Galileo’s Middle Finger, the book

This book, Galileo’s Middle Finger, is a fascinating non fiction read about a historian diving into smear campaigns to uncover the truth about the characters and accusations, and has proven three times already to bring justice to extremely misleading claims that have nearly or totally ruined otherwise respectable scholar’s careers.

The title was attention grabbing, based on Galileo’s battle with the Catholic Church in his time as he pursued the truth about the solar system and the laws of the universe that contradicted mainstream wisdom of the age about creationism and God’s almighty power. It was a metaphor, like a “fuck you” from truth seekers, unafraid of stirring the pot in the face of powerful censorship.

She began with her history researching hermaphrodites, the first field she naturally became involved with. There was a smear campaign against a researcher who furthered an observation about how some trans men get off by imagining themselves dressed in drag. It was something about how most people get off by imagining genital play with the gender of their choice, but there is a unique subset of trans men that get off by imagining and dressing themselves as women. Seems like a pretty harmless claim.

But there were three women in particular who took issue with that claim, who ironically did exactly that in their personal lives, and twisted evidence, created a public website to push bogus claims, intimidated witnesses, turned interviewed characters against the man, and nearly, or pretty much successfully, ruined his reputation. Through Alice’s tedious research into the subject and timeline, she was basically able to exonerate him, but only if you read her entire research story, which was part of the problem in the first place.

People don’t have the time or attention to actually read the work of the leading researcher, instead resorting to the sound-bites collected by the smear campaign to get a sense of the he-said, she-said central to the issue. These people were making up or misrepresenting the evidence against the guy and eventually against Alice, and you would only know better if you took the time and effort to do a deep dive yourself.

The next saga involved a touchy subject, clarifying that rape was actually, at least in part, motivated by sexual urges, which seemed like a strange thing that have to clarify seeing as the act is performed with an erection and ends in an orgasm. It was a pretty uncomfortable situation to read about, to be honest.

The issue in that story was that the leading publications on the motivations of forced sex was that it was entirely based on power dynamics. It was about domination and control, and it left no room in the diagnosis for sexual attraction; so in an example case, a neighbors daughter to the researcher in question, was kidnapped and murder, and when the researcher was called upon to state whether he had seen anything fishy in the last few months regarding the daughter or her acquaintances, he blatantly asked why the case wasn’t being prosecuted on the premise that the murderer raped the girl, then killed her out of shame; a truly heinous situation. The prosecutor said they couldn’t make that argument, because the published research at the time only allowed for the motivation to be framed as a power struggle and a dominance issue.

This dude was fighting the good fight, in a really uncomfortable subject, and his opponents took his work out of context, and made extremely misleading claims that he was supporting forced sex.

Alice looked into the subject and stood in solidarity with him against these delusional accusers.

The third story was about an anthropologist in South America, who was living with the yanomamo for like twenty years, collecting extraordinary data about their culture and behavior, but somehow, along with another researcher who worked in the same field, became embroiled in a smear campaign by some dude who claimed human rights abuses by these anthropologists against the indigenous population, including intentionally starting a measles epidemic to test the resilience of the locals against the disease, while withholding medical care that could save them. The claims this guy put forward were all bogus, and were refuted by many scholars and respectable organizations, but the guy still had one organization to stand on and make his false claims. Alice’s research into the subject was thrilling and she ending up being able to prove the guy making the claims was all smoke.

When I picked up the book in the library, I turned to the middle section and started a chapter titled ‘Human Nature’, expecting it to be an enlightening section about how we act and interpret our world, a subject I’m personally fascinated by, reading Daniel Kahneman and Steven Pinker; but instead jumped straight into the middle of the smear campaign regarding the human rights abuse claims against the yanomamo researcher. It was a fascinating read, so after I finished the chapter, I decided to check the book out.

The rest of this book has not been what I was expecting, and now I’ve read over a hundred pages about hermaphrodites and the motivations behind rape.

I thought it was an odd coincidence that the one passage I flipped to while reading it in the library was the most easy to digest, the most PG and engaging subject so far, and then was hooked, brought it home, and was subsequently saddled with disturbing and sensitive research topics.

While the information in the book might be uncomfortable to talk about, I really like the idea behind it: that you need to properly research the claims people put out there, because it’s easy for someone to just say anything they want, taken out of context, and be believed as true. It’s inspiring that she is able to fact check these claims, that while sound plausible if you know nothing about the subject or characters or motivations of the characters, actually can’t hold water when inspected properly; but these bogus claims still get to be tossed around because of how much effort it takes to prove them wrong, and how easy it is to believe them since they provide a convenient and coherent narrative.