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Comment by watwut | Hacker News Reader

Simultaneously you acknowledge that sexism existed and simultaneously you want to make it taboo. It is not personal offence to you that sexism existed or exist nor something outrageous to talk about it.

This is how he is characterized:

> known for his [...], sexism along with generous support for women academicians

But to answer the question, the reason for this to not make it taboo is simple - it is part of history and world. When you make it taboo, people end up having naive simplistic ideas over how world worked back then.

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Why do you say that hyperman1 "want[s] to make it taboo"? I don't see that at all. I think he[1] is just saying: the article says Feynman was sexist, but I haven't seen evidence of that and find it hard to believe.

For what it's worth, I think it's clear that Feynman was, at the very least, what-we-nowadays-tend-to-call-sexist. That is, he saw women as sex objects and talked about them as sex objects, and so far as I can tell saw nothing wrong or improper about doing that. See, e.g., That Chapter of "Surely you're joking...", a bit of which is quoted in the article. (The article's decontextualization makes it look worse than it actually is, but it's still not great.) It's harder to tell whether he was sexist in the narrower sense of thinking that women are generally e.g. intellectually inferior to men. I'm pretty sure he wasn't sexist in the even narrower sense of thinking that women simply can't do the things that traditionally used to be men's jobs.

[1] Making a guess on the basis of username.

I interpreted the "What is 'sometimes sexist attitudes' doing there" as outrage over it being mentioned. I did not thought it was disagreement, because the article has some quick explains on which part of memoirs made them thing that.

> I'm pretty sure he wasn't sexist in the even narrower sense of thinking that women simply can't do the things that traditionally used to be men's jobs

I think that part is addressed by "generous support for women academicians", support he gave to his sister and "unwavering respect for the many talented women he supported" and "support to the Blake scholar Jenijoy La Belle" all in the article.

The article basically goes out of way to point out instances where he was supportive to women with ambitions.

Offtopic: To me personally, mentioned negative attitudes mostly spoken to having certain sense of entitlement or naivety around bar women. He kind of expected them to be different species. The one where a girl falls in love with dude she just met and will have sex cause the guy she knows for 10 minutes is so awesome. Obviously it does not work like that, leading to disappointment and resentment over having to basically pay for sex.

I don't think it's fair to say he saw women at large as "sex objects," since he often encouraged and aided female colleagues in their scientific work. That doesn't preclude him from seeing women in that way in certain contexts, or that being sexist, but I do think his view of women was a lot more nuanced than a characterization like that would suggest.

Thanks. Your interpretation is indeed what I intended.

To be clear: I see more sexism in the Los Alamos chapter,where a 'Girl' is only good enough to do computations, until the computer replaces them.

While the bar-chapters quoted here paint a bleak picture, it does so of both sexes, and Feynman remarks how things didn't work as he wasbrought up to expect.

I am indeed male,even if 'hyperman' was a happy artefact of an algorithm that shortened my 4 word full name to 8 characters to create a student logon name. My classmates liked it and it stuck

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