EXPOSING THE ACADEMIC LEFT WITH HILARIOUS RESULTS.
HILARITY ENSUES WHEN STUDIES PAPERS FALL FOR LEFT-LEANING RIDICULOUSNESS
Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian had a hunch: If they wrote a bunch of ridiculous papers laced with just enough lefty buzzwords, they could probably get them published by major cultural studies papers.
They were absolutely right: Of 20 papers written by the trio under fake names, seven were accepted and another five were still under review. The project has been referred to as Sokal 2, a reference to the famed 1996 case in which American physicist Alan Sokal published a paper of impenetrable gibberish in a peer-reviewed cultural studies journal.
The Sokal 2 architects — all academics and selfconfessed “left-leaning liberals” — had a serious mission: To expose what they call the “identitarian madness coming out of the academic and activist left” and restore “open inquiry” to academia.
But their bold mission also yielded some hilarious satire. Below, six ridiculous studies that Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian used to shake up the humanities.
Who Are They to Judge?: Overcoming Anthropometry and a Framework for Fat Bodybuilding
Published in Fat Studies The stated mission of Fat Studies is to explore “the way fat people are oppressed, the reasons why, who benefits from that oppression and how to liberate fat people from oppression.” Thus, editors deemed it a good fit when Florida professor Richard Baldwin submitted a paper arguing the act of accumulating cellulite should be considered a form of competitive bodybuilding. (Baldwin is a real professor and a friend of the Sokal 2 trio. “The fat body is a body built by time and work and deserves to be respected,” the paper writes. It then dismisses the “fatphobia” and “healthism” of contemporary bodybuilding events, where the “disgrace of fat bodies is valorized.” The concept isn’t entirely out of left field: The paper has a bibliography of other papers celebrating obesity and cites the Fattylympics, a real London event staged by two British fat activists just before the 2012 Olympics. “Fat bodybuilding challenges normativity by expanding the notion of the built body itself,” the paper claims. Editors loved the piece, except for the use of the phrase “final frontier” in an early draft. “The term frontier implies colonial expansion and hostile takeover, and the genocidal erasure of Indigenous peoples,” read a note.
Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity in Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Ore.
Published in Gender, Place and Culture
This is the jewel in the crown of Sokal 2. Fictional academic Helen Wilson writes about spending an entire year wandering around Portland dog parks with a notebook, and discovers that they are “oppressive spaces that lock both humans and animals into hegemonic patterns of gender conformity that effectively resist bids for emancipatory change.” Wilson writes that “dog parks are petri dishes for canine ‘rape culture’” noting that she witnessed a dog rape roughly every 60 minutes. To ensure that she accurately knew the genders of every dog, Wilson makes the outlandish claim that she “closely and respectfully examined the genitals of slightly fewer than ten thousand dogs.” The editors of Gender, Place and Culture noticed nothing amiss, giving the study rave reviews as “an important contribution to feminist animal geography.” But as soon as the study was published online it became the subject of international mockery. It so widely circulated, in fact, that Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian were forced to end their hoax project early when members of the press started noticing that “Helen Wilson” and her employer, the “Portland Ungendering Research Initiative” were not real.
When the Joke Is on You: A Feminist Perspective on How Positionality Influences Satire
Accepted by HypatiaT This paper is particularly cheeky considering what was to come: It argues that anybody who would dare use a hoax to satirize “social justice” academia is a harmful oppressor who needs to be stopped. “It is a matter of grave concern when attempts are made to use the comedic mode to attack, belittle and discredit social justice oriented efforts,” writes author Richard Baldwin. Fortunately, Baldwin concludes that social justice researchers are too smart to be taken in by a hoax. “To date, not least because of the rigor attendant on peer-reviewed academic scholarship in general and technical skill required to produce them, few academic hoaxes have been perpetrated, especially against social-justice oriented scholarship,” the paper concludes. “Excellent and very timely article!” wrote one peer-reviewer.
An Ethnography of Breastaurant Masculinity: Themes of Objectification, Sexual Conquest, Male Control, and Masculine Toughness in a Sexually Objectifying Restaurant
Published in Sex Roles
In this study Prof. Baldwin puts on his Jane Goodall hat and spends two years observing a group of men who enjoy frequenting “breastaurants”; establishments such as Hooters where large-breasted waitresses wear skimpy clothes. Over 16 pages of dense jargon, Baldwin concludes that men’s interest in scantily clad women appears to be the central reason for the industry’s success. “It’s got to be because of the babes,” reads an excerpt from Baldwin’s field notes in which he quotes a male called “Matt.” The picture that emerges in the paper is that breastaurants are “male preserves” where women are “contractually expected to take men’s orders while displaying ersatz sexual availability as a specific form of heterosexual aesthetic labour.” Ultimately Baldwin finds this “problematic” and “worrisome” and concludes that more breastaurant study is needed.
Moon Meetings and the Meaning of Sisterhood: A Poetic Portrayal of Lived Feminist Spirituality
Accepted by Journal of Poetry Therapy
This is easily the most rambling of the studies. It’s essentially just a bunch of bad poems written by a fictional “ungendering” researcher named Carol Miller. The poems all come from an online angsty teen poetry generator, which is part of why James Lindsay was able to bang out the paper in six hours. The poems all ostensibly come from Carol Miller’s “Moon Meetings” with a “secret Feminist Spiritual Community.” In his extended descriptions of the meetings, Lindsay piles on every feminist academic stereotype he can conjure. “We celebrate menstruation at every meeting, as is naturally fitting,” the paper reads. “Those who are honoured and given a ritual mixture of spiced red wine and tincture of motherwort sweetened with port, emblematic of the menses.” This is probably a good point to mention that actual gender studies professors have not taken kindly to Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian, with many characterizing them as agents of a right-wing conspiracy.
Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism
Accepted by Affilia Adolf Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf, in which he essentially lays out a rough blueprint for the Second World War, is not known for its readability: It’s a rambling victim-complex screed interspersed with words like “Jewish rabble” and “Marxist deceivers.” This study took chapter 12 of Mein Kampf, in which Hitler describes the origins of the Nazi party, and reworked it so that it was instead describing the rise of “solidarity feminism.” Hitler, for instance, wrote that “the nationalization of the broad masses can never be achieved by half-measures … but only by a ruthless and fanatically one-sided orientation toward the goal to be achieved.” In this study, that becomes “feminism cannot limit itself to half-measures in solidarity … only a single-minded alignment with solidarity for effecting the goal of justice will suffice.” The paper is even called Our Struggle, a direct reference to Mein Kampf being translated as “My Struggle.” The editors of Affilia did not notice, with one praising its “potential to generate important dialogue for social workers and feminist scholars.”