Do penises cause climate change? Discuss

‘Why not think about Gender Studies?’ asked an advertorial aimed at prospective students in the newspaper I was reading. Actually, I can think of lots of reasons, starting with: what kind of employer in his right mind (or her right mind, come to that) would be insane enough to take on a graduate with an intellectually worthless degree indicative of shrill resentment, bolshiness, blue hair, lax personal hygiene and weaponised entitlement?

But two US academics, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, recently came up with an even better one. They managed to get published in a social sciences journal a paper arguing that the penis is not in fact a male reproductive organ but merely a social construct and that, furthermore, penises are responsible for causing climate change.

It ought to go without saying that their paper, ‘The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct’, was a spoof. Yet it was peer-reviewed by two supposed experts in gender studies, one of whom praised the way it captured ‘the issue of hypermasculinity through a multidimensional and nonlinear process’, and the other of whom marked it ‘outstanding’ in every applicable category.

Their model was the Sokal Hoax of 1996, when New York University physics professor Alan Sokal persuaded an academic journal to accept a similarly meaningless paper titled ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’. His aim was partly to mock the incoherence of post-modernist social science, and partly to demonstrate that humanities journals will publish anything so long as it is couched in the language of ‘proper leftist thought’.

Like Sokal’s, the latest hoax was careful to observe all the fashionable left-wing pieties. ‘We suspected that gender studies is crippled academically by an overriding, almost religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil,’ the authors later observed.