This idea from Thanatos Savehn at Twitter. He said:
I’ve noted many Science articles claiming that empathy is surely the cure for our ills, so I looked into it. I wonder if a significance test might shed some light on whether there’s an association between the frequency of girlboss scientists and the frequency of empathy papers?
He provided this graph or frequency of appearance by year of “empathy” from PubMed (government search engine for medical and related papers):
Obviously, 2024 is not finished, and it takes time to get these things in, so there will be increases at the end. But it looks like this keyword peaked a couple of years back. Is this decrease going to persist?
To check, I thought it would be fun to look at other terms we might associate with wokeness. Another fellow I took inspiration from was doing something similar recently, too.
Here’s the obvious girlboss word: “feelings” — Whoa, oh, oh, feelings:
Look at those emotions fly! But maybe, just maybe, even considering the unfinished year, we’re on the downslope. This could of course be an artifact. There are many reasons for variability other than a return to more masculine science (there are other reasons for caution, too, given below). “Return” is anyway too strong. Let’s say a relaxation of the feminization instead.
Let’s do a woke word: “sex assigned at birth” (with quotes):
That 1980 is fascinating. In that year there is only the paper “Etiology of homosexuality” where (it seems) the term “sex assigned at birth” was coined, from somebody going by VE Headings (who was searching for biological and genetics reasons for homosexual behaviors).
The next entry of “assigned” had to wait thirty-one years, until 2011, in the paper “HIV/AIDS programming in the United States: considerations affecting transgender women and girls” by Sevelius and others. They want us to “be truly gender responsive”. By which they meant affirm the delusions of the deluded.
The 80s, and even 2010s, were before the Great Awokening. That event was more recent, and was the time when Sanity and Reality were purged from academia. But, as you can see, the Slippery Slope was already being greased.
Lunatics say “sex assigned at birth”; assigned not noted. As if the delivering doctor or midwife or parents can magically transmogrify the baby into its opposite, or something on a “spectrum”, or something equally ludicrous.
There is no slow down here; only increase. Which suggests the best bet is a continued rise.
This naturally leads to the inanity of all idiotic inanities, “pregnant men“. Surely no competent, serious academic would write a paper with this glaring monstrosity? Well, sigh:
There are only five papers listed, but they all don’t count. The 1995 paper used the term with scare quotes, to be sure the reader did not miss their skepticism. One paper hit the search because the irrelevant term “pregnant, men” came up.
Which leaves us with three, all of which used the term unironically. Like the 2022 “The Power of a Story: Enhancing Students’ Empathy for Transgender Pregnant Men“, which also hit on “empathy”, by a crew of people with typical female names. My favorite sentence of this marvel is “Sharing the lived experience of transgender pregnant men can increase awareness…”
It can! We are all now well aware of how easy it is for people to believe preposterousities.
Which brings us to “lived experience.” Recall that term means unlived non-experiences, which is to say, Fantasy passed off as Reality.
Proof of the non-experience claim comes in the 1986 paper “Redefining sexuality from women’s own experiences.” The title says it all. You don’t get to redefine “sexuality”, unless you have invented a whole new form of procreation, and no, new ways to make hair grow on your palms don’t count.
There is no decrease here, either.
There will be some ambiguities about “empower“, but I find most uses of it nauseatingly effeminate, or worse. Whether that’s right or wrong, science has no business empowering or disempowering anything, except transformers or other mechanisms of electricity generation or transfer. Other uses are scientism, not science. As I have said endless times, science cannot tell you what is right, or wrong, to do.
Since there are acceptable uses of “empower”, it’s well to remind ourselves that a lot of terms are going to increase not necessary because of popularity, but because of the increasing number of people calling themselves scientists, the ending flood of journals, and the vast amounts of money flowing into science. Which I ought better to have said up front.
So let’s look at the word that might shows changes in popularity: “physiognomy“.
Note the early start date. The first big peak was in the 1970s, where the idea was taken (at various degree) seriously. It fell out of favor when people learned screaming “Racist!” could have a powerful effect. (They are now learning the effect is greatly weakened.) Physiognomy is back today because of things like mammaplasty. Which means exactly what you think it means. Plastic surgeons use the word. The word is also used in biology for the good reasons you’d suspect: animals besides man are allowed to have physiognomies.
What about their favorite word, second in illogicality only to “pregnant men”, which is to say, “racism“?
A definite peak then fall off. The levels, which should be near zero, and will be above zero only because historical discussion of madness will ever be with us, are still high. But there is good news in this.
I did “reproductive health“, which also peaked and dropped a tad. This is a favorite euphemism to disguise the killing of the lives inside would-be mothers, yet the phrase is in widespread use for mostly sane reasons, which is to say, in the plain meaning of the words. These seem to be the predominate uses, too, so the graph is not helpful is teasing out girlboss wokeisms.
The same is true for “whiteness” (same peak and fall off). When used in a woke context, it means “I hate whites”. But in the graph, most of the uses are in things like this: “ChlorTox scale assessment, greenness, and whiteness evaluation of selective spectrophotometric analysis of dimenhydrinate and cinnarizine“.
Overall? Maybe a slight decrease in legacy woke nonsense and girlbossery. But no drop in perversion. Not yet. But things are changing.
Are there other words I missed? Try it yourself.
Late addition: “chestfeeding” (one word):
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I feel you, man!