Professors Write Hoax Academic Paper Blaming Global Warming on Penises; It Gets Published

Gender Studies wasn’t an option when many of us went to college, but here’s how MIT describes their program:

Exploring gender with the tools of different, and often multiple, disciplines, Women’s and Gender Studies subjects strive to help MIT students better understand how knowledge and value take different forms depending on a variety of social variables. In the course of their inquiry, students not only learn how to use gender as a category of analysis, but also reflect on the manifestation of gender in their own lives, leading to a range of personal and intellectual discoveries. Although gender is a central component of every subject, the study of gender requires attention to connections between gender, sexuality, race, class, religion, nationality, and other social categories; different subjects shed light on different aspects of such connections.

Sounds fascinating, right?

Many professors and intellectuals are onto the fact that Gender Studies is a total waste of time. Worse than a waste of time, the courses actually teach incomprehensible, asinine concepts to impressionable kids who will never graduate with a useful degree. That’s why two professors –Philosopher Peter Boghossian and mathematician James Lindsay — set out to prove once and for all that Women’s Studies is “shallow, credulous and painfully politically correct” by writing a fake article full of jargon and ridiculous ideas.  Namely, they blamed global warming on penises.  Yes, really. According to Heat Street, the editors at the journal published the hoax article.  Using fake names, the authors did it again with an article that claimed, among other things, that when men take up too much space around them —manspreading — they are “raping the empty space around him.” Cogent Social Sciences fell for that hoax as well.  (Let the irony of the publication’s name sink it for one second… You’ve got to savor that.)

The professors finally came clean in Skeptic Magazine:

“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.”

Here’s an example of an incomprehensible sentence. “Based upon an appreciable corpus of feminist literature on the penis, this troubling identification results in an effective isomorphism linking the conceptual penis with toxic hypermasculinity.”  Um…?  But they didn’t just write academic jargon, they also put some hilariously ridiculous terminology for male anatomy into the piece as well  (some of the tamer descriptions were “cranny axe,” “dagger,” and “heat-seeking moisture missile”).

The fact that academic journals can’t tell the difference between actual Women’s Studies articles and complete jokes says a lot.  It’s time to get rid of these programs altogether.

Image Credit: Cogent Social Sciences