"'The conceptual penis as a social construct' is a Sokal-style hoax on gender studies."

"This paper should never have been published."

Titled, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” our paper “argues” that “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.” As if to prove philosopher David Hume’s claim that there is a deep gap between what is and what ought to be, our should-never-have-been-published paper was published in the open-access (meaning that articles are freely accessible and not behind a paywall), peer-reviewed journal Cogent Social Sciences. (In case the PDF is removed, we’ve archived it.)

Assuming the pen names “Jamie Lindsay” and “Peter Boyle,” and writing for the fictitious “Southeast Independent Social Research Group,” 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. We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral implications that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal.

This already damning characterization of our hoax understates our paper’s lack of fitness for academic publication by orders of magnitude. 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....

I like the way the journal that took the piece called itself Cogent Social Science. Actually, I feel that an emphasis on the "cogent" is patriarchal.

Read the whole thing, because there's some question about the academic stature of the journal. It has a pay-to-publish policy. Here's the coverage of the story in The Chronicle of Higher Education, "Hoax Article in Social-Science Journal Gets a Rise Out of Some Scholars."

Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University, in Oregon, and James A. Lindsay, an independent scholar.... say they sought to emulate [the Sokal hoax]... [and] to attack the process by which the article was published — “the complex problem of pay-to-publish journals with lax standards that cash in on the ultra-competitive publish-or-perish academic environment.”...

At the Daily Nous, a website that covers news of philosophy, Justin Weinberg describes the article as an “attempted” hoax and says that it was rejected by another, more-reputable journal. At Bleeding Heart Libertarians, James Taylor calls Cogent Social Sciences a “pay-to-publish vanity journal” whose low standards make it difficult to sustain the hoax as proving anything about gender studies as a field or academic publishing as an industry....

One of the more thoughtful critiques came from Ketan Joshi, a communication consultant and writer in Australia on renewable energy, climate change, and other topics. On his blog he writes that the hoaxers pose as rationalists but actually harness their anti-gender-studies paranoia to the engine of irrationality. And unlike the “constructive, clear-headed charity” exemplified by Alan Sokal when he revealed his hoax, Mr. Boghossian and Mr. Lindsay “inject a strong current of mean-spiritedness into their hoax, far removed from any effort to shine a light on unethical practices in publishing.”