning as well, especially if that becomes the norm in business, I can’t quite imagine colleges churning out students that view each other, but rarely ever see each other.
On Friday afternoon, many of my coworkers logged in for social gathering via the Go-To-Meeting app. It was fun. Some had pets in their laps. Several of us were drinking beer and wine. We said goodbye to two employees leaving for other opportunities, one of whom was drinking tequila. We ended up wearing funny hats, which had nothing to do with drinking, of course. But again, I do still miss the small interactions when I am simply walking around and asking someone how it is going. I suspect that will be true for college students as well, when all contact is intentional rather than incidental.
Bodies and Lifestyles
Men marry a body, women marry a lifestyle.
I ran across the above statement in the comments section of a youtube video, probably the one called How to Fix a Broken Heart. After citing A Tale of Two Brains in a previous article, I had watched the full, five-part Laugh Your Way to a Better Marriage, and of course if you watch anything on youtube they will lead you to more of the same. So I watched a lot of TEDx talks, the best of which was, Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person by Alain de Botton.
Again, Laugh Your Way was very amusing, and probably helps more than it hurts. But Mark Gungor is a minister, and in religious fashion he asserted that access to sexual relations should be reserved until after marriage. Why? Because he believes sex is a sort of bargaining chip that women should hold to induce men to commit to marriage. I think a situation where one person only “performs” sex to get marriage demeans both parties.
The most interesting TEDx talk was Maria Røsok’s The Unknown Greatness of the Clitoris, which I would recommend for anyone who either has one, or who wants to be intimate with someone that has one. Spoiler: there’s a lot more to it than that little button-sized glans most old textbooks labeled as clitoris.
Botton is a philosopher and essayist, born in Switzerland, but raised in Britain. Having attended Harrow, Cambridge and Harvard, he is extremely well-read, but uses a disarmingly dry wit to bring things back to earth. Botton writes on a wide range of topics, and even hosted a three-part television series called The Perfect Home, in which he decries the English developers’ penchant for building safe neo-Georgian and neo-Tudor tract houses. Here in America, you could probably substitute neo-Colonial, and perhaps neo-Spanish Colonial in the West.
One of Botton’s premises was that when we seek a love partner, we are unconsciously looking for the familiar. Over the years a lot of people (often girlfriends) have given me pearls of wisdom from magazines, like, ‘men secretly want to marry someone like their mothers,’ or ‘women want to marry someone like their fathers,’ and one girl swore that ‘both men and women want to marry someone just like their mothers.’ According to Botton, as infants and children we become accustomed to certain behaviors as we receive love from our parents, and are attracted to familiar behaviors in a potential mate. That can be very sad, of course, if someone had a dysfunctional childhood, and seeks to find someone just as violent or perverted as dear old Mater or Pater.
But usually these accompanying behaviors are a lot more innocuous. So if your mom or dad was demonstrative, you may be attracted to demonstrative people rather than reserved types. If your mom or dad delivered love with humor, you might look for funny partners. My parents were very smart, and Mom could tell great stories. I was an introvert, and Mom always felt compelled to jolly me out of a bad mood. I know that I was initially attracted to bright, sunny and cheerful women that could do most of the talking. However as I adapted to become less introverted, I would say that I became much less reliant on later mates to cheer me up. Now I’m often the one that makes my wife laugh, though she certainly has her moments.
Botton also believes that the overarching theme of the romantic age – finding our one, true soul-mate – has been good for quite a few industries, but tough on individuals. He believes that instead of searching for the one and only, we should be searching for someone who is good enough. My wife and I had a lot of fun with this concept one morning. I asked her if she felt she had married the Wrong Person, and she replied, ‘No, I found you and you’re Good Enough.’ To which I replied, ‘Honey, you’ve just made me the happiest-enough man in the world!’
Regarding the title, I have found articles that support the idea that men marry primarily for the person while women marry for the lifestyle and children that go along with marriage. I’ve never been one to believe we are from Mars and Venus, though. Although men and women are different, I think both genders hope for a certain life to go along with their partner. I do think that with certain individuals the potential lifestyle, or perhaps the physique, will drive the romantic attachment, though.
Sunny
For a recent article in The Real News, interviewer Taya Graham starts off, “We all know men like to pay for sex.” Seriously?
I’d say that a far more acceptable generalization would be, “We all know men like sex, and some are even willing to pay for it.” But that is still a generalization, because while some of us may care very deeply about the exploitation involved, others simply want at least some bit of romance in their hookups. Some really believe it is sinful, or at least a bad idea. And others are simply too poor or too cheap or too afraid of getting caught.
