October 4, 2018
Warning: today’s issue is not meant for younger eyes.
I’m not trying to be vulgar — you know me better than that — but I am discussing what goes on in leftist academia, and it’s not for a child’s eyes (or anyone’s, really).
Three academics — Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose — have been engaged in the most exquisitely subversive project over the past year: submitting altogether insane articles for publication at feminist, “gender studies,” and related journals.
They had to halt the project prematurely when a watchdog Twitter account that keeps an eye on crazy academic articles brought attention to one of their successful publications, noting that names and institutions mentioned in it did not exist. That led to an inquiry by the journal’s editor, and the secret project began to unravel.
But they had plenty of success up to then.
They had seven articles published, passing “peer review” at academic journals. Another seven were at the “revise and resubmit” stage (which generally results in acceptance) when they had to call a halt to the project. Typically if an academic can publish seven academic papers in as many years, he is rewarded with tenure; our trio managed this feat in a mere ten months.
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One paper, about rape culture in dog parks, “gained special recognition for excellence from its journal, Gender, Place, and Culture, a highly ranked journal that leads the field of feminist geography. The journal honored it as one of twelve leading pieces in feminist geography as a part of the journal’s 25th anniversary celebration.”
The authors even received four invitations to act as peer reviewers themselves, on the basis of the excellence of their (fake) papers.
Now the authors are not right-wingers, mind you, so it won’t do to pretend this is all a made-up, right-wing concern. Boghossian belongs to a school of thought known as the “New Atheists,” and Pluckrose describes herself as a “secular, liberal humanist.”
“We intentionally made the papers absurd and used faulty methods to see if they could pass scrutiny at the highest level of academia. Concerningly, they did,” said author James Lindsay.
“It’s scary that the work of these scholars is taught in classes, taken up by activists, and misinforms politicians and journalists about the true nature of our cultural realities,” added Boghossian.
“It’s scary that the work of these scholars is taught in classes, taken up by activists, and misinforms politicians and journalists about the true nature of our cultural realities,” added Boghossian.
“Our project has uncovered their corruption.”
They decided to see whether they could secure publication of, as Pluckrose describes it, “a paper that says white males in college shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class (or have their emails answered by the instructor), and, for good measure, be asked to sit in the floor in chains so they can ‘experience reparations.’ That was our ‘Progressive Stack’ paper. The answer seems to be yes, and feminist philosophy titan Hypatia has been surprisingly warm to it.”
She continues: “Another tough one for us was, ‘I wonder if they’d publish a feminist rewrite of a chapter from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.’ The answer to that question also turns out to be ‘yes,’ given that the feminist social work journal Affilia has just accepted it.”
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Again Pluckrose:
Many papers advocated highly dubious ethics including training men like dogs (“Dog Park”), punishing white male college students for historical slavery by asking them to sit in silence in the floor in chains during class and to be expected to learn from the discomfort (“Progressive Stack”), celebrating morbid obesity as a healthy life-choice (“Fat Bodybuilding”), treating privately conducted masturbation as a form of sexual violence against women (“Masturbation”), and programming superintelligent AI with irrational and ideological nonsense before letting it rule the world (“Feminist AI”). There was also considerable silliness including claiming to have tactfully inspected the genitals of slightly fewer than 10,000 dogs whilst interrogating owners as to their sexuality (“Dog Park”), becoming seemingly mystified about why heterosexual men are attracted to women (“Hooters”), insisting there is something to be learned about feminism by having four guys watch thousands of hours of hardcore pornography over the course of a year while repeatedly taking the Gender and Science Implicit Associations Test (“Porn”), expressing confusion over why people are more concerned about the genitalia others have when considering having sex with them (“CisNorm”), and recommending men anally self-penetrate in order to become less transphobic, more feminist, and more concerned about the horrors of rape culture (“Dildos”). None of this, except that Helen Wilson [one of their pen names — TW] recorded one “dog rape per hour” at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon, raised so much as a single reviewer eyebrow, so far as their reports show.
I’ll have more to say about this in the coming weeks.
Now I repeat: these are not right-wing scholars who submitted these hoax papers. They are telling social-justice activists: you may think that what these fields are doing may involve some occasional overreach but is fundamentally good and is in pursuit of good ends. But “after having spent a year immersed and becoming recognized experts within these fields, in addition to witnessing the divisive and destructive effects when activists and social media mobs put it to use, we can now state with confidence that it is neither essentially good nor sound.”
