His autobiographical book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, tells the story of the young Feynman as a sort of proto-“nice guy” asshole who thinks women owe him sex in exchange for buying them drinks.
The point of the story is that he learns a different way of dealing with women — just ask them if they’d like to have sex, instead of buying them things and hoping they get the hint. And, while treating women like human beings and being upfront with them and allowing them a chance to be upfront with you seems like it would make a lot of sense, Feynman then goes and ruins the lesson by getting entirely the wrong message out of it.
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.
Basically, Feynman was convinced that buying women things and expecting sex as payment was respecting them. In order to do anything different, he had to disrespect them and think of them as horrible demons. 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.
Sigh.
To Feynman’s credit, he seems to decide this isn’t something he wants to keep doing. But he never seems to get what was really wrong with the idea and it’s frustrating that he seems to get close to the realization that you can (le gasp!) just treat women like humans, only to swish past it and end up in a pit of vile crap.
Again, I’m still thinking about what I think about this and how it affects my views on Feynman. At the very least, it’s a great example of how likeable, interesting, really smart people can act and think in ways that are vile — a reminder, if you will, that likeability and charm (and talent) aren’t proof of kindness and someone worthy of respect and worthy of your trust. In the context of the recent New York magazine story on Terry Richardson, you might say that it’s a great reminder that somebody can be both an artist and a predator. (Please note that I’m not calling Feynman a predator here. I’m commenting on the headline of the New York article.) A person can be both somebody you like hanging out with and be somebody who treats women he wants to fuck horribly.
I think the biggest thing about why this bothers me is that it’s a reminder of why I don’t actually want a time machine to go back and visit my heroes. I’ve just run across too many stories, like this one, that tell me that the people I respect professionally and think I would like to have a conversation with didn’t really see me as an equal human being. And that’s depressing.
Image: Nobel Foundation