I forget when I first learned – probably from TV – that some women traded sex for money, but I suspect I first thought more deeply about prostitution while reading The Catcher in the Rye, through the characters of a pimp, the elevator operator Maurice, and a young hooker calling herself Sunny. As I look back, it was quite an accomplishment for the reclusive JD Salinger to have permanently soured a sexually curious young high schooler on the idea that there was any glamour in paying for intercourse.
After my freshman year of college, working for the county, two of us summer interns were surveying the police offices, and saw a woman handcuffed to a chair, awaiting her turn before a magistrate. She could have been there for any reason, but somehow from her dress and demeanor we had the idea that she was a prostitute. My coworker couldn’t stop staring at her until she scared the bejesus out of him by flashing a big, toothy smile.
A year later, during another summer job for the Corps of Engineers, I first heard prostitution – along with drug abuse – justified as a victimless crime. My fellow intern Alan was just as young and callow as I was, but he seemed confident that it was simply a blameless business transaction.
The following year, at another summer Corps job in Southern VA, I was at a crowded bar with three fellow college interns, when a good old boy offered to introduce us to some whores. “If you want,” he said. “I don’t give a shit.” We all laughed a lot, and I thought, “Uh, no,” but one of my comrades wanted to know more. “Are they pretty?” he asked. Now the GOB had a thick local accent, so we thought he replied that they were fat, but when my friend said, “We don’t want fat!” he clarified, “No not fat, fair! They’re fair.” Fair. What an elastic term. We laughed some more and let the subject drop.
In the Real News article, Kate D’Adamo takes the mainstream liberal viewpoint that prostitutes, now called sex workers, are primarily just workers, and should enjoy the protections of society. She admits that trafficking is bad, but believes that the decriminalization of prostitution in New Zealand has resulted in the, “healthiest sex industry in the entire world,” with low rates of violence and sexually-transmitted disease. The International Union of Sex Workers asserts that sex work is an empowered choice.
The mainstream conservative viewpoint is that prostitution is a sin, but a lot of them are sinners. In practice, when a prominent conservative is caught soliciting, he must claim to be truly sorry, return to the arms of family and religion, and hope that the prostitute mysteriously hangs herself, all of which happened with former Senator, and now lobbyist, David Vitter. That was before serial sex consumer Donald Trump was president, of course. More recently Robert Kraft simply relied on his lawyers to have the video evidence suppressed. His massage parlor madam was not so lucky.
A third viewpoint is the so-called Swedish or Nordic model, in which the customers and pimps are vigorously prosecuted while the sex workers are referred for counseling and job training. This viewpoint considers prostitution a form of male violence. As reported in The Guardian:
A statement signed by 177 verified sex trafficking survivors from Sex Trafficking Survivors United (STSU) suggests that: “Without the buyers of commercial sex, sex trafficking would not exist. If we start penalising and stigmatising the buyers, we could end sex trafficking in our lifetime … prostitution is not a victimless crime; it is a brutal form of sexual violence.”
A few mornings ago, I turned on my cell phone to find two similar text messages, supposedly from young girls (21 and 23) who supposedly live near me and supposedly want to find older sexual partners. Seriously?
My Old School
“And I’m never going back … to my old school.”
One day when I was about fourteen, my parents gave me a brochure from the Georgetown Preparatory School, in Garrett Park, Maryland. This was before Tom Brown’s School Days was on television, and I had no notions about private schools. All the kids I knew and all the kids on TV attended public school. But my father had gone to a Jesuit school in New York City, and thought that I would do well under the same sort of tutelage.
To be accepted I had to take the Secondary School Aptitude Test, the SSAT, and be interviewed. I always loved taking standardized tests; to me it was like a day off school. At the interview they asked what sports I played. I knew almost nothing about team sports other than baseball, which I had played badly, but my Mom offered that I loved to swim. They let me in.
Now I read about Georgetown Prep as an elite school. There were some guys from wealthy families, and some diplomat kids, but a lot of the guys were from striving middle class backgrounds like me. Some had to work in the dining hall to help pay their tuition. It wasn’t Eton, or even Choate. I somehow knew we were better off than Cardozo, but I never felt that we were very different than the other schools we swam against: St Albans, Sidwell Friends, Good Counsel, Bullis, Bishop Ireton, Gonzaga.
I certainly got that classical education at Prep: we took Latin, Calculus, read books by DWMs, and dreaded Speech class. There were no dummies in my form, and I think that not wanting to look bad in class spurred me to try harder than I would have at public school. We were also made to sit down and do three hours of homework every evening, whereas at home I probably would have watched a lot more TV. We were also encouraged to do team sports, which led me to the swim team. All of that was good.
