How to Think Like a Genius 30-Sex
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Rick Rosner)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/01/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s talk a little bit about sex and genius.
Rick Rosner: I’d suggested we talk about personality traits that go along with genius, and then we were looking at the idea that the personality traits might have as much variety among geniuses as they do among everyone else. You have depressed geniuses, happy, mean, nice. The whole bit. And that probably applies to, if not personality, at least sexual behavior as far as we know with the few examples that we have.
Geniuses probably have the same range of sexual drives that everyone else does. Though, given that they don’t play by the rules sometimes, they may feel more free to act on them. For instance, Feynman had a big romance and short marriage with the love of his life who died of tuberculosis while he was working on the Manhattan Project, and he was still a very young man.
And after that as if Feynman felt free to engage in picking up as many women as he possibly could, and he used empirical methodology and the same analytics that he used in physics that he used for picking up women long before there was a pickup artist movement, he had rules. Like, you never buy a woman a drink, especially a B girl.
B girl was a bar girl. At the time, a kind of a not quite prostitute scam, where a girl or woman would hit you up in a bar for a drink, she was working in league with the bar and you would buy her a drink in the bar and she would get some watered down ginger ale of drink, and at the end of the night you’d get hit with a huge bill. At that time, Feynman decided that buying a woman a drink makes you sucker and you’re not going to make any headway, and so you’re going to make headway.
He was apparently successful at seducing women all around. He was a good-looking, fun guy. He played the bongo drums. he was a safe cracker. He racked up large numbers of seduction. At the opposite extreme, you have Newton who was very solitary and maybe died a virgin, even though he lived into his 90s.
His mom remarried when Newton was 10 and gave Newton away for a bunch of years to another family. People wonder if this twisted him emotionally. In the art world, you have Picasso who was a big player and seducer of women and not necessarily somebody who treated women with full consideration of what they may have wanted; at the same time, him being Picasso and being such a famous vibrant guy. There was not a shortage of women who would put up with that.
Einstein had at least 5 affairs. We don’t know how far the affairs went, but most affairs involve sex. His marriages were, especially his second marriage to a cousin was, kind of a marriage of I guess you could call it convenience, but she picked up after him and handled his affairs and was happy to married to a great man, and he felt free to do whatever he wanted.
I guess as I started off that among the greater or the — Marie Curie had, I think, affairs, more than one or at least one affair. She was considered very attractive by her peers at the time. So, a conclusion might be — without looking at the backgrounds of more than a few geniuses — they want sex like everyone else, but feel more free to act on their desires in discarding norms of behavior.
We’ll probably have to look at the times in which everybody lived. The first half of the 20th century was a Golden Age for prostitution, at least in the US. And the sexual revolution of the second half of the second half of the 20th century freed up everybody, not everybody, but more people to have sex in a non-marriage, non-hooker context.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
In-Sight Publishing 