“The conceptual penis as a social construct”

“The conceptual penis as a social construct”: That is the title of an academic paper. You can read it here in PDF form. You can read it but I wouldn’t bother. It is all 100 percent bullshit. No, really. It is peer reviewed and published but it is bullshit. It is nonsense. It is a hoax. The authors acknowledge that they just pulled it out of their asses. It is random, meaningless crap. Even the authors don’t understand it because there is nothing to understand.

The androcentric scientific and meta-scientific evidence that the penis is the male reproductive organ is considered overwhelming and largely uncontroversial.

That’s how we began. We used this preposterous sentence to open a “paper” consisting of 3,000 words of utter nonsense posing as academic scholarship. Then a peer-reviewed academic journal in the social sciences accepted and published it.

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.

It is more than a joke, however. It is proof that abject bullshit can make it through the peer review process and be published in respected journals. It means that experts are just pencil whipping it. It means we don’t know what we don’t know.

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