Academics Under Fire: Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose
Part 1: The Grievance Studies Hoax
The original cast of characters in the “grievance studies affair” was Portland State University professor of philosophy, Peter Boghossian, EdD, and James Lindsay, PhD, a published mathematician. They had become disturbed about what they concluded was a decline of real scholarship in the humanities fields, particularly in “critical studies,” “cultural studies,” and “identity studies” i.e. gender, race, and sexual orientation studies. They had concluded that these fields of studies were no more than, as Boghossian called them collectively, “grievance studies.” He called it grievance studies because, he said, scholarship therein was ideologically rather than scientifically driven and was characterized by preposterous suppositions, shoddy methodologies, and jargon-filled writing styles so over-wrought they seemed designed to be impenetrable. Lindsay and Boghossian decided to test their conclusions by writing the most absurd paper they could dream up to see if they could get it published.
The result was “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.” It was satire but not everyone picked up on that. They wrote it under fictitious names—Jamie Lindsay and Peter Boyle. Actually, Peter Boyle is not a fictitious name, it just was not the name of the writer of the article. It was the name of the actor who played the goofy monster in Mel Brooks’ movie spoof, Young Frankenstein. They claimed they were associated with the Southeast Independent Research Group, a fictitious group. On April 17, 2019, they submitted the article to the journal, Cogent Social Sciences.
In their bio for the journal, they claimed they were a “dynamic team of independent researchers” who:
have a particular fascination with penises and the ways in which penises are socially problematic, especially as a social construct known as a conceptual penis, . . . [which has] opened an avenue to a new frontier in gender and masculinities research that can transform our cultural geographies, mitigate climate change, and achieve social justice.1
Even if it were not evident that the article was satire, you’d think that associating climate change with problematized penises would have been a tip-off to the peer reviewers that something was amiss. That’s what you’d think. You’d be wrong.
What was not fake in their paper were some, but not all, of the works and authors cited and whose concepts, jargon, and writing styles provided the bases for the paper. They drew on and cited such highly regarded theorists as lesbian and feminist, Judith Butler (the penis “can only be understood through reference to what is barred from the signifier within the domain of corporeal liability.”)2 They drew on Michel Foucault (these are ‘the practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’ mentioned by Foucault’s first delineation of post-structuralist discursive analysis.”)3 They drew on Jacques Lacan’s “incisive observation that, ‘sexual identity is part of the economy of truth’.” Others, however, were made up out of whole cloth.
On April 11, Cogent Social Sciences accepted the paper and published it. As the hoax played out, a problem was that the journal was not top-tier, and, on top of that, although it was a peer-reviewed journal, it was a pay-to-play operation that charged a steep fee to publish. The fee for the paper had been $625. Several readers noticed and commented.
On April 19, Boghossian and Lindsay published an acknowledgment of the hoax in Skeptic.4 At the top of the article, the journal’s editor, Michael Schermer, posted his rationale for having published the article:
Every once in awhile [sic] it is necessary and desirable to expose extreme ideologies for what they are by carrying out their arguments and rhetoric to their logical and absurd conclusion, . . . .
Boghossian and Lindsay opened their article with the sentence that had been their lead sentence in “The Penis as a Social Construct” and which should have put editors at Cogent on notice:
The androcentric scientific and meta-scientific evidence that the penis is the male reproductive organ is considered overwhelming and largely uncontroversial.
They went on to review their stated “argument” in the hoax paper:
The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.
They wrote bluntly and, at times, scathingly of their own paper:
This paper should never have been published. . . . We wrote an absurd paper loosely composed in the style of post-structuralist discursive gender theory. The paper was ridiculous by intention essentially arguing that penises shouldn’t be thought of as male genital organs but as damaging social constructions. We made no attempt to find out what “post-structuralist discursive gender theory” actually means.
Continuing, they wrote:
We didn’t try to make the paper coherent; instead, we stuffed it full of jargon (like “discursive” and “isomorphism”), nonsense (like arguing that hypermasculine men are both inside and outside of certain discourses at the same time), red-flag phrases (like “pre-post-patriarchal society”), lewd references to slang terms for the penis, insulting phrasing regarding men (including referring to some men who choose not to have children as being “unable to coerce a mate”), and allusions to rape (we stated that “manspreading,” a complaint levied against men for sitting with their legs spread wide, is “akin to raping the empty space around him”). After completing the paper, we read it carefully to ensure it didn’t say anything meaningful, and as neither one of us could determine what it is actually about, we deemed it a success.
As for the works they cited:
Most of our references are quotations from papers and figures in the field that barely make sense in the context of the text. Others were obtained by searching keywords and grabbing papers that sounded plausibly connected to words we cited. We read exactly zero of the sources we cited, by intention, as part of the hoax. And it gets worse . . . .
