The Penis as a Social Construct

Discussion in 'The Cesspool' started by exchemist, May 23, 2017.

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  1. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Beer w/Straw likes this.
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  3. Beer w/Straw Transcendental Ignorance! Valued Senior Member

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    LOL!

    I really liked this part: "After completing the paper, we read it carefully to ensure it didn’t say anything meaningful".
     
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  5. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Made perfect coherent sense to me

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    But then my 3 neurone brain moves in mysterious ways

    Somewhat like John Cleese in the Ministry of Silly Walks

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  7. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    The insights transformatively embedded around the underlying context of overlaid referential deployment modalities in that paper find immediate exigency within this forum, as illustrated by this:
    Which is to say: many of the signifiers of corporeal illegibility around here are total penises.
     
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  8. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Yes. They had a lot of fun devising it, that's clear.

    But the story is somewhat weakened by the journal that accepted it for publication, which was a pay to publish journal. There is some discussion of the role of these in science reporting and whether or not, although they are said to have a peer review process, the conflict of interest with the profit motive means they don't scrutinise articles properly.

    But it's a great idea, regardless. I particularly liked:

    " The conceptual penis presents significant problems for gender identity and reproductive identity within social and family dynamics, is exclusionary to disenfranchised communities based upon gender or reproductive identity, is an enduring source of abuse for women and other gender-marginalized groups and individuals, is the universal performative source of rape, and is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change."

    And the bit where the authors attribute "manspreading" to a "rape" of the space around them.

    I suppose we should now await the operation of Poe's Law, i.e. for some humourless nitwit to argue the above are actually valid viewpoints.

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  9. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    I wouldn't even dare

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    But even better would be a female version counter point article

    about how vaginas have kept women enslaved

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    Any takers female posters?

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  10. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    I read once(long ago) that Napoleon thought of women primarily as breeders for future soldiers for the grand army of the republic.
    (little bitty soldiers marching out of their vaginas four abreast?)
     
  11. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    To mangle a well known punch line from a TV ad for a car

    We're gonna need a bigger vagina

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  12. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    I think that the point of this is that academic standards in the humanities have declined so dramatically in the last few decades that people can write virtually anything, no matter how bizarre or incoherent, and get it published in the journals, provided only that it expresses a "correct" race-class-gender line. Much of it is worthless in my opinion, yet it succeeds as a dissertation topic, gets people published, gets them hired and gets them tenure at the prestige universities. And I don't think that's funny at all.

    I recently purchased a used copy of the long out-of-print 1959 edition of Kathleen Freeman's The Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Companion to Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker and the contrast couldn't be more stark. Freeman was a humanities scholar of the old school who actually knew what she was writing about. The detail and analysis in that book are extraordinary and even in 2017 a graduate student in early Greek philosophy probably still needs to read it.

    When the general public starts to get the impression that many contemporary university professors' work product is simply bullshit, respect for academic opinion in general starts to decline.
     
    Last edited: May 23, 2017
  13. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    I could not possibly disagree. I have always been highly suspicious of "gender studies" and this does not show the subject in a good light. One does wonder a bit if the academic world is rather out of control and if a few fewer chairs and university departments - or a few fewer universities - might not bring back quality and save society a lot of money.

    I am regularly appalled at the poor standard of writing in academic papers. This hoax seems to show that publishers and editors have given up entirely trying to require that a submitted paper should be comprehensible.
     
  14. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    In other words, not a real journal. And Michael Shermer is kind of an anti-feminist asshole.
     
    Last edited: May 23, 2017
  15. DrKrettin Registered Senior Member

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    The basic problem is the fundamental change over the last few decades in the political requirement to measure the performance of universities to determine funding. (I'm speaking of the UK here). This performance is inevitably measured by simple-minded politicians using the number of academic articles published as a yardstick for academic performance. This gives rise to huge numbers of published articles which are total bollocks.

    There was a time when a professor would lead an academic department, then after 40 years, retire and write one book which was very well worth reading and referencing. Now, the pressure is on to develop a book from every PhD thesis, and churn out any number of articles and books, because the value of your C.V. is directly proportional to the number of publications. The value of these writings is totally irrelevant, because nobody has the time or knowledge to assess the quality. It is a depressing development, and results in quantity rather than quality.
     
