powauth

But also people are now more: A) more sexual with who they date B) are friends more with the opposite sex.

I still recall that when I was in high school, my mother was confused how I had both a girlfriend and several close female friends. Society is definitely different.

Eh, it depends on who you hang around and how you've grown up - what you stated is just one specific example. The somewhat ambiguous way he described it "The term is widely in use, and refers to the exchange of physical pleasure, not necessarily intercourse, between two people who may not be going together or in fact may not have been introduced and indeed may not be strictly sober." describes it pretty well. (well I'd favor dropping the 'may' in 'who may not be going together')

lol, creep perhaps. But hardly confident :p

This may just boil down to semantics, but I would call the hypothetical "confident man" you are talking about a confident, socially skilled man.

My "confident creep" has inner confidence in his abilities (he might even think of himself as a god among men), but he cannot correctly project his confidence (though in his mind, he is projecting it correctly). He can drop any empathy and ask such a question without being nervous, but his style, dress, conversation, etc. are so awkward, it fails.

Point being: Confidence is not the only thing that matters. You actually need social skills.

True, women are more likely to get it from a man than vice-versa, but my number (1 in 10k) is not exaggerating all that much.

http://hivinsite.ucsf.edu/insite?page=ask-05-10-11

"Two large studies in California and Europe found a per-contact risk (meaning the risk of a man becoming infected from each instance of penile-vaginal sex) of 0.0001 (1 in 10,000) and 0.0003 (1 in 3,000)"

Well, for the 14% of the population that works on, sure.

Confidence is key, but there is a difference between a confident stud and a confident creep.

*Feynman :p

sex-only-for-producing children is a bit of a stretch. The link to Ebert's blog post above describes pre-1960s society pretty well; couples were sexual, but if they weren't married (or at least engaged), they probably weren't having sex.

Agreed.

For the record, it is very hard to contract HIV from vaginal sex. (< 1/10000 per-instance chance)

Interesting. My talks (at least with older people who went to college) have given me quite a different perspective - where people would typically marry very young (often out of college), and no one would even think of having sex without at least being engaged.

I don't doubt the truth of this story (though there is certainly hyperbole); rather I find it hard to believe that 'sleep with' in this context actually means 'sex'. The main flags are A) Feynman is discussing with other people about it (afaik not acceptable socially then) and B) a sexual one-night stand would be even less so.

Finally I wager that the teen birth rate drop is solely due to an increase in education and contraption (and even legalized abortions). Obviously, there were some teenagers having sex in the 1940s (with a much higher liklihood of becoming pregnant right now), but, due to the risks and less acceptance than now, the rate was lower.

He was married during that entire time (until 1945). This also doesn't take place until after he was at Cornell. Probably around 1946 or 1947.

This post teaches us all a valuable lesson: always frame the question before, not after, asking it. People stop reading after the '?'

Just out of curiosity: Is Feynman using 'sleep with' as a euphemism for sex? I'm guessing that, this story being written in the 1940s/50s, pre-sexual revolution, that it is more referring to sleeping with a some low level of intimacy.