Indeed it did, as there is a website, they explain, that generates fake papers in fake journals within a matter of minutes.
Some references cite the Postmodern Generator, a website coded in the 1990s by Andrew Bulhak featuring an algorithm, . . . that returns a different fake postmodern “paper” every time the page is reloaded. We cited and quoted from the Postmodern Generator liberally; this includes nonsense quotations incorporated in the body of the paper and citing five different “papers” generated in the course of a few minutes. . . .
Nearly a third of our references in the original paper go to fake sources from a website mocking the fact that this kind of thing is brainlessly possible, particularly in “academic” fields corrupted by postmodernism. . . .
Another cites the fictitious researcher “S. Q. Scameron,” whose invented name appears in the body of the paper several times. In response, the reviewers noted that our references are “sound,” even after an allegedly careful cross-referencing check done in the final round of editorial approval.
They borrowed technical words from mathematics that could not possibly make sense in a humanities article, e.g. “isomorphism” and “vector.” According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, “isomorphism”:
is a word in algebra meaning a “one-to-one correspondence (mapping) between two sets that preserves binary relationships between elements of the sets. For example, the set of natural numbers can be mapped onto the set of even natural numbers by multiplying each natural number by 2.”5
“Vector,” says Math Insight:
is an object that has both a magnitude and a direction. Geometrically, we can picture a vector as a directed line segment, whose length is the magnitude of the vector and with an arrow indicating the direction. The direction of the vector is from its tail to its head.”6
In this sentence, for example, they combined the two:
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 (their made-up term), with the conceptual penis playing the roles of subject, object, and verb of action.
Boghossian and Lindsay concluded that the fundamental problems that resulted in their ridiculously and transparently satirical article were not “pay-to-play” journalism, or fake journals, writers, and articles via the Postmodern Generator, or the use of words borrowed from unrelated fields with no understanding of what those words mean. The fundamental problem was that postmodernism, as it had evolved and splintered into multiple subfields, had infiltrated cultural studies, gender studies, and critical theory studies making those fields all but unrecoverable. Postmodernism as it had evolved was driven by unquestioned political and moral purposes not a search for information or knowledge.
Following their acknowledgment in Skeptic that “The Penis as a Social Construct” had been a hoax, Lindsay and Boghossian regrouped. They asked Helen Pluckrose, a cultural and political writer and editor-in-chief of Areo, to join the project. Pluckrose published a lengthy article outlining in detail how the three proceeded.7 They articulated three basic rules for themselves going forward:
they would focus on ranked peer-reviewed journals in the fields
they would not pay to publish
if a journal editor or reviewer asked whether any paper was a hoax, they would admit it.
The purpose of the rules was to ensure that any conclusions they reached derived naturally from the fields themselves. The purpose of the exercise was to demonstrate that “highly regarded peer-reviewed journals in gender studies and related fields would publish obvious hoaxes.”
By hoaxes they meant papers featuring at least one of the following: “clearly ludicrous and/or outrageous theses, visibly amateurish construction, a transparent lack of rigor, and . . . little understanding of the field.” They believed that because of “ideologically motivated scholarship, radical skepticism, and cultural constructivism”, scholarship in the fields was suffering. They wanted to prove that and hoped that those who likewise believe in “liberalism, progress, modernity, open inquiry, and social justice” would take stock and refuse to go along.”8
Throughout 2018, they wrote twenty papers and submitted them to peer-reviewed academic journals that, they believed, were particularly susceptible to grievance studies. They wrote and submitted them using the fictitious names and fictitious organizations named above.
Of the twenty, seven were accepted for publication. Four were published. Others were accepted pending revisions. Some were rejected. Then, the Wall Street Journal discovered the hoax, and Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose had to pull the papers that remained under review.
Beyond the mystifying content of the papers accepted, you would have thought that peer review alone would have exposed the hoax perpetrated by Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose. You would have thought that at least some of the peer reviewers would have looked up the names of people and/or the organizations the perpetrators of the hoax said they were affiliated with, names they could not have heard of because they didn’t exist.
Working in any of the fields in question, they should have discovered there are no such academics as Helen Wilson, PhD, M Smith, MA, Carol Miller, PhD, Maria Gonzalez, PhD, Lisa A. Jones, PhD, or Stephanie Moore, PhD. There was an actual Richard Baldwin, PhD, associated with Gulf Coast State College, but he was retired and had an emeritus status there. He had given Boghossian permission to invent papers under his name.
The peer reviewers should have discovered that the organizations with which the fictitious writers of the hoax papers said they were affiliated likewise did not exist. There was no Portland [Oregon] Ungendering Research Initiative [PUR]. No Feminist Activist Collective for Truth [FACT]. No Southeast Independent Research Group.
