Isn’t that why men buy women drinks? They are hoping for an invite? Course the woman isn’t obligated to issue one if the guy has nothing else going for him other than a few spare bucks.
You mean to tell me that back in those days, men and women would actually engage in this behaviour? In bars yet? Shocking!
I sure am glad that in the 21st century, we’ve all moved past that kind of degradation.
You guys are forgetting something.
Girls and bars and hooking up in general had totally different implications post WWII than it does today.
Today a strange girl in a bar is just a girl in a bar. She could be the next Misses Right. The one you take to meet your parents. Back then not so much.
Feynman, Jewish, who was probably raised “properly”, had a high powered PhD and worked in a high powered (heh) place wasn’t likely to being taking some strange girl he meet in a bar back to meet his parents one day. Not to say he wouldn’t ever do that because he was a rebel, but I suspect that was his thinking going in (heh).
As a rule, thats what certain segments of society expected, and as a rule, thats probably something many of the girls there knew as well. It was a place to get free drinks/food and maybe have a “good time”.
And Feynman probably considered it to be what it looked like. Basically a polite version of low level prostitution. When he asked for sex straight up and got a yes then bought stuff for the girls that probably just confirmed it in his mind.
IIRC he would sometimes refuse to pay for anything , let the girls do the buying, and then they would take him to their rooms.
And…?
So, he was a PUA AND a MRA ! Ahead of his time baby.
That dude had talent.
Next you’ll tell me he played in a band.
Where do you get that from?
Really? It’s not a degrading attitude towards women to convince yourself that they aren’t worth anything, and treat them accordingly? Because if so, I might need a new dictionary.
The context is fairly clear, though.
But that’s the thing: Feynman explicitly considered them to be obligated to recompense his expenses. After all, when one fails to do so, he calls her ‘worse than a whore’—she’s taken his dough, and he’s not even getting any for it! Righteous outrage!
OK, so we’ve had ‘they were asking for it’, and ‘boys will be boys’, and now, ‘those were different times’. Any apologetic cliches still missing?
George Washington had slaves?
So he did.
Sheldon Cooper knows about everything.
:rolleyes:
It’s disgraceful the way Isaac Newton failed to take a clear position on LGBT issues.
While I find his attitude distasteful, he was involved with consenting adults, so I find it difficult to label him a “sexual predator”.
Well, he may or may not have made his views explicit, but I think we can guess what they would have been! 
Don’t judge him by the standards of 2016. Back then, ‘nice’ girls didn’t hang out in bars accepting drinks and food from strange men. Everyone in those places knew why everyone else was there. And there was exploitation on both sides: some women would lead a man on all night, letting him buy her drinks and food, then just slip away. Some men were obnoxious. But very few people in those situations were innocents who didn’t understand what was going on.
Feynman was just a horny young man, like millions of others. He hung out in strip clubs and he chased women. So what? He never forced himself on anyone that we know of, and he very admirably married a woman who was dying of tuberculosis and stuck by her side until the end.
People are complicated - geniuses more so.
As the board’s resident defender of PUAs I just want to say that a lot of it doesn’t fit the social caricature. A lot of it is just guys trying to make themselves more attractive.
The things I learned through studying Real Social Dynamics, and workshops with some British PUAs I found useful generally for talking to anyone: male or female, young or old, or when doing public speaking say.
Of course though, jerks are everywhere, so I’m sure it would not be hard to find jerk PUAs. But I don’t think it’s right to say the whole concept is about being that.
I’ve read both of the books of anecdotes, and i would say nothing predatory in there.
Then I’m sure you can name some concepts. I went into it back as a teen, before I wised up. While I can tell you some things that aren’t misogynistic (as that element hadn’t taken over yet), I can’t tell you a single thing that isn’t about trying to get women to have sex with you.*
And while I never saw the book you mentioned, I checked, and it is explicitly about making women be attracted to you.
*Well, nothing true, anyways. I can tell you about eye access cues or other crap from NLP, but those have been debunked. NLP is a pseudoscience.
Frankly, calling Feynman a ‘sexual predator’ because he tried various techniques to convince women to have sex with him infantilizes women. I may not condone all of his techniques, and yeah I’d probably be a little skeeved out to be around someone practicing some of those PUA techniques in this day and age, but at the end of the night he had sex with women who wanted to have sex with him. He was direct and persuasive and yeah, objectified women in pursuit of sex, but didn’t use deception or coercion. Calling him a ‘sexual predator’ reeks of an attitude that women are children who need chivalrous white knights to protect them from making bad decisions.
He was a successful man, kind of a rock star in the world of physics. He probably had more going for him than the other guys in the bar, so just by paying attention I bet he could get laid pretty easily.
What a bizarre disanalogy. The thing is exactly that Feynman did make his position abundantly clear. If Newton had a section in the Principia detailing how he would psych himself up for some good old gay bashing, then yes, I would take the—apparently controversial!—stance that this is morally reprehensible.
This whole ‘everyone did it back then’-argument is really just so much bullshit. Even if everybody was engaged in rampant baby-killing, that doesn’t make baby-killing hunky-dory. Certainly, we’re all a product of our time, and may be subject to its moral failings; but still, moral failings they are. Otherwise, you can pretty much excuse all behavior as being a product of its times; moreover, the times never would change if behaving according to its prevailing moral judgments automatically made those judgments right.
Additionally, I wonder if people would quite so ardently defend Feynman if he’d made his statements in reference to another ethnicity—if he’d told the tale of how he’d tell himself how African Americans really weren’t worth anything, or of how the Jews really were just after your money, and so on. I’m seeing far fewer people defending Heidegger for his Nazi leanings—but surely, those were just the times, as well!