GLENN: I just -- I love this. This is a hoax done by two academics who are tired of the academics who think they know everything and are -- are -- are perpetrating what they think is a scam of gender studies.
They wrote a paper, the penis as a social construct for gender studies. And they were trying to get it published. And they intentionally -- they said, "If one of us understood -- we would write a paragraph, and if one of us understood it, then they would have to change it, until it absolutely made no sense at all."
So here's some of the examples. In this double peer-reviewed study, double peer-reviewed study that got high marks.
We conclude that penises are best not best understood as the male sexual organ or as the male reproductive organ, but instead as an enacted social construct that is both damaging and problematic for society and future generations. The conceptual penis presents significant problems for gender identity and reproductive identity within social and family dynamics. It's exclusionary to disenfranchised communities, based upon gender or reproductive identity. It's an enduring source of abuse for women and other gender-neutral -- marginalized groups and individuals.
Is the universal performance source of rape and the conceptual driver behind much of climate change.
(chuckling)
PAT: Okay.
GLENN: Toxic hyper masculinity derives its significance directly from the conceptual penis and applies itself to supporting neo-capitalist materialism, which is a fundamental driver of climate change, especially in the rampant use of carbon-emitted fossil fuel technologies and careless domination of virgin natural environments.
We need not delve deeply into criticisms of dialectic objectivism or their relationships with masculine tropes like the conceptual penis, to make effective criticism of exclusionary dialectic objectivism. All perspective matters.
They write, if you're having trouble understanding what any of this means, there are two important things to remember. First, we don't understand it, and we wrote it. Nobody does. This problem should have rendered it unpublishable in all peer-reviewed academic journals. Second, these examples are remarkable lucid compared to much of the rest of the paper.
Here's another paragraph from it: Inasmuch as masculinity is essentially performative, so too is the conceptual penis. The penis, in the words of Judith Butler, can only be understood through reference from what is barred from the signifier within the domain of corporal legibility. The penis should not be understood as an honest expression of the performer's intent, should it be presented in a performance of masculinity or hyper masculinity.
Thus, ismorphism between the conceptual penis and what is referred to throughout discursive feminist literature as toxic hyper masculinity is one defined upon a vector of male cultural machismo, with the conceptual penis playing the roles of subject, object, and verb of action.
The result of this trichotomy of roles is to place the hypermasculine men, both within and outside of competing discourses, who -- whose dynamics as seen via post structuralist discourse analysis, enact a systematic interplay of power, which the hypermasculine masculine men use the conceptual penis to remove themselves from powerless subject to positions -- to powerful positions. They write, no one knows what any of this means because we've made it up and it's complete nonsense.
Anyone claiming to understand this is pretending, full stop.
Then they go into how they used a post modern generator, a website coded in the 1990s, from NYU.
A physicist -- it's a method of hoaxing cultural studies journal called "social text." It returns a different fake post modern paper every time the page is reloaded. We cited and quoted from the post modern generator liberally. This includes nonsense quotations, incorporated in the body of the paper, citing five different papers, all generated by this hoax generator.
Five references to fake papers in journals that don't exist is astonishing on its own. But it's incredible, given that the original paper we submitted only had 16 references total. It has 20 now, after they asked for more examples.
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.
Two of the fake journals cited are deconstructions from elsewhere and/or press, taken directly from the post modern generator.
Another cites the fictitious researcher, S.Q. Scramaron, 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 alleged careful cross-referencing check done in the final round of editorial approval.
No matter the effort they put into it, it appears one can simply -- one can -- cannot simply jump a cogent social science shark.
They tried hard to leave bread crumbs all the way through. And they said the secret is, just compliment and tell them how smart they all are.
PAT: Yeah.
GLENN: And they'll buy into it.
PAT: And use pre and post modern expressionism all along the way.
GLENN: Well, it's the -- the pre post modernism that is -- that is so problematic.
PAT: You're right.
PAT: I mean, that is -- that's pretty amazing. That's pretty amazing.
GLENN: And you know what, it's that kind of junk that our kids are learning. And they don't understand it.
PAT: Oh, yeah.
GLENN: And they don't understand it. But everybody pretends they understand it. And it provides the cover for the professors to say whatever they want. And here's the proof of it right here: And nobody understands it. The emperor has no clothes.