But Prep was all-male, so public school would have offered far more interaction with girls. A few young ladies from Stone Ridge attended our science classes. They were the source of many fantasies, but I never spoke to them. A lot of private school girls attended our mixers, but I was too terrified to talk to them. In four years I think I met two girls through Prep. I was staying overnight with a classmate, and his mother’s friend brought her daughter, who I now remember as looking like Martha Plimpton, sort of awkward/pretty. She played her guitar and sang Joni Mitchell’s Clouds for us. We were not on each other’s wavelength, but I wish I had tried harder. Later I was at a school play, and sat next to the sister of a classmate. She was pretty. We talked quite a bit, and she was very nice, but I had no idea what my next move might be. The next day her brother teased me about my great romantic encounter. And that was the end of that.
So I read that current Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is accused of trying to molest a 15 year-old girl from Holton-Arms, at a party. I didn’t go to parties at day student’s houses, but I heard some bits about them. We had a minor sensation after one of my classmates punched one of my swim teammates over a girl, which I believe happened at a party.
Kavanaugh and Gorsuch attended about a decade after my time. GP seems to appreciate the notoriety of alums in the highest court in the land, but people on twitter now refer to it as that, “creepy little all-boys school.” Democracy Now! quotes journalist Sarah Posner:
“It is becoming abundantly clear, even by the account of Kavanaugh himself and Mark Judge, that there was an environment [at Georgetown Prep] that was out of control, quite frankly. And lets be very clear and fair here. We are not saying that every student at Georgetown Prep acted this way. But according to this article in The Washington Post this morning, which I again urge everyone to read, this was a very prevalent atmosphere there—the drinking, the drugs, the abuse of girls from neighboring high schools.”
Did anyone else ever watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High? I’m not defending it, but I have to believe that drinking, drugs and abuse of women could probably have been observed at almost any high school, public or private.
I was not in favor of appointing Gorsuch (or Garland) and I think Kavanaugh is an even more troublesome candidate. I just hope people realize that many of us at Prep were not smug rich kids, or heavy drinkers, or would-be sexual predators.
The Passing of a Playboy
I’ve been intrigued by the reactions to the death of Hugh Hefner – the founder of Playboy Magazine. Erotica goes back thousands of years on cave walls, in paintings, sketches, and later in woodcuts and engravings. Since the invention of halftone printing there have been magazines like PhotoBits, first published in 1898. Pinup girls like Bettie Page used to pose for such magazines, which were usually sold discreetly to adult men, who usually concealed them. Playboy was the first high-quality, mass market men’s magazine to feature nude pictorials, and the first of the type that many women and children ever saw on the shelves. My father concealed his Playboys, though not very well, but we had neighbors whose parents were less conscientious.
I subscribe to the self-described progressive outfit The Young Turks (TYT), who have one show called, “Old School.” During a recent broadcast founder Cenk Uygur announced Hefner’s passing as breaking news. Even though they have vastly different backgrounds and business models, Uygur seemed to feel a connection to his fellow entrepreneur/publisher:
Cenk: What’s funny is that I just got a little emotional. I almost teared up, I didn’t, but … what do I know about Hugh Hefner. I interviewed him once. He was nice…. He was part of America, man.
Malcolm Fleschner: He was an iconic figure in America.
Cenk: I just got really, really sad.
Malcolm: There is only one Hugh Hefner, there is nobody like him, and there never will be again, we’ve lost him, whatever you thought about him, he was a uniquely American figure and had a massive impact on our culture …
Cenk: If ever a person was iconic, it was Hugh Hefner … Man, he lived a good life.
On TYT’s Pop Trigger, a younger group, Brett Ehrlich, Grace Baldridge, Daron Dean, and Jason Carter also covered Hefner’s passing, and extolled Hefner as forward-thinking, even while acknowledging his objectification of women. On the TYT main show, Ana Kasparian, Ehrlich and Baldridge again seemed to take Hefner for granted as an exponent of social progress, despite his flaws. On their recurring youtube show, Reality Rescued, TYT’s roving reporter Jordan Chariton even tossed out that he had first masturbated to Playboy, shocking poor Emma Vigeland.
I had seen many of my father’s copies before December 1967, but will always remember a Playboy pictorial on erotic Art Nouveau engravings by Aubrey Beardsley, Gustav Klimt, Franz von Bayros and Norman Lindsay which my younger self found much more provoking than remote and detached photos of Hef’s carefully selected bunnies. I could probably buy a copy, but it probably wouldn’t live up to my memories.
Even though he was a vocal champion of (many) liberal social values, Hefner fares less well with liberals than the TYT progressives. In a New Yorker article, Hugh Hefner, Playboy, and the American Male, Adam Gopnik writes:
There was a time when his excursions into the Playboy philosophy, which was not quite as ridiculous a document as its title makes it sound, were, though never taken seriously, at least seen as significant. Now, they seem not merely quaint but predatory.