What was real were the generally well-regarded journals that accepted their seven papers for publication—Gender, Place, & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, Fat Studies, Sexuality & Culture, Sex Roles, Men & Masculinities, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, and Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work.
In order to get a feel for the kind of conceptual nonsense, methodological inferiority, and ethically suspect proposals they were trying to expose, it is worthwhile to know a bit about the papers that were accepted for publication in these top-tier, peer-reviewed academic publications. I’ll review the seven papers accepted for publication by their titles, theses, purposes, publishers, and selected reviewer comments. Because the names under which the papers were written and the names of the organizations with which they claimed to be affiliated were fictitious, and because I’ve mentioned them above, I won’t list them again.
The Dog Park Paper
Title: “Human Reaction to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity in Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon”9
Thesis: “[By uncovering] emerging themes in human and canine interactive behavioral patterns in urban dog parks [we can] better understand human a-/moral decision-making in public spaces and uncover bias and emergent assumptions around gender, race, and sexuality.”
Purpose: “To demonstrate that “journals will accept arguments which should be clearly ludicrous and unethical if they provide (an unfalsifiable) way to perpetuate notions of toxic masculinity, heteronormativity, and implicit bias.”
Publisher: Gender, Place, and Culture, a “leading journal of feminist geography and feminist intersectional studies”
Reviewer Comment: “This is a wonderful paper – incredibly innovative, rich in analysis, and extremely well-written . . . . The fieldwork executed contributes immensely to the paper’s contribution as an innovative and valuable piece of scholarship.”
Following the revelation that the paper had been a hoax, the journal retracted it.
The Fat Bodybuilding Paper
Title: “Who Are They to Judge?: Overcoming Anthropometry and a Framework for Fat Bodybuilding”10
Thesis: “That it is only oppressive cultural norms that make society regard the building of muscle rather than fat admirable and that bodybuilding and activism on behalf of the fat could be benefited by including fat bodies displayed in non-competitive ways.”
Purpose: “To see if journals will accept arguments which are ludicrous and positively dangerous to health if they support cultural constructivist arguments around body positivity and fatphobia.”
Reviewer Comment: “[T]he use of the term ‘final frontier’ is problematic in at least two ways. First – the term frontier implies colonial expansion and hostile takeover, and the genocidal erasure of indigenous peoples. Find another term.”
Publisher: Fat Studies, “the first academic journal in the field of scholarship that critically examines theory, research, practices, and programs related to body weight and appearance”
Following the revelation that the paper had been a hoax, the journal retracted it.
The Dildos Paper
Title: “Going in Through the Back Door: Challenging Straight Male Homohysteria and Transphobia through Receptive Penetrative Sex Toy Use”11
Thesis: “That it is suspicious that men rarely anally self-penetrate using sex toys, and that this is probably due to fear of being thought homosexual (“homohysteria”) and bigotry against trans people (transphobia). . . . Encouraging them to engage in receptive penetrative anal eroticism will decrease transphobia and increase feminist values.”
Purpose: “To see if journals will accept ludicrous arguments if they support (unfalsifiable) claims that common (and harmless) sexual choices made by straight men are actually homophobic, transphobic, and anti-feminist.”
Reviewer Comment: “This article is an incredibly rich and exciting contribution to the study of sexuality and culture, and particularly the intersection between masculinity and anality.”
Publisher: Sexuality and Culture, “covering ethical, cultural, psychological, social, and political issues related to sexual relationships and sexual behavior”
Following the revelation that the paper had been a hoax, the journal retracted it.
The Hooters Paper
Title: “An Ethnography of Breastaurant Masculinity: Themes of Objectification, Sexual Conquest, Male Control, and Masculine Toughness in a Sexually Objectifying Restaurant”12
Thesis: “That men frequent “breasturants” like Hooters because they are nostalgic for patriarchal dominance and enjoy being able to order attractive women around.”
Purpose: “To see if journals will publish papers that seek to problematize heterosexual men’s attraction to women and will accept very shoddy qualitative methodology and ideologically-motivated interpretations which support this.”
Reviewer Comment: “The breastaurant is an important site for critical masculinities research that has been neglected in the extant literature and this study has the potential to make a significant contribution.”
Publisher: Sex Roles, “a multidisciplinary, international behavioral and social sciences journal with a feminist perspective”
Following the revelation that the paper had been a hoax, the journal retracted it.
The Hoax on Hoaxes2 or HoHo2 Paper
Title: “When the Joke Is on You: A Feminist Perspective on How Positionality Influences Satire”
Thesis: “That academic hoaxes or other forms of satirical or ironic critique of social justice scholarship are unethical, characterized by ignorance and rooted in a desire to preserve privilege.”
