The penis is mightier than ...

Huffpost SA is not alone in being scammed by people trying to make a point about the prevalence of bias and fake news in the media. Last week the peer-reviewed academic journal Cogent Social Sciences published a hoax gender-studies paper entitled The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct. DailCaller.com reported that two academics, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, used pen names to successfully submit the paper, which cited 20 sources, none of which they say they read and five of which were fakes “published” in journals that don’t actually exist.

The paper opened by stating that the “androcentric scientific and meta-scientific evidence that the penis is the male reproductive organ is considered overwhelming and largely uncontroversial” and went downhill from there, to a conclusion that stated in part that “penises are not best understood as the male sexual organ ... but instead as an enacted social construct that is both damaging and problematic for society and future generations”.

“The conceptual penis presents significant problems for gender identity and reproductive identity within social and family dynamics, is exclusionary to disenfranchised communities based upon gender or reproductive identity, is an enduring source of abuse for women and other gender-marginalised groups and individuals, is the universal performative source of rape and is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change.”

“You read that right. We argued that climate change is ‘conceptually’ caused by penises,” Boghossian and Lindsay wrote in an article announcing the success of their hoax.

Some of the article’s paragraphs were downright nonsensical, such as: “Thus, the isomorphism between the conceptual penis and what’s referred to throughout discursive feminist literature as ‘toxic hypermasculinity’, is one defined upon a vector of male cultural machismo braggadocio, with the conceptual penis playing the roles of subject, object and verb of action.”