For The American Thinker, Rick Moran writes, Hugh Hefner is Dead:
What was Hefner’s role in this transformative America? Actually, he was a lot less impactful than certainly Hefner would have us and the media believe. He did not initiate the sexual revolution. We can thank the Pill for that. Rather, Hefner rode the wave of changing morals and mores by creating bankable images of nearly nude women, along with sharp political and cultural commentary from some of the best liberal writers in America. He made it cool to be a cad and reinforced the male fantasy of consequence-free sex.
And The New Republic decries, Hugh Hefner’s Incomplete Sexual Revolution:
What derailed the male revolt was the female revolt. Women reasonably asked themselves: If men like Hefner were abandoning the traditional claims of chivalry, then what were they offering? The answer: a patriarchy without any promise of protection—a raw deal.
Without a trace of irony, today’s intersectionally woke neoliberals signal their virtue by pointing out that Hefner profited from wrapping himself in the social revolution at the same time that he was sexually exploiting his lowly-paid female employees.
Interestingly, a woman architect really appreciated Hefner. Writing for the AIA journal, Architect, Karrie Jacobs penned, Playboy Magazine and the Architecture of Seduction in 2016, quoting Beatriz Colomina:
… Hefner made [midcentury modern design] mainstream. That’s the point of the exhibition, that Playboy did more for modern architecture and design then any architectural journal or even the Museum of Modern Art. At its peak, it had seven million readers.
I gave a lecture at Cornell at the beginning of this research. At the end of the lecture, a woman said to me, “Now I understand why my father, who never went to a museum, who never had any idea about art or architecture or design, had an amazing collection of midcentury furniture.”
And then I had a correspondence with her. She asked him, “Where did you get all this furniture?” And he said, “Playboy told me to buy it.”
That is absolutely spot on. Along with the girls, and the interviews, and the fiction, were descriptions of the Playboy Pad: apartments or houses that would reflect well on the bachelor’s good taste, with lists (and costs) of the Barcelona chairs, Burberry raincoats, Fleischmann’s Preferred Blended Whiskey, Miles Davis albums, Blaupunkt hi-fi sets, etc that midcentury human male bowerbirds could purchase and arrange to attract a mate.
Addicted
The world is crashing around us, and all I want to do is watch that old music video, I Didn’t Mean To Turn You On. Not for the pouty models that pretend to play instruments. I love Robert Palmer’s take on (what is almost a Prince) song, and I like the four dancers working it. Nothing about that video seems to relate to the song, but at least he isn’t being chased by a man in a gorilla suit, like Cherrelle.
OK, Congress seems to have an awful choice between leaving the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as it is, or passing the American Health Care Act (AHCA). The ACA has slammed many enrollees with much higher premiums, but all indications are that the AHCA would be much, much worse for everyone except the very wealthy. So far it doesn’t seem that the bill’s supporters have the votes. Of course, having health care isn’t the same thing as having good health care, but the AHCA would cut many preventative care measures, and weaken Medicaid.
Meanwhile, Senate Republicans voted to allow internet providers to monitor and sell their users’ browsing histories. The House has not yet voted on the measure. To some extent the internet already knows my browsing history. If I browse a particular tee shirt, or bike part, or book, I will see ads for exactly those items in popup or sidebar adverts for weeks. I presume that is the result of cookies rather than someone data mining at my browsing history.
We went to a local department store a few weeks ago to find out why they aren’t sending a statement, and found out they no longer have a service office. Brick and mortar retailers like JC Penney, Macy’s and Sears are slowly going under, but online retailers still think we have money to spend. They think if only they can look at our browsing histories that we will buy more of their stuff. They’re wrong. Employers are paying us less and less, and our credit cards are all maxed out. We browse stuff, and think that would be nice, but then we look at our bills and decide to do without. The big treat for us these days is Chipotle; Panera costs too much.
Establishment Democrats feel that the fact that from 2005 to 2009 Paul Manafort secretly lobbied for a Russian oligarch with ties to Putin proves their Russia allegations. But after giving him tens of millions of dollars Oleg Deripaska soon accused Manafort of fraud. There are no signs they were on any sort of terms when Manafort briefly managed President Trump’s campaign from March to August of 2016. But I’m With Her Dems still hope that the Deep State will use Russia to take down Trump.
Way too many of us are addicted to opioids. I was in the ER last year, and got intravenous morphine for a UTI from a big kidney stone. The effect was like a comforting wave of warmth starting in my chest and rolling over my face and arms. For the first time in days I felt good. But in the morning a middle-aged woman was prowling the corridor yelling, “Where is my medicine? You’re supposed to give me my medicine! You’re not doing your jobs!” The nurse told her she wasn’t due for forty-five more minutes, but she couldn’t wait, and just yelled some more. Whenever I looked at my bottle of pills, her voice came back to me.