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  16. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    He may be but it was not his hoax.
     
  17. geordief Valued Senior Member

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    Maybe this is more of a Lilliputian construct
    based on that? (12 minutes in)

    He just seems realistic to me (trying to explain why things are as they are)

    I always liked his column in the Scientific American
     
  18. StrangerInAStrangeLand SubQuantum Mechanic Valued Senior Member

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    That attitude was common thru most of history.

    <>
     
  19. StrangerInAStrangeLand SubQuantum Mechanic Valued Senior Member

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    I thought that was Silly Woks.

    <>
     
  20. Bells Staff Member

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    I find it interesting that only one person in this thread has touched on the disgusting irony of this whole hoax..

    More to the point, where and who the hoax stems from and who it chooses to disparage. Taken without acknowledging the history of the Skeptics movement, sure, one could have a laugh. But when one considers the skeptic community and the damning allegations of sexual assault and sexual harassment towards women and feminists, then it ceases to be a laughing matter.

    Spidergoat is the only one who actually spotted it and saw the bigger picture.

    While everyone is discussing the problems with publications and studies of humanities subjects and others mocked the notion of 'gender studies', all except one, actually saw the bigger picture.

    Bluntly speaking, no one here knows of the history of misogyny and sexism that exists within the skeptics community? The threats of rape, sexual assault, to female or feminist skeptics?
     
  21. Bells Staff Member

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    Spidergoat was being kind. Shermer is a sexual predator.

    Welcome to the reality that is Michael Shermer..

    “I ran into Shermer in the hallway," Smith said recently, speaking publicly for the first time about what happened that night. They began talking, and he invited her to a Scotch and cigar party at the Caesars Palace hotel. “He was talking about future articles we could write, and he mentioned this party and asked if I could come, and I said yes.” At the party, they began downing drinks. “At some point,” Smith said, “I realized he wasn’t drinking them; he was hiding them underneath the table and pretending to drink them. I was drunk. After that, it all gets kind of blurry. I started to walk back to my hotel room, and he followed me and caught up with me.”

    On their way from Caesars to the Flamingo, where they were both staying, she chatted briefly with a friend on her mobile phone, she told me. They got to the Flamingo. “He offered to walk me back to my room, but walked me to his instead. I don’t have a clear memory of what happened after that. I know we had sex.” She remembers calling a friend from an elevator after leaving his room. “I was in the elevator, but didn’t know what hotel.”

    Over the next couple days, word spread around the convention that they had hooked up — whether the rumors began with what she told people, what he told people, or what others oversaw, it isn’t clear. Shermer went into damage-control mode. He called the friend Smith had spoken with during their walk “and lied to him about everything,” Smith said. She heard later from “a couple other people” whom Shermer had called to intercept the rumors. Finally, Shermer sent an email, which I have obtained, to a fellow skeptic, who was one of the conference organizers, and, as it happens, the friend Smith called from her mobile phone the night before. The email is worth reading in its entirety, right down to its conclusion — a sly, Clintonian diminishment of Smith. “Thanks for a great TAM,” Shermer wrote to the organizer. “You did a super job organizing and running the show…” It continued:

    I wanted to let you know that I tracked down the source of those vicious rumors about Alison Smith and I that I mentioned to you: at the scotch/cigar party that Thursday night there were a couple of young guys in their 20s […] Anyway, as you know at these parties everyone gets pretty smashed and has a good time and there’s a lot of flirting and such. I got there around 10:30 […] and was just going to hang around for about an hour, but everyone there was plying me with scotch and yaking it up, and there was a group in the bathroom with their feet in the tub, and people lying around on the bed, etc. So I was just joining in having a good time.
    Alison showed up around 11:30, and of course she’s young and cute and these two guys were panting big time to be with her, but she obviously wasn’t interested in them that way, and was just moving around the room having fun, but when she was hanging on me now and then I could tell that these guys were really pissed off. Long story short, later the next day, after talking to you, I saw both of them standing together and confronted them about the gossip rumors, and [one of them] admitted he was mad at me because he said he felt like I was preventing him from, in his words, “getting into her pants,” and the dreadlocks guy said that he was really drunk and that “I admit that I was running my mouth off.” So, basically, they admitted that it was them spreading the nonsense that I was trying to get Alison drunk and take advantage of her. For the record, by the way, most of the people at that party, Alison especially, could drink me under the table no problem. People kept pouring me scotch, and after awhile I was pretending to drink it and then drinking water instead, and at one point Alison said something like, “hey, he’s not really drinking his scotch,” so I was busted and everyone gave me a hard time (in good fun of course).
    Anyway, I wanted you to know that Alison is a good kid and this was just a typical gossip rumor thing that goes on all the time, but that I’m a bigger target than most in this small skeptical pond, so I have to be especially careful.

