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5 min readThe Man Who Invented Eugenics to Measure a Woman's Body
Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, once used a sextant—a navigational tool for measuring angles and distances—to secretly calculate the dimensions of a Herero woman he found attractive. He was traveling through southern Africa in the 1850s when he encountered the wife of his interpreter, whom he described as "a Venus among the Hottentots." Unable to ask her permission, unwilling to explain himself to the missionary who could have translated, and apparently unable to simply speak to her, Galton recorded that he "took a series of observations upon her figure in every direction, up and down, crossways, diagonally, and so forth," then worked out her measurements "by trigonometry and logarithms." This is not an incidental footnote in his biography. As the hosts of Behind the Bastards argue, the entire edifice of scientific racism and eugenics that Galton built over the following decades was rooted in this kind of prurient, unconsenting obsession with the bodies of non-white people.
A Life of Nepotism and Casual Cruelty
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:03) **Cold Open: Milo Yiannopoulos & The Leopard-Eating-Faces Principle** - The hosts celebrate the news that eugenicist Milo Yiannopoulos has been taken into ICE custody, framing it as a case of "leopards eating someone's face."
- 2 (04:49) **Galton's Middle East Tour: The Death of Ali** - Galton is touring the Middle East and North Africa when his coffee boy, Ali, dies of dysentery.
- 3 (07:32) **Proof of Galton's Character: "You Cannot Strike a Berber"** - The hosts read a quote from Galton's later writings about his travels, revealing his true character.
- 4 (09:04) **Fleeing the Country: Ali's Family Seeks Justice** - Galton claims to have sent Ali's wages and a gift to his wife, but this "roused a hornet's nest of greedy claimants."
- 5 (10:05) **The Fate of the Monkeys: A Tale of Neglect** - Galton returns to England with two pet monkeys, who are supposed to go into quarantine but are not made to obey the law because he is rich.
- 6 (13:13) **Quantifying the Monster: 70 Words for Monkeys, 17 for a Human** - The host notes that Galton, a statistics nerd, spent 70 words discussing the monkey deaths and only 17 discussing the death of the human, Ali.
- 7 (13:54) **Becoming an English Gentleman: Learning to Shoot** - After his father dies, Galton must learn how to be an English gentleman, which he describes as learning to shoot things.
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Show Notes
In part 2, we follow Galton during his youthful rampage through the middle east and then Africa, and how his 'gap years' created the racism we all live with today.
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More from this podcast
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