But we’re addicted to more than opioids. When I ride the light rail I see smartphone addiction. Hell, I see pedestrians walking, and bicyclists riding and motorists driving while looking at their smartphones. I think we’re addicted to easy.
Back to my addiction. Photographer Terence Donovan made Robert Palmer and those five models famous in the music video for Addicted to Love. He dressed up Julie Pankhurst, Patty Kelly, Mak Gilchrist, Julia Bolino and Kathy Davies to look like Patrick Nagel girls, and had them pretend to play guitars and keyboards and drums behind the dapper Mr Palmer. His sex object look was controversial, but the video was an unexpected and iconic hit. Donovan used at least one of the models, Patty Kelly, again in I Didn’t Mean to Turn You On, and added those four dancers wearing what look like bridesmaid dresses.
Donovan went to the well again for Simply Irresistible, with more models, more dancers, water pouring over models in swimsuits, but all kind of a muddle. I’ve read that Palmer began to feel that his singing was being overshadowed by the models, though at a reunion the Addicted girls all said he was very professional during the shoot. I had forgotten that Palmer sang Every Kinda People, one of those songs that doesn’t need a fancy video, and is worth hearing again every so often.
Was Feynman a Fine Man?
What a hornet’s nest!
Back in May 2014 I posted The Neg, in which I compared the Pickup Artist technique to Richard Feynman’s account of picking up strippers from his book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman. I am no scientist, but I enjoy reading about science, and have read The Feynman Lectures, Six Easy Pieces, the Krauss bio and the comic-style illustrated bio of Feynman.
My opinion was that following his long courtship of, and brief marriage to, the terminally-ill Arline, he immersed himself in meaningless sexual experimentation for several years, and a bad second marriage. I was disappointed to read about his affairs with the wives of coworkers, but it did seem that he had finally settled himself with a third marriage.
On July 11th 2014, Ashutosh Jogalekar posted, Richard Feynman, sexism and changing perceptions of a scientific icon – a far more critical, but well-reasoned, take on the famous man. I only found it from links on the Galileo’s Pendulum post. Scientific American, however, soon removed Jogalekar’s post … then restored it some time later:
The irony thus seems to be that, just like Feynman was fond of generating cherry picked anecdotes about himself, we seem to be fond of generating skewed, cherry picked anecdotes about him that accuse him of sexism. … My own perceptions of Feynman have changed, and that’s the way it should be. At first I idolized Feynman like many others, but over time, as a more careful reading of his life revealed some of the unseemlier sides of his character, I became aware of his flaws. While I still love his lectures and science, these flaws have affected my perception of his personality, and I am glad they did. There are things that he said or did that are clearly wrong or questionable at the very least, but we can at least be grateful that we have evolved to a stage where even the few instances of his behavior that have been documented would not be tolerated on today’s college campuses and would be instantly condemned. As a man I do not now admire Feynman as much as I did before, but I am also glad to have a more complete understanding of his life and times.
At The Curious Wavefunction, Jogalekar explains why his post disappeared and reappeared:
Here’s the gist of the story:
1. I host a guest post on women in science and later, I write a post on Wade’s controversial book (these are 2 of almost 200 posts on a variety of topics I’ve written for SciAm).
2. In response to criticism of the two posts on social media, SciAm issues a public statement. The blog editor asks me to run “controversial” posts by him. No specific guidelines are discussed (something I now regret not doing).
3. I write a post about how my perception of Feynman has changed and how we need to judge historical figures in their entirety and understand the times in which they lived. I do not think the post was “controversial” in the least and therefore do not run it by the editor.
4. The post elicits both positive and negative responses on Twitter, blogs and email.
5. The post is taken down because the editors find it “controversial” and think that I should have run it by them. I am told that it would be best to part ways with the network.
6. SciAm resurrects the post with a note containing what I would consider an accurate, but incomplete, description of events.
Two days later, Matthew R Francis at Galileo’s Pendulum posted, The problem of Richard Feynman. Francis didn’t think Jogalekar went far enough, but many commenters asserted that Feynman was just a normal guy for his time being accused under modern political correctness:
Feynman doesn’t need us to defend him, anymore than Einstein does. Their legacies in science are secure, so it doesn’t behoove us to defend their often less-than-stellar personal lives, especially when they did damage to people less powerful than themselves. It certainly does nobody any favors to say, as Ash Jogalekar did in a blog post for Scientific American, that Feynman was no worse than anyone else in his era. The post was removed by the editors (and I’ll leave it to others to debate whether that’s a good tactic or not; I have mixed feelings myself), but several people archived the text before it vanished. [The post is now back. See the Update below.] While much of the post is valid — Jogalekar doesn’t deny a lot of Feynman’s bad behavior — he ends up falling into the same pit of excuse-making. Worse, he implies that Feynman’s “game” is probably universal and necessary for men to play.
