On That Penis Paper Causes Global Warming Hoax

“The conceptual penis as a social construct” is a peer-reviewed paper by two fellows who used fake names, published in the journal Cogent Social Sciences.

The real authors were Peter Boghossian, an academic philosopher, and James A. Lindsay, a writer. They revealed the article to be a hoax in, of all places, Skeptic magazine.

It’s sufficient to quote just one paragraph from the hoax, which was in part produced using the Postmodern Generator.

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.

Now we all remember the Sokal Hoax, in which a similar barrage of preposterosities was published in the well regarded journal Social Text.

What happened as the result of the Sokal Hoax? Nothing. We all had a laugh, confirmed what we already knew about academia, and then…academia went on to sink ever lower into the abyss of illogical ravings. Social Text was revealed to be a joke, but it is still doing great business, thank you very much.

The same will happen to the penises-cause-climate-change article. We’ll have a warm chuckle, confirm to ourselves that academic “gender studies” is a fiction and a fraud…and academics will continue on just as if it never happened.

Strike that. For Sokal, looking away was sufficient. “Sokal who?” was the response of every responsible academic. But this is the Current Year and indifference isn’t possible. The inmates are hitting back. One of the authors highlights one example. Another author shows another.

It’s nice to be able to agree with Jerry Coyne, and I do so now. Coyne discovered a strain of blue-badged Twitteratti who are calling the penis paper “transphobic” and “bigoted and disgusting”. Never mind the penis paper lifted most of its content from the very field it was spoofing. That the hoax occurred at all is what was “problematic.”

We’ll stand by here at the blog to see how far this attack escalates. We shouldn’t be surprised to learn that (a) the hoax will be called a patriarchal conspiracy, and (b) academics will argue that penises really do exacerbate global warming.

It’s not wonder the penis paper was not caught by peer review. Consider, for instance, this peer-reviewed article. Before giving it’s title, recall to your mind the many times Yours Truly predicted that in order to disprove one’s own “homophobia” one would have to report actual experience with sodomy, or to pronounce oneself willing to have such experiences.

“Teaching Men’s Anal Pleasure: Challenging Gender Norms with ‘Prostage’ Education” by Jonathan Branfman and Susan Ekberg Stiritz in the mainstream journal American Journal of Sexuality Education (coincidentally the same publishers as the penis paper). From the Abstract:

To help students critique sex/gender norms, sexuality educators should address men’s anal pleasure. Men’s anal receptivity blurs accepted binaries like male/female, masculine/feminine, and straight/queer. By suppressing men’s receptivity, the taboo against men’s anal pleasure helps legitimize hegemonic sex/gender beliefs—and the sexism, homophobia, and male dominance they encourage. Conversely, by deconstructing men’s anal taboo and creating a new language of anal pleasure—“prostage” (pro-STAHJ)—educators can help students challenge restrictive gender norms.

You have to love that the authors felt the need for the phonetic spelling of prostage.

I owe the remaining examples to @RealPeerReview. All articles are peer-reviewed.

• “Just Getting Off”: The Inseparability of Ejaculation and Hegemonic Masculinity. “This paper offers the notion of the ‘ejaculation imperative’ to describe the theoretical and pragmatic processes by which physiological ejaculation becomes intrinsically inseparable from discourses of time, sexual performance and social expectations.”
• The Lactating Man. “Lactation and breastfeeding are typically viewed as inherently female activities.”
• The Gender of Pregnancy: Masculine Lesbians Talk about Reproduction. “…the bodily production of pregnancy has been socially gendered as feminine because of its association with female-bodied people.”
• ‘Preserving la difference’: the elusiveness of sex-segregated sport. “Sport is founded upon a belief in dimorphic sex, dichotomous gender and segregated competition.”
• Human Sex Differences in Height: Evolution due to Gender Hierarchy?
• Anti-sexist men: A case of cloak-and-dagger chauvinism. “…discussions with anti-sexist men and on personal experience, it seems that “impotence’ is a common reaction to stroppy feminists…”

The point is, we could go on all day, all night, all tomorrow, all tomorrow night, and et cetera, and never run out of these fantasies. Our exposing them, and your “awareness being raised” about them, will do nothing to stem their flow.

The only way to stop these things is by the forcible removal of these authors from academia. And that is not going to happen.