PENGUIN PRESS, MARCH 2015Three important insights I’ve gained from studying what has happened to scientists whose research has ticked off activists working within social justice movements: (1) If you want to get in trouble, study sex. (2) Anybody who tells you “all publicity is good publicity” has never been accused of genocide. (3) Death threats are rarely grammatically correct. I illustrate each of these lessons in my new book, Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science.
First off, Mama was right: Sex is gonna get you in trouble. While it is true that you can also tick people off by making challenging scientific claims about alien abductions, chronic Lyme disease, or race—especially race—the surest route to having your reputation threatened is to contradict some deeply held belief about sex.
So, you could follow the leads of people like Craig Palmer and Randy Thornhill, who dared to suggest that rape may involve our evolved biology, or Michael Bailey, who promoted the idea that eroticism may play a role in transgenderism, or Elizabeth Loftus and Melvin Guyer, who challenged the idea of “recovered memory” of childhood sexual abuse.
As these people discovered, when your work gets labeled “controversial,” you should expect that few ...