On the same day another Sci Am blogger, Janet D Stemwedel, posted, Heroes, human “foibles”, and science outreach – essentially echoing Matthew:
While it is true that much of what we know about Richard Feynman’s behavior is the result of Feynman telling stories about himself, there stories really don’t seem to indicate awareness of the harmful impacts his behavior might have had on others. Moreover, Feynman’s tone in telling these stories suggests he assumed an audience that would be taken with his cleverness, including his positioning of women (and his ability to get into their pants) as a problem to be solved scientifically.
And a day later, Mathematigal posted, Feynman is not my hero:
… every time I hear someone in my department or in one of my classes go on about how Feynman was so awesome I mean he was kind of a jerk to women but whatever, I file him (and it is almost always always a him) away as someone who would have sided against me in every single one of the situations I’ve mentioned. Every time I see a joking tweet or post about how Feynman’s second wife divorced him because she didn’t like that he was always doing calculus in his head, while totally ignoring the fact that the divorce papers indicate that he would fly into a rage, attack her, and break furniture whenever she interrupted said mental calculus, my world gets a little bit smaller.
I can vouch that a divorce action is not always the best source of facts. And it is not unusual for many men to want to sleep with women, and for some women to accommodate them. But as I have looked at the Polanski, Cosby, Allen and now Richardson and Charney stories it is clear that a lot of successful men that have preyed on women and girls will be granted the benefit of any doubt by other men, and even some women that admire their work.
So I will now think about Feynman a bit less charitably. But it isn’t just the famous that get a pass. The leading story in the NY Times last week was about a first year student who was raped at a party soon after arriving at Hobart and William Smith College.
It took the college just 12 days to investigate the rape report, hold a hearing and clear the football players. The football team went on to finish undefeated in its conference, while the woman was left, she said, to face the consequences — threats and harassment for accusing members of the most popular sports team on campus.
The neg
Some guy just shot a bunch of young people because girls wouldn’t sleep with him. Even though he tried the techniques prescribed by so-called PUA – PickUp Artists – he wasn’t getting anywhere with them. So he wrote a manifesto, then bought a gun and started shooting.
I did read about this PUA pickup technique a few years ago, and it basically involved the “neg” – putting women down, a little, so they’d try to impress you. Normally I wouldn’t expect that to work at all if not for certain women I have known that do always seem to gravitate to men who treat them badly. So perhaps it works on women with serious esteem issues. And perhaps it occasionally surprises attractive women who are used to being pursued.
PUA reminded me of something I read in Richard Feynman’s odd autobiography, Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman. I had assumed he was a born rogue, but later I read Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science, by Lawrence Krauss, and discovered that Dick actually grew up as a nice young man, albeit brilliant, and married his childhood sweetheart Arline – even though she was clearly dying of tuberculosis.
I suppose that loss could throw a guy’s psyche for a loop. After Arline died, Feynman became known as a womanizer, even sleeping with a colleague’s wife, but after a bad marriage and some wild years settled into a long, happy marriage. But long before finding Gweneth, he found himself going to strip clubs, buying drinks for the girls but getting no action. He complained to the MC at the bar, who advised him:
“OK,” he says. “The whole principle is this: The guy wants to be a gentleman. He doesn’t want to be thought of as impolite, crude, or especially a cheapskate. As long as the girl knows the guy’s motives so well, it’s easy to steer him in the direction she wants him to go.
“Therefore,” he continued, “under no circumstances be a gentleman! You must disrespect the girls. Furthermore, the very first rule is, don’t buy a girl anything — not even a package of cigarettes — until you’ve asked her if she’ll sleep with you, and you’re convinced that she will, and that she’s not lying.”
“Uh… you mean… you don’t… uh… you just ask them?”
“OK,” he says, “I know this is your first lesson, and it may be hard for you to be so blunt. So you might buy her one thing — just one little something — before you ask. But on the other hand, it will only make it more difficult.”
Well, someone only has to give me the principle, and I get the idea. All during the next day I built up my psychology differently: I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren’t worth anything, and all they’re in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they’re not going to give you a goddamn thing; I’m not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic.
Then that night I was ready to try it out. I go into the bar as usual, and right away my friend says, “Hey, Dick! Wait’ll you see the girl I got tonight! She had to go change her clothes, but she’s coming right back.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I say, unimpressed, and I sit at another table to watch the show. My friend’s girl comes in just as the show starts, and I’m thinking, “I don’t give a damn how pretty she is; all she’s doing is getting him to buy her drinks, and she’s going to give him nothing!”
