I have immense respect for the academics who put this satire together. Some have said they did this just for publicity (as opposed to
real academics, who have
no interest in being publically recognized for their efforts and reaping the benefits of that recognition
) but really they've done something that is very difficult, very time consuming, and very unrewarding. I mean, not everyone gets to be Jordan Peterson. In fact, only Jordan Peterson gets to be Jordan Peterson. There is no monetizing this. No Patreon, no youtube revenue, no celebrity appearances. They'll get a few mainstream news articles and nothing else. I hope I'm wrong, and indeed I might be, but my point is that rationally speaking, going into this they could have had no expectation that it would benefit their careers. So the whole idea that this is a "publicity stunt" strikes me as nonsensical.
Others have taken the position that nothing they've published is really that extreme. Indeed, it fits perfectly within the critical theory canon and should be widely accepted. In a sense these naysayers have a point. Here is some of what was published:
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”)...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”).
Does any of this sound, as a Sietch user well versed in clown world nonsense, out of the ordinary? Does it sound particularly extreme, given the context? It really doesn't to me. I'm sure I've read Salon and Vice articles advocating a number of these things in the past few years, and that's no joke. Indeed, the authors of this study recognize this:
Put another way, we now have good reasons to believe that if we just appropriate the existing literature in the right ways—and there always seems to be a citation or vein of literature that makes it possible—we can say almost any politically fashionable thing we want. The underlying questions in every single case were the same: What do we need to write, and what do we need to cite (all of our citations are real, by the way) to get this academic madness published as high “scholarship”?
What they point to here is extremely important, and explains the stunning success of their study (publishing this many papers in this many reputable journals in this short of a time is really impressive, regardless of content). They met
the only two criteria that really matter when it comes to getting published: style and ideology. The style—their choice of words, of phrases, of constructing their arguments—fits perfectly with critical theorist norms. In addition, the ideological perspective of their work matched that of the publishing outlets. This is ultimately what allowed their papers to be read with an uncritical eye, and pass whatever passes for peer review at these journals. Review the following list of recent papers in
Gender, Place, and Culture, one of the journals that accepted an article:
- "Privilege, Power, and Dungeons & Dragons: How Systems Shape Racial and Gender Identities in Tabletop Role-Playing Games"
- "The Perilous Whiteness of Pumpkins"
- "Drone Disorientations: How 'Unmanned' Weapons Queer the Experience of Killing in War"
- "Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon"
Do any of these pieces seem out of place? Absent prior knowledge, would you be able to tell which one is a hoax? Of course not.
This is all to say that though the style and ideology fit—and this is what many of their critics noted, in saying that really this was not a huge deal and everything said matched with prior theory—the content left much to be desired:
Our papers also present very shoddy methodologies including incredibly implausible statistics (“Dog Park”), making claims not warranted by the data (“CisNorm,” “Hooters,” “Dildos”), and ideologically-motivated qualitative analyses (“CisNorm,” “Porn”). (NB: See Papers section below.) Questionable qualitative methodologies such as poetic inquiry and autoethnography (sometimes rightly and pejoratively called “mesearch”) were incorporated (especially in “Moon Meetings”)...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”).
To summarize, we spent 10 months writing the papers, averaging one new paper roughly every thirteen days. (Seven papers published over seven years is frequently claimed to be the number sufficient to earn tenure at most major universities although, in reality, requirements vary by institution.) As for our performance, 80% of our papers overall went to full peer review, which keeps with the standard 10-20% of papers that are “desk rejected” without review at major journals across the field.
In short, the data they produced to back up their research and the claims they made based on that data was entirely contrived or as they phrased it "shoddy, absurd, unethical and politically-biased". The scaffolding—the style, the ideology, the citations—was there, but the building was a mirage. And despite that they managed to get a bunch of these damn papers published. Again, some critics have said the same thing could happen in any field. I guess. But I really don't think fudging lab numbers to get an NIH grant is the same epistemologically speaking as making baseless, unsubstantiated, and dishonest claims about human sexuality and conclusions from these claims
and having them published. And hey, maybe I'm wrong. After all, one thing you learn about science in the humanities is that science is complete and utter horseshit internally (that is, we constantly discuss its problems and biases and its lack of objectivity) but the indisputable truth externally (that is, when speaking to proles who have doubts about global warming or something). But then again it doesn't come as a surprise to me (and probably doesn't come as a surprise to
you) that arguing and acting in bad faith is a fundamental aspect of modern academia.
The more that I think about it, though, I suppose the "flaws" in the content of their articles aren't actually flawed from a critical theorist's perspective. That is, they affirm certain "truths" about the "nature" of "humanity" (all concepts they disavow as reifications even as they discuss the indisputable importance of power relations, but only as they relate to White Men and Western Civilization and Christianity). So sure, the data about dog-fucking may be cooked, but really, the conclusions are accurate. The ends prove the means. It's a total inversion of how academic inquiry is (in theory) supposed to work, but isn't that the entire point? That whole sequence of evidence -> conclusion is a bigoted Western concept anyways. We've seen it recently with Kavanaugh. Guilty until proven innocent. It's the same damn thing.
Anyways, what I'm trying to say is that even in attempting to demonstrate that this study proves nothing, its critics demonstrate its relevance. Their arguments against it boil down to, essentially, these dishonest trashy piece of crap papers that a bunch of academic nobodies shit out in a few days for a fucking laugh are
fundamentally true. The authors may not have intended it, but they accidentally published acceptable papers! And isn't that the truth? These papers were acceptable, and they are acceptable. What the authors describe as their "shoddy" process
is the normal process for writing papers grounded in critical theory, which almost all (and I can tell you as the ashamed holder of an MA in History that is
not an exaggeration) humanities papers are these days. Even as the academic establishment, supported by its braindead lackies in the media and on social media in places like Reddit, carry water for the scam that is the peer review process,
they damn themselves.