Anyone who needs cheering up on a Sunday afternoon, could do worse than read Jerry Coyne’s blog post A new academic hoax: a bogus paper on “the conceptual penis” gets published in a “high quality peer-reviewed” social science journal – and the papers to which it refers.
If you don’t understand a word of it, that’s fine, because the paper being described, The conceptual penis as a social construct in Cogent Social Sciences, is a total and elaborate hoax which even the authors admit they don’t understand! Just as a small example:
Nowhere are the consequences of hypermasculine machismo braggadocio isomorphic identification with the conceptual penis more problematic than concerning the issue of climate change. Climate change is driven by nothing more than it is by certain damaging themes in hypermasculinity that can be best understood via the dominant rapacious approach to climate ecology identifiable with the conceptual penis.
The paper was designed to expose the trendy opaque nonsense of much of the social sciences. And it succeeded as it was published in a peer-reviewed journal.
The paper’s text sort of makes superficial sense – and I could see it becoming a radical feminist meme – but it is actually complete bollox. Enjoy it!