After the first act my friend says, “Hey, Dick! I want you to meet Ann. Ann, this is a good friend of mine, Dick Feynman.”
I say “Hi” and keep looking at the show.
A few moments later Ann says to me, “Why don’t you come and sit at the table here with us?”
I think to myself, “Typical bitch: he’s buying her drinks, and she’s inviting somebody else to the table.” I say, “I can see fine from here.”
A little while later a lieutenant from the military base nearby comes in, dressed in a nice uniform. It isn’t long, before we notice that Ann is sitting over on the other side of the bar with the lieutenant!
Later that evening I’m sitting at the bar, Ann is dancing with the lieutenant, and when the lieutenant’s back is toward me and she’s facing me, she smiles very pleasantly to me. I think again, “Some bitch! Now she’s doing this trick on the lieutenant even!”
Then I get a good idea: I don’t look at her until the lieutenant can also see me, and then I smile back at her, so the lieutenant will know what’s going on. So her trick didn’t work for long.
A few minutes later she’s not with the lieutenant any more, but asking the bartender for her coat and handbag, saying in a loud, obvious voice, “I’d like to go for a walk. Does anybody want to go for a walk with me?”
I think to myself, “You can keep saying no and pushing them off, but you can’t do it permanently, or you won’t get anywhere. There comes a time when you have to go along.” So I say coolly, “I’ll walk with you.” So we go out. We walk down the street a few blocks and see a cafe, and she says, “I’ve got an idea — let’s get some coffee and sandwiches, and go over to my place and eat them.”
The idea sounds pretty good, so we go into the cafe and she orders three coffees and three sandwiches and I pay for them. As we’re going out of the cafe, I think to myself, “Something’s wrong: too many sandwiches!”
On the way to her motel she says, “You know, I won’t have time to eat these sandwiches with you, because a lieutenant is coming over…” I think to myself, “See, I flunked. The master gave me a lesson on what to do, and I flunked. I bought her $1.10 worth of sandwiches, and hadn’t asked her anything, and now I know I’m gonna get nothing! I have to recover, if only for the pride of my teacher.”
I stop suddenly and I say to her, “You… are worse than a WHORE!”
“Whaddya mean?”
‘“You got me to buy these sandwiches, and what am I going to get for it? Nothing!”
“Well, you cheapskate!” she says. “If that’s the way you feel, I’ll pay you back for the sandwiches!”
I called her bluff: “Pay me back, then.”
She was astonished. She reached into her pocketbook, took out the little bit of money that she had and gave it to me. I took my sandwich and coffee and went off.
After I was through eating, I went back to the bar to report to the master. I explained everything, and told him I was sorry that I flunked, but I tried to recover.
He said very calmly, “It’s OK, Dick; it’s all right. Since you ended up not buying her anything, she’s gonna sleep with you tonight.”
“What?”
“That’s right,” he said confidently; “she’s gonna sleep with you. I know that.”
“But she isn’t even here! She’s at her place with the lieu —”
“It’s all right.”
Two o’clock comes around, the bar closes, and Ann hasn’t appeared. I ask the master and his wife if I can come over to their place again. They say sure. Just as we’re coming out of the bar, here comes Ann, running across Route 66 toward me. She puts her arm in mine, and says, “Come on, let’s go over to my place.”
The master was right. So the lesson was terrific!
I want to interject here, a former girlfriend of mine told me about a conversation she was having with a stripper on DC Metro once. The woman told her, “Stripping is easy, you just have to hate men.” Presumably these 1950s era strippers did not all hate men, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them were easy to manipulate. Feynman goes on:
When I was back at Cornell in the fall, I was dancing with the sister of a grad student, who was visiting from Virginia. She was very nice, and suddenly I got this idea: “Let’s go to a bar and have a drink,” I said.
On the way to the bar I was working up nerve to try the master’s lesson on an ordinary girl. After all, you don’t feel so bad disrespecting a bar girl who’s trying to get you to buy her drinks — but a nice, ordinary, Southern girl?
We went into the bar, and before I sat down, I said, “Listen, before I buy you a drink, I want to know one thing: Will you sleep with me tonight?”
“Yes.”
So it worked even with an ordinary girl! But no matter how effective the lesson was, I never really used it after that. I didn’t enjoy doing it that way. But it was interesting to know that things worked much differently from how I was brought up.
Anyway, I never tried this myself, but rereading it again, I wonder if Dick was all that rigorous in testing his theory. It makes for a great story, and Feynman was a great raconteur. Maybe he was bragging a little. Or maybe he realized that the sort of girl that falls for this approach was not what he really wanted, and that the sort of guy that plays these games was not what he wanted to be.
Update 20140715: Apparently I was fairly charitable towards Feynman. Matthew R Francis and Janet D. Stemwedel consider his sexual behavior predatory and feel that it tarnishes his legacy.