Purpose: “To see if journals will accept an argument that shuts down critiques of social justice scholarship as a lack of engagement and understanding, even if one engages fully and knowledgeably with the ideas to the extent of having a paper on them published in a leading academic journal.”
Reviewer Comment: “Given the emphasis on positionality, the argument clearly takes power structures into consideration and emphasizes the voice of marginalized groups, and in this sense can make a contribution to feminist philosophy especially around the topic of social justice pedagogy.”
Publisher: Hypatia, “a forum for cutting-edge work in feminist philosophy”
The Moon Meetings Paper
Title: “Moon Meetings and the Meaning of Sisterhood: A Poetic Portrayal of Lived Feminist Spirituality”
Thesis: “No clear thesis. A rambling poetic monologue of a bitter, divorced feminist, much of which was produced by a teenage angst poetry generator before being edited into something slightly more ‘realistic’ which is then interspersed with self-indulgent autoethnographical reflections on female sexuality and spirituality written entirely in slightly under six hours.”
Purpose: “To see if journals will accept rambling nonsense if it is sufficiently pro-woman, implicitly anti-male, and thoroughly anti-reason for the purpose of foregrounding alternative, female ways of knowing. (NB: It was written entirely by James, who is male.)”
Publisher: Journal of Poetry Therapy, “an interdisciplinary journal committed to the publication of original articles concerned with the use of the literary arts in therapeutic, educational, and community-building capacities”
The Feminist Mein Kampf or ‘FMK’ Paper
Title: “Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism”
Thesis: “That feminism which foregrounds individual choice and responsibility and female agency and strength can be countered by a feminism which unifies in solidarity around the victimhood of the most marginalized women in society.”
Purpose: “To see if we could find ‘theory’ to make anything grievance-related (in this case, part of Chapter 12 of Volume 1 of Mein Kampf with fashionable buzzwords switched in) acceptable to journals if we mixed and matched fashionable arguments.”
Reviewer Comment: “This is an interesting paper seeking to further the aims of inclusive feminism by attending to the issue of allyship/solidarity.”
Publisher: Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work, “the only peer-reviewed, scholarly social work journal from feminists' points of view, offering a unique mix of research reports, new theory and other creative approaches.”
If you want to read about the other papers in the grievance studies hoax, go to the Aero article linked in the footnotes below.
Once it was revealed that the papers had been a hoax, a hoax with a purpose, there was praise as well as predictable fallout. Next article in this series: Academics Under Fire: Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose, Part 2: The Fallout
Jamie Lindsay and Peter Boyle, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” Cogent Social Sciences (2017), 3: 1330439. https://www.skeptic.com/downloads/conceptual-penis/23311886.2017.1330439.pdf. Accessed January 29, 2024.
Judith Butler, “Critically Queer,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1: 17-32.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, New York, NY: Pantheon, (1972).
Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct: A Sokal-Style Hoax on Gender Studies, Skeptic, ed. Michael Shermer, May 19, 2017. https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/conceptual-penis-social-contruct-sokal-style-hoax-on-gender-studies/. Accessed February 3, 2024.
William L. Hosch, “Isomorphism,” Encyclopaedia Brittanica, updated December 23, 2023. https://www.britannica.com/science/isomorphism-mathematics. Accessed February 3, 2024.
David Frank and Duane Q. Nykamp, “An Introduction to Vectors.” Math Insight. http://mathinsight.org/vector_introduction. Accessed February 3, 2024.
James A. Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose, “Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship,” Areo, February 10, 2018. https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/. Accessed January 31, 2024.
James A. Lindsay, et. al., “Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship.”
Helen Wilson (pseudonym), “Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon,” Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, May 22, 2018, 1-20. https://norskk.is/bytta/menn/dog_park.pdf. Accessed February 5, 2024.
Richard Baldwin (borrowed identity), “Who Are They to judge? Overcoming Anthropometry Through Fat Bodybuilding,” Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society, April 10, 2018, VOL. 7, NO. 3, i–xiii. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/21604851.2018.1453622
M. Smith (pseudonym), "Going in Through the Back Door: Challenging Straight Male Homohysteria and Transphobia through Receptive Penetrative Sex Toy Use,” Sexuality & Culture, June 16, 2018, 22(4): 1542. doi:10.1007/s12119-018-9536-0
Richard Baldwin (borrowed identity), "An Ethnography of Breastaurant Masculinity: Themes of Objectification, Sexual Conquest, Male Control, and Masculine Toughness in a Sexually Objectifying Restaurant,” Sex Roles, September 19, 2018, 79 (11–12): 762. https://doi:10.1007/s11199-018-0962-0
I am, as I am certain you are, well-familiar with research articles. My son and DIL work at Johns Hopkins and publish papers regularly; my daughter and SIL are surgeons and publish. I only mention this because I while I am appalled at the breakdown of standards, I also applaud them for calling the system out.