“Increasingly, Western societies – especially the English-speaking countries – are becoming two different peoples speaking two very different languages and believing in two modes of living. One camp believes in some form of objective truth and labels humans as either male or female. They acknowledge there are endless variations in the ways humans express themselves, but they are certain there are only two sexes. The concept of two sexes is so ancient and fundamental to our makeup as a species, we’re still wrapping our heads around having to verbalize what was always common sense. Defending the obvious is exhausting.
Clash of two camps: If universal truths are no longer recognized and everything is a “construct,” writes the author, society becomes increasingly divided even at the level of basic understanding and language. Shown are: (top) the 2023 Drag Up Fight Back protest, San Francisco, CA; (bottom) the meeting against minor children transgender policies, Vancouver, B.C. (Sources of photos: (top) Sheila Fitzgerald/Shutterstock; (bottom) EJ Nickerson/Shutterstock)
The other camp believes in a post-modernist version of constructed truth in which there are dozens of “fluid” genders that negate sex and biology. They also believe that anyone who does not subscribe to this belief is a heretic and as evil as a Nazi. They have the news and entertainment media, most of academia, much of the corporate world, and more and more of the state apparatus (from educational bureaucracies to human rights commissions) on their side.
How do these two camps speak to one another? The two belief systems require very different laws and social norms. If there are only two sexes, the man in my mother’s story is not allowed in the women’s changeroom. If sex is a social construct and can change through self-declaration or self-perception, that man can be a woman and is therefore allowed in the women’s changeroom. Right now, it seems the latter camp is winning and that we no longer share a common understanding of basic truths or even of language. Words like “man” or “woman” that were once universal are no longer.
A society that does not have a shared language cannot share thoughts. A society that is divided on whether or not there is objective truth, outside of personal feelings and emotions, cannot set laws or policies that work for the broadest range of people. A society where women and girls are cowed into silence when a crime is perpetrated against them for fear of being labelled the enemy is a shaky society indeed.”
Anatomical penises may exist, but as pre-operative transgendered women also have anatomical penises, the penisvis-à-vismaleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity. Through detailed poststructuralist discursive criticism and the example of climate change, this paper will challenge the prevailing and damaging social trope that penises are best understood as the male sexual organ and reassign it a more fitting role as a type of masculine performance.
Subjects: Gender Studies – Soc Sci; Postmodernism of Cultural Theory; Feminism
“As we stated, absolutely no academic journal should have published our paper. One did. The one that did is not a vanity journal (see above). It qualifies for faculty reimbursement at many university libraries, and it possessed at least one specialist reviewer whose knowledge of the field of gender studies evidently exceeds ours. This reviewer employed relevant academic terminology with obvious confidence (“capturs [sic] the issue of hypermasculinity through a multi-dimensional and nonlinear process”) and read the paper carefully enough to remark on absence of a tool of analysis (poststructuralist discourse analysis is mentioned in the abstract but it is used nowhere in the manuscript, which the reviewer caught). On these facts alone, it reaches too far to suggest that nothing can be inferred about gender studies from the success of our satire.
At the same time, the “Conceptual Penis” paper is a parody whose target is easily recognizable and unmistakable. The paper is ridiculous, certainly, but it is also immediately identifiable with the field it lampoons. The power of satirical parody lies entirely in its being recognizable for what it mocks. This lends credibility to our abiding suspicion that there is a problem in gender studies and, by extension, other fields of postmodernist studies, and with the moral architecture on the academic Left that enables them.”
Wow. The roast continues…
“It is only possible to entertain this criticism with any seriousness by ignoring the surrounding mountains of evidence that postmodernist vanity studies fields have built up over decades, which they term “scholarship.” Within the corpus of literature in those fields, there is a voluminous, extant catalog of academically vapid papers that employ certain moral lenses and are written in impenetrable pseudo-analytical prose. That body of literature preceded and motivated our hoax while providing a basis for its style. For those who got the joke, our paper is funny because it’s accurate. That is, it is not so very different from many real papers that are published in gender studies and related fields.
This is the real evidence justifying our initial suspicion about gender studies, and it is bolstered by the current fashionable madness taking over many college campuses. This collective insanity virtually always emanates from ideological complaints rooted in identity politics, aspects of postmodernism, and uses or abuses of “critical theory”. This has been used to indoctrinate a generation of students and faculty who are now taking illiberal, authoritarian actions.”
The moral of the story? One should be quite skeptical of any field that has its head this far up its own ass.
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