A Pleasure Working Under You
The war between men and women continues unabated. One of the most emailed and popular articles on the NY Times has been, Does a More Equal Marriage Mean Less Sex? It is a very long article, and very speculative, but the upshot is that the author feels that equality leads to a happy wife, a happy life, but not necessarily more, or passionate sex:
No matter how much sink-scrubbing and grocery-shopping the husband does, no matter how well husband and wife communicate with each other, no matter how sensitive they are to each other’s emotions and work schedules, the wife does not find her husband more sexually exciting, even if she feels both closer to and happier with him. … “The less gender differentiation, the less sexual desire.” In other words, in an attempt to be gender-neutral, we may have become gender-neutered.
According to the article, both men and women are hard-wired to expect that passionate sex will involve male dominance and female submission. Though the devil is in the details, that idea rings bells for me. When I was a boy, my mother and I were watching a movie on tv (Number One) with Charlton Heston as an aging quarterback. In one scene he argues with Jessica Walter, who plays his disaffected wife, then forces himself on her. She initially resists, then starts to respond. “And they call that rape,” my mother said. That was … a surprise.
During one of our necking sessions my first (much more experienced) girlfriend dragged my hand to her breast. I had no idea what to do then. (OK, I had some idea, but wasn’t sure what was allowed.) She soon dropped me for someone that presumably did. Quite a bit later my first lover asked me to talk trashy to her during sex. I had no idea what to say. Tom Jones and Balthazar B were about the extent of my sexual heroes, and neither waxed eloquent while making love.
But on the other hand, many lovers later, I made passionate love during a thunderstorm, at one point holding my arms around her arms around her head. She always loved thunderstorm sex, but grumbled that me pinning her down reminded her of the time she had been raped. I’ve dated one woman who showed me a picture of her black eye, one who was intimidated into office sex, one that was date-raped, one that was raped in her dorm room by an intruder and whose ex-husband used to spit on her if she couldn’t achieve orgasm. Yes, the one that was raped had trouble enjoying marital sex.
Here is where I’m supposed to give a pat rejoinder to the article’s premise, but I’m still as confused about women as when I had a crush on a little blonde girl in Kindergarten.
It does seem clear to me that women are attracted to powerful and wealthy men who can take care of them, but at the same time it is an article of faith among self-identified nice guys that women are drawn to the bad boys. Does that sound like a plot quandary from a Woody Allen film? If so he solved it by becoming rich, powerful and a bad boy. In light of the Dylan Farrow furor, XoJane asked, What Is It About Our Artists and Very Young Girls?:
It’s no mystery why teen girls would be drawn to the powerful men who court them. Young girls, a traditionally fairly powerless group, wake up one day to discover they wield enormous sexual power, power they may use without the perspective or emotional maturity to fully understand the consequences. Many 13-year-olds with access to rock stars and visionary directors would be thrilled to capture one’s interest, but unable to fully understand how unlevel the playing field truly is.
I’ve never courted younger women, but in three musicals I dealt with teenage girls in the cast flirting with me. Over the run of a show everyone becomes close through common purpose; it is easy to confuse that closeness with other feelings, and some guys do take advantage of that. I realized that these girls weren’t looking for a lover, they were just charmed that a man would actually talk with and listen to them, and had turned me into a fantasy boyfriend. Just before dress rehearsal one actually dragged me out in the hall to show her friends.
I wonder now – if I had taken advantage and groomed them for sexual encounters, and later been accused – I wonder how many male internet commenters would step up to defend me and attack them? In, Victims Of Sexual Assault Need To Take Their Share Of Blame, Too, TPM continues to report on blaming the victim:
[Wall Street Journal columnist James] Taranto is a reliable soldier in what he’s called the “war on men.” He wrote last June that Democrats … were trying to “criminalize male sexuality” in their efforts to eliminate sexual assault from the military.
Taranto had quoted a New York Time article, Stepping Up to Stop Sexual Assault, which reported on an effort to recruit bystanders to stop the rape of approximately one out of every five college women:
According to an account in New England Monthly at the time, an extremely drunk freshman was led into a Stoke Hall dorm room by three drunk sophomores who took turns having sex with her. One went into the hallway and bragged that they had a train going, high-fiving his friends. Several students, including the resident assistant, knew what was going on but did not put an end to it. Nor did the roommate intervene as the three boys tried to pressure the girl into saying it was consensual. …
College men use two words to describe when a man gets in the way of another man’s business, and it is not “bystander intervention.” For the purposes of a family newspaper, call it “shot blocking.”
In the Urban Dictionary, Cock Blocking is defined as, “To hinder, by whatever means, the chances of another male from getting a sexual encounter with a female.”
Donal 