A multi-directional cacophony of gleeful back-patting
Ketan Joshi on that non-hoax “hoax”:
There’s a multi-directional cacophony of gleeful back-patting ringing out across my Twitter feed at the moment. The outpouring of joy stems from an article published in Skeptic Magazine. Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay managed to submit a hoax article to a gender studies journal, and are hailing this as a profound, thermonuclear indictment on the entirety of gender studies, social science and the “academic left”. They wrote that:
“We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral implications that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal”
Their article was initially rejected by a journal, “NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies”. But they were referred to a smaller outlet, ‘Cogent Social Sciences’, that offers publication where you ‘pay what you like’ (apparently, they didn’t pay anything).
On the face of it, this might seem like a clever take-down of predatory publishing practices. Sadly, that’s not the case. It’s presented by Boghossian and Lindsay, people sharing the article online, and by people responding, as a comprehensive demolition of gender studies, post-modernism, “social justice warriors” (SJWs, in alt-right parlance) and social science:
A string of smug tweets follows.
@RichardDawkins @peterboghossian @GodDoesnt Spectacular, gentlemen. Truly.
— Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) May 19, 2017
Ah that “gentlemen” – such a red flag for an asshole. They also like to call each other “sir” – “well played, sir.” Hot stuff.
The authors of the Skeptic Magazine article wrote:
“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”
Most people, whether they’re part of the skeptic community or not, can recognise that a single instance isn’t sufficient evidence to conclude that an entire field of research is crippled by religious man-hating fervour, and that anyone pushing that line is probably weirdly compromised.
Years and years of steady Twitter will do that to a person.
He lists several science hoaxes, by way of making the point that it isn’t just gender studies that can be hoaxed.
The hypothesis presented by the authors – that gender studies is a sinister, anti-male left-wing fraud soaked in religious fervour – isn’t supported by a simple illustration of dodgy practices in academic publishing.
Which raises a very important question: why are the titans of the skeptic / rationalist community being pointedly irrational, when it comes to the reason this hoax was published?
Because they all despise feminism.
The article in Skeptic Magazine highlights how regularly people will vastly lower their standards of skepticism and rationality if a piece of information is seen as confirmation of a pre-existing belief – in this instance, the belief that gender studies is fatally compromised by seething man-hate. The standard machinery of rationality would have triggered a moment of doubt – ‘perhaps we’ve not put in enough work to separate the signal from the noise’, or ‘perhaps we need to tease apart the factors more carefully’.
That slow, deliberative mechanism of self-assessment is non-existent in the authorship and sharing of this piece. It seems quite likely that this is due largely to a pre-existing hostility towards gender studies, ‘identity politics’ and the general focus of contemporary progressive America.
Especially feminism. They hate feminism hard.
So much for ‘thought leaders’.
And the fact that it was rejected by one journal? That would seem to suggest that not all gender studies has been destroyed.
It sounds like that journal referred them to the journal they used; if the editors of the journal that rejected them knew what this other journal was (and I would suspect they did, if they are a reputable journal), then they may have been hoaxing the hoaxers.
And apparently they think that Gender Studies is feminism.
Well, Lady M, they believe that Gender Studies is all that supports feminism. If Gender Studies falls, feminism falls with it.
Oh, the irony. Won’t somebody please think of the irony.
I posted this on another website where this topic was being discussed:
“Having read this hoax article my take is a bit different. Yes, the language is gobbledygook, but you don’t have to be an idiot or a male hater to interpret some of the content as ringing true.
For example, it is fairly easy to infer that macho ‘dick wagging’ isn’t linked to anatomy and that dick wagging could have an impact on our climate policies.
It depends on your mind set when you read something. Yes, there are some looking for validation of preconceived notions (Fox News anyone?) but others may be more generous and just looking for insights.
Nevertheless, you would hope that editorial review processes would be a little less generous.”
The authors claimed that they reviewed the article to eliminate any semblance of logic. I guess I’m an idiot because the notion that there may exist toxic cultural masculine practices that are not purely biological didn’t seem absurd.
Pliny,
Your comment reminds me of George Carlin’s “Bigger Dick Foreign Policy Theory”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMwXR-1oajE
As for this “brilliant hoax,” it sounds to me a lot more like Piltdown Man — an attempt to invalidate an entire field based on very little.
Peter Boghossian has made a real dick of himself this time. His conclusion about gender studies as a whole is the result of an egregious phallusy. Unfortunately, his action has stimulated a lot of anti-feminist emissions from the manosphere.
I have been slightly encouraged by a number of the comments on the Skeptic.com site. A number of people have pointed out that the exercise is a minimal data point at best, meant to support an already established narrative.
@beauvoir’s baby, don’t worry. When they see he called the penis a male sex organ, the trans activists will amputate his epistemology.
IDK. He’s not a white “cis” woman, so he’ll probably get a pass. In my experience, for all that men per se are targets of trans activist’s fury, it’s displayed more in the form of denigrating jokes. Whereas, women who displease those activists are reviled loudly and publicly, get called misogynist slurs, and worse.
