Assaults on free speech and academic inquiry are increasingly familiar in the present age of social media. Even as I started Alice Dreger’s compelling new book, Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science, Dreger’s colleague at Northwestern, author and film professor Laura Kipnis, was the target of a Title IX investigation for publishing an opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Kipnis 2015a). Kipnis had criticized new codes regulating sexual relations on campus for infantilizing students “while vastly increasing the power of university administrators over all our lives” (Kipnis 2015b). Students at Northwestern clamored to be protected from these harmful ideas, simultaneously proving Kipnis’s point about the deterioration of campus discourse, and initiating the surreal and pointless investigation. Although the charges against Kipnis were eventually dropped, the incident highlighted growing demands from students to be shielded from any form of emotional discomfort, including exposure to ideas with which they might disagree. Such exposure is now routinely portrayed as equivalent to physical injury, a metaphorical conflation of words with violence that manifests itself in a variety of forms, including the popular concepts of microaggression and triggering. This invidious comparison is designed for one purpose alone—to justify the suppression of speech by some higher authority. What happens, though, when it is not political speech that is deemed offensive and threatening, but an empirical claim about the natural world? Jonathan Rauch, in his book Kindly Inquisitors, warned that liberal science is perpetually under threat from a “humanitarian” stance that judges ideas not by their truth, but by their potential for harm. A minor example of this caught my eye recently when a study was published estimating that 64% of women who do scientific fieldwork are subject to sexual Hum Nat DOI 10.1007/s12110-015-9235-6