RUTHFULLY YOURS

Two academics submitted a paper to a publication called “Cogent Social Sciences” that exposed the entire academic “discipline” of “Gender Studies” to ridicule.

The professors – Peter Boghossian, a full-time faculty member in the Philosophy department at Portland State University, and James Lindsay, who has a doctorate in math and a background in physics – claimed in the paper that the male penis is not a genital organ, but rather a “social construct” and that male genitalia causes global warming.

The paper was laughably peer reviewed and published with only a few changes.

Breitbart’s James Delingpole recalls a similar hoax from the 1990’s:

They were hoping to emulate probably the most famous academic hoax in recent years: the Sokal Hoax – named after NYU and UCL physics professor Alan Sokal – who in 1996 persuaded an academic journal called Social Text to accept a paper titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”.

Sokal’s paper – comprising pages of impressive-sounding but meaningless pseudo-academic jargon – was written in part to demonstrate that humanities journals will publish pretty much anything so long as it sounds like “proper leftist thought;” and partly in order to send up the absurdity of so much post-modernist social science.

So, for this new spoof, Boghossian and Lindsay were careful to throw in lots of signifier phrases to indicate fashionable anti-male bias:

We intended to test the hypothesis that flattery of the academic Left’s moral architecture in general, and of the moral orthodoxy in gender studies in particular, is the overwhelming determiner of publication in an academic journal in the field. That is, we sought to demonstrate that a desire for a certain moral view of the world to be validated could overcome the critical assessment required for legitimate scholarship. Particularly, we suspected that gender studies is crippled academically by an overriding almost-religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil. On the evidence, our suspicion was justified.

They also took care to make it completely incomprehensible.

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.

Obscuring ignorant thought by filling an academic paper with incomprehensible jargon is the post-modernist way. When you reject context and definitions in favor of deconstructionism, all original intent of the author is lost and you can substitute any meaning you wish as long as it conforms to the leftist tenets accepted by other academics.

The hoaxers simply took this notion to its logical – and humorous – extreme.

More than anything, the hoaxers proved that most academics in these fake disciplines have no sense of humor whatsoever. If they did, they would have immediately recognized how stupid the hoaxers’ conclusions were.

Parents sending their kids to college and paying tens of thousands of dollars to have their kids’ heads filled with this nonsense, should demand a refund.