I’m actually kind of done with white cishet dudes jerking off to “science”

Okay so the word “science” means a couple different things and I have different feelings about those different things.

There’s “science” the subject and field of study, which means like botany and zoology and physics and chemistry and all that good stuff. I enjoy learning about “the sciences” and how shit works.

Then there’s “science” the process. It involves observing, forming hypotheses, testing them and drawing conclusions from the results. Anyone can do this. Babies do this. When you threw shit off the side of your high chair as a baby to see what would happen you were doing science. I am cool with science the process until it gets tangled up with science the institution (see below).

Science the institution is run mostly by white cishet dudes who had enough social privileges to go to a place like Caltech or MIT for their education. Science the institution is fucked up and oppressive. There is all kinds of fucking bias in the way studies are performed and even more bias in the way the results are reported. There are usually controls, such as double-blinds, within the study to prevent observer bias, but that does nothing to help when the basic premise of a study is based on oppressive bullshit. Science the institution tells indigenous people their healing methods are bullshit. It tells women that diseases that occur more often in female-bodied people must be all in their heads. It’s full of corporate sponsorship and conflicts of interest, and I don’t for a minute believe that “this was totally proven in a study” means a goddamn thing if it doesn’t line up with people’s lived experiences of reality.

I’m sick of science worship. Science can be oppressive. Science can be wrong. Stop fucking fapping to Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins (both of whom have suggested, by the way, that child sexual abuse is not something to be taken seriously). Stop using “because science” as an argument to deny the lived experience of oppressed people. Stop shaming people for not embracing your culture of white male atheism. And really please just go fuck yourself with the whole “social sciences aren’t real sciences”, because then you’re pretty much just saying “oppressed people don’t matter because they don’t behave as predictably as my lab rats”.

If you really love science as a process and a field of study, stop backing the scientific institutions that impede true unbiased implementation of the scientific method.

Oh one more thing: Maybe stop shaming women and PoC for not being interested in STEM majors and careers that are a giant fucking white cishet dude circle jerk, and start figuring out how you can make science less dickish and more welcoming to people with different cultural perspectives.