Ah, Sokal, Sokal, Sokal, Sokal… He was a splendid man and did a splendid thing and wrote a splendid book about what he did and why he did it, but I have grown tired of the assumption among such as Dawkins that until a proper scientist came along and blew up ‘post-modernism’ etc, nobody in what we call the ‘arts’ had even noticed anything was wrong. Sir Richard Evans, E.P. Thompson, Peter Washington, Raymond Tallis, Tony Judt, John Searle, Thomas Nagel, & Brian Vickers are among the many in the ‘arts’ who have written well and savagely against certain fashions…
I liked Pliny the in Between’s comment, and thought his point well taken. I skimmed the offending article, found it singularly un-funny, and wonder what all the (mostly male) crowing is about. It doesn’t begin to be near the level of Sokal’s piece. The fact the authors paid some not very reputable journal to publish it makes me wonder even more about those crowing about this ‘victory’. Perhaps the authors and their fans should read Swift to find out what good satire is like – but of course he was not a scientist.
The Tuvel lynching is going on apace. Botching this prank doesn’t mean that the field isn’t riddled with self-promoting jerks who publish drivel in impenetrable jargon.
^John, that’s easy enough to agree with. I think the main problem is that they seem to think that taking down gender studies (which they did not do) dismantles the claims of feminism once and for all. Ridiculous assumption.
John the Drunkard – which field? Is it even clear which field they’re talking about?
If the answer is gender studies I’m not sure your claim that the field is riddled with self-promoting jerks who publish drivel in impenetrable jargon is accurate. I think the impenetrable jargon is elsewhere.
Tim Harris @ 12 – I’m happy that the first name you mentioned is Richard Evans. He’s one of the very first people I approached when B&W was brand new to request an article, because I was such a fan of In Defense of History. Imagine my astonishment when he accepted this brash request and adapted a talk he’d recently given for publication here. What a mensch.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2002/postmodernism-and-history/
Boghossian and Lindsay remind me of all those upper middle class white punks who think spray painting “SKOOL SUX” is the ultimate act of rebellion. Mind you, I was one of those upper middle class white punks, but we thought it was wonderfully ironic to spray paint “ANARCHISTS UNITE” on the side of a municipal water tower. This was in 1982. I was sixteen. Boghossian and Lindsay have progressed no further.
Thank you, Ophelia. Yes, Evans is an excellent scholar and excellent human being. He was of course responsible for the destruction in court of David Irving (as the article you print of his recounts). But I like the first paragraph of that article very much:
‘Postmodernism comes in many guises and many varieties,
and it has had many kinds of positive influences on historical scholarship.
It has encouraged historians to take the irrational in the past more seriously,
to pay more attention to ideas, beliefs and culture as influences in their own
right, to devote more effort to framing our work in literary terms, to put individuals,
often humble individuals, back into history, to emancipate ourselves from what
became in the end a constricting straitjacket of social-science approaches,
quantification and socio-economic determinism.’
I have the splendid book of his, too, in which he took the pernicious kind of post-modernism apart, and have read and re-read it.
My interests lie in many things but principally in literature and drama, and it is certainly true to say that scholars like, say, Kieran Ryan shook up the political complacency of much writing about Shakespeare (and I include the complacencies of the New Historicism, along with those of ‘The Elizabethan World Picture’ view of things). Just as (as Jerry Coyne pointed out a little time ago in one of his more responsible posts on political matters) atheism or new atheism cannot and should not be reduced to some Aunt Sally against which or whom everyone can enjoy throwing brickbats or whatever, so post-modernism cannot and should not be so reduced; nor, pace Coyne, can and should ‘the Left’. It is remarkable how intellectually and morally inconsistent people can be when easy antipathies are aroused.
His book on the Irving trial, and the work he and his grad student assistants did to document a small sample of Irving’s deliberate systematic falsifications, is fascinating.
Late, but there’s good take-down of this ‘hoax’ on the weblog ‘Crooked Timber’ and good criticism of all those who rushed to tell us what a splendid ‘hoax’ it was. It is by Henry Farrell. There is this good paragraph:
‘Second, my own pretend-social-science prediction (which may of course be disconfirmed) is that Steven Pinker and other prominent ‘skeptics’ are not going to rush to acknowledge that the hoax has gone horribly wrong, even though it obviously has. On the one hand, the skeptics’ own theory of themselves is that they are cool headed, rational assessors of evidence, who hew to scientific standards of proof in developing and testing their personal beliefs while their enemies are prepared to believe in all sorts of gobbledygook. If this theory were to hold true, then one would have expected either (a) that skeptics would have rejected the hoax immediately (perhaps treating it with particular suspicion given that it fit so closely with their political priors about postmodernism and academic feminism) or (b) that if they couldn’t quite get there on their own, they would acknowledge the flaws in the spoof and recalibrate their own beliefs and public arguments as soon as the problems had been pointed out to them.’
Farrell goes on to predict that ‘either there will be no acknowledgement of fault by Pinker et Cie, or that if there is some grudging acknowledgment it will be framed so as to assert or imply that the skeptics are right, even if they are wrong.’
I will come in even later, and recommend Timothy Burke’s no-holds-barred piece on this incident at his blog “Easily Distracted” – here is the link. His piece about skepticism that follows is also worth a read, in my opinion.