From canine rape to men’s use of dildos, journals get hoodwinked
Three United States researchers have pulled off a sophisticated hoax by publishing fake research with ridiculous conclusions in sociology journals to expose what they see as ideological bias and lack of vetting at these publications.
Seven of the 20 fake articles written by the trio were accepted by journals after being approved by peer-review committees tasked with checking the authors’ research.
A faux study claiming that “Dog parks are Petri dishes for canine ‘rape culture’” by one “Helen Wilson” was published in May in the journal Gender, Place and Culture. The article suggests that training men like dogs could reduce cases of sexual abuse.
Faux research articles are not new: a notable example is physicist Alan Sokal, who in a 1996 article for a cultural studies journal wrote about cultural and philosophical issues concerning aspects of physics and math.
This time, the fake research aims at mocking weak vetting of articles on hot social issues, such as gender, race and sexuality.
The authors, writing under pseudonyms, intended to prove that academics in these fields are ready to embrace any thesis, no matter how outrageous, so long as it contributes to denouncing domination by white men.
“Making absurd and horrible ideas sufficiently politically fashionable can get them validated at the highest level of academic grievance studies,” said one of the authors, Dr James Lindsay.
Lindsay — that is his real name — obtained a PhD in mathematics in 2010 from the University of Tennessee and has been dedicated to this project for 1½ years.
One of the published journal articles analyses why a man masturbating while thinking of a woman without her consent commits a sexual assault.
Another is a feminist rewrite of a chapter of Mein Kampf.
Some articles, such as a study of the impact of the use of an anal dildo by heterosexual men on their transphobia, even claimed to rely on data such as interviews, which could have been verified by the journal gatekeepers.
For that “study”, the authors claimed to have interviewed 13 men. In the dog article, the authors claimed to have examined the genitals of 10,000 canines.
“If our project shows anything, it shows that what’s coming out of these disciplines cannot currently be trusted,” said Lindsay.
Their goal, however, is not to destroy or defund the disciplines.
“We think they should be reformed,” he said.
The hoaxes garnered joking ridicule on Twitter, but researchers were more concerned with the methods and ethics of the fake authors, and the potential for generalisations about the fields targeted.
The other hoaxers are Peter Boghossian, a philosophy professor at the University of Portland, and Helen Pluckrose, a top editor at AreoMagazine.com, a site that has published a detailed account of the deception.
The articles on dogs was pulled when the publisher realised that “Helen Wilson” did not exist.
Ann Garry, the interim editor of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, said she was “deeply disappointed” to learn about the hoaxes her journal published.
Roberto Refinetti, editor-inchief of the journal Sexuality and Culture, said the article on dildos “was reviewed by three university-affiliated experts in the field, none of whom suspect a hoax”.
Nicholas Mazza, editor of the Journal of Poetry Therapy, who accepted what the hoax authors described as anti-male “rambling nonsense”, said he will take basic vetting measure after being hoodwinked.