May 20, 2017



Feminist "Scholarship": Where Sense And Reason Go To Die

I've long had the impression that papers in feminist academia are written by throwing a bunch of words in a jar ("hegemonic" and its various relatives), shaking the thing out on a countertop, and putting the words down on the page in whatever order they're picked up.

Well, there's been a beautiful hoax, a la the Sokol mumbo jumbo scientific paper a while back (in 1996), and this new one is by Peter Boghossian annd James Lindsay.

They have a piece about it in Skeptic magazine, which I get by e-subscription.

The Hoax

The androcentric scientific and meta-scientific evidence that the penis is the male reproductive organ is considered overwhelming and largely uncontroversial. That's how we began. We used this preposterous sentence to open a "paper" consisting of 3,000 words of utter nonsense posing as academic scholarship. Then a peer-reviewed academic journal in the social sciences accepted and published it. This paper should never have been published. Titled, "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct," our paper "argues" that "The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct." As if to prove philosopher David Hume's claim that there is a deep gap between what is and what ought to be, our should-never-have-been-published paper was published in the open-access (meaning that articles are freely accessible and not behind a paywall), peer-reviewed journal Cogent Social Sciences. (In case the PDF is removed, we've archived it.) Assuming the pen names "Jamie Lindsay" and "Peter Boyle," and writing for the fictitious "Southeast Independent Social Research Group," we wrote an absurd paper loosely composed in the style of post-structuralist discursive gender theory. The paper was ridiculous by intention, essentially arguing that penises shouldn't be thought of as male genital organs but as damaging social constructions. We made no attempt to find out what "post-structuralist discursive gender theory" actually means. We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral implications that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal. This already damning characterization of our hoax understates our paper's lack of fitness for academic publication by orders of magnitude. We didn't try to make the paper coherent; instead, we stuffed it full of jargon (like "discursive" and "isomorphism"), nonsense (like arguing that hypermasculine men are both inside and outside of certain discourses at the same time), red-flag phrases (like "pre-post-patriarchal society"), lewd references to slang terms for the penis, insulting phrasing regarding men (including referring to some men who choose not to have children as being "unable to coerce a mate"), and allusions to rape (we stated that "manspreading," a complaint levied against men for sitting with their legs spread wide, is "akin to raping the empty space around him"). After completing the paper, we read it carefully to ensure it didn't say anything meaningful, and as neither one of us could determine what it is actually about, we deemed it a success. Consider some examples. Here's a paragraph from the conclusion, which was held in high regard by both reviewers: We conclude that penises are not best understood as the male sexual organ, or as a male reproductive organ, but instead as an enacted social construct that is both damaging and problematic for society and future generations. The conceptual penis presents significant problems for gender identity and reproductive identity within social and family dynamics, is exclusionary to disenfranchised communities based upon gender or reproductive identity, is an enduring source of abuse for women and other gender-marginalized groups and individuals, is the universal performative source of rape, and is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change. You read that right. We argued that climate change is "conceptually" caused by penises. How do we defend that assertion? Like this: Destructive, unsustainable hegemonically male approaches to pressing environmental policy and action are the predictable results of a raping of nature by a male-dominated mindset. This mindset is best captured by recognizing the role of [sic] the conceptual penis holds over masculine psychology. When it is applied to our natural environment, especially virgin environments that can be cheaply despoiled for their material resources and left dilapidated and diminished when our patriarchal approaches to economic gain have stolen their inherent worth, the extrapolation of the rape culture inherent in the conceptual penis becomes clear.

This isn't to say the journal lacks standards:

They didn't accept the paper outright, however. Cogent Social Sciences' Reviewer #2 offered us a few relatively easy fixes to make our paper "better." We effortlessly completed them in about two hours, putting in a little more nonsense about "manspreading" (which we alleged to be a cause of climate change) and "dick-measuring contests."

They bring up two problems:

Conclusion: A Two-Pronged Problem for Academia There are at least two deeply troublesome diseases damaging the credibility of the peer-review system in fields such as gender studies: 1. the echo-chamber of morally driven fashionable nonsense coming out of the postmodernist social "sciences" in general, and gender studies departments in particular and

2. the complex problem of pay-to-publish journals with lax standards that cash in on the ultra-competitive publish-or-perish academic environment. At least one of these sicknesses led to "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct" being published as a legitimate piece of academic scholarship, and we can expect proponents of each to lay primary blame upon the other.

This so clearly shows what feminist academia is: an ideology mill in which you don't have to make sense; you just have to hit all the right marks while using impenetrable (heh) language that makes women out to be cartoonish victims and men out to be cartoonish perps.

Daniel Dennett on the mumbo jumbo of post-modernism (at Edge, via @SteveStuWill):

Postmodernism, the school of "thought" that proclaimed "There are no truths, only interpretations" has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for "conversations" in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.

Interestingly, a sex differences researcher I respect, Joyce Benenson, points out that while men are comfortable with hierarchy and competition, women don't like any woman to stand out beyond the rest. They tend to hang out in twos (rather than in groups like men) and to bond through sharing vulnerabilities. (No queen of the hill for the women or the wymyn!) Post-modern academia and all of the relativism that drives it seems to be molded around this psychology.

*