In the midst of her struggle to restore the reputations of the persecuted scholars, Dreger came across an outrageous story about an 82-year-old researcher who’d been kicked out of Cornell for fraud and who was conducting weird and extremely harmful eugenics experiments on pregnant women.
The freak made hundreds of pregnant women take placenta-crossing steroids with the goal of modifying the genitals of the fetuses. And, of course, she never told them that the “treatment” was untested and very likely to cause birth defects. Instead, she lied to the women and completely misrepresented what she was doing.
One would think that if it’s so easy to ruin an academic for saying something that for some reason might disturb somebody, it should be real easy to shut down a bizarre experiment on unsuspecting pregnant women. Right?
Wrong.
Dreger discovered that the same politicians, journalists, academics, and online discussion board participants who pilloried an anthropologist for describing how indigenous Amazonians liked to get drunk had no interest in the harm that another academic was actually doing to actual women. Moreover, a friend of the crazed eugenicist was conducting experiments to establish if a vibrator would cause arousal in 5 – year-old girls*. Yes, seriously. But there was no act of Congress condemning this freak while there was one condemning a scholar who wrote that different victims of pedophiles sustained different degrees of harm.
In a contest for public attention, “said something people weren’t prepared to hear” won over “did something very dangerous to people” every single time. The online outrage machine reacts very well to soundbites that people can get mortally offended about. Nothing is easier than misrepresenting somebody’s scholarship in order to sink them. When the maligned scholar tries to explain what was actually said, the outraged consumers will have moved on to a fresh cause for shared anger.
Maybe it makes more sense for us all collectively to allow more space for people to say unexpected, maybe even disturbing things and censor harmful actions a lot more than we censor words.
* In the next post, I will explain what the declared purpose of these experiments was. Prepare to be floored.
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