    Michael

    This was his excuse at the time.

    [Continued next post due to bug with word limit]
     
  22. Bells Staff Member

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    He's done this before. He's known for doing this sort of thing and known for being a "bad boy", when it comes to this sort of behaviour. The story of Shermer's action to Smith broke when another "free thought blooger" wrote a damning post about it:


    Then, five years later, on Aug. 8, 2013, a popular freethought blogger named PZ Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris, wrote a post titled “What do you do when someone pulls the pin and hands you a grenade?” Myers had, he claimed, been “given this rather … explosive … information … And it’s bad. Really bad … I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do, I can do no other.” Then, without naming Smith, he quoted an email from her:


    At a conference, Mr. Shermer coerced me into a position where I could not consent, and then had sex with me […] I wanted to share this story in case it helps anyone else ward off a similar situation from happening […] Ever since, I’ve heard stories about him doing things (5 different people have directly told me they did the same to them) and wanted to just say something and warn people, and I didn’t know how.


    The story attracted wide attention, and many bloggers and commenters attacked Myers for posting, five years after the fact, an anonymously sourced attack on a man who says he has never been arrested for, let alone convicted of, anything. One atheist started an Indiegogo campaign to raise money for Shermer to sue Myers (which he never did). And Shermer, when I contacted him, denied Smith’s version of events.

    In a long statement, which he has also posted on his website, Shermer wrote that at the party Smith propositioned him “in a very direct, assertive, and physical fashion,” and that he turned her down. Later, he said, after they had stopped drinking, they “ended up walking and talking for a couple hours out on the Las Vegas strip … She was sober. I was sober. I invited her back to my room and she willingly accepted my invitation.” There, they had sex. “As far as I knew then and for all these years after, we both had a good time.”

    But among some women, since Myers' post, there has been a sense of relief that somebody had finally spoken out. Several women told me that women new to the movement were often warned about the intentions of certain older men, especially Shermer. Two more women agreed to go on the record, by name, with their Shermer stories. (Neither accused him of rape, and neither was in a position to corroborate Smith’s story.) These stories help flesh out a man who, whatever his progressive views on science and reason, is decidedly less evolved when it comes to women.
    [...]
    The reality of sexism in freethought is not limited to a few famous leaders; it has implications throughout the small but quickly growing movement. Thanks to the internet, and to popular authors like Dawkins, Hitchens, and Sam Harris, atheism has greater visibility than at any time since the 18th-century Enlightenment. Yet it is now cannibalizing itself. For the past several years, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and online forums have become hostile places for women who identify as feminists or express concern about widely circulated tales of sexism in the movement. Some women say they are now harassed or mocked at conventions, and the online attacks — which include Jew-baiting, threats of anal rape, and other pleasantries — are so vicious that two activists I spoke with have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. One of these women has been bedridden for two years.

    Note the differences in Shermer's retelling of what happened.. When James Randi was questioned about Shermer's reputation and his behaviour, he responded:


    “Shermer has been a bad boy on occasion — I do know that,” Randi told me. “I have told him that if I get many more complaints from people I have reason to believe, that I am going to have to limit his attendance at the conference.

    “His reply,” Randi continued, “is he had a bit too much to drink and he doesn’t remember. I don’t know — I’ve never been drunk in my life. It’s an unfortunate thing … I haven’t seen him doing that. But I get the word from people in the organization that he has to be under better control. If he had gotten violent, I’d have him out of there immediately. I’ve just heard that he misbehaved himself with the women, which I guess is what men do when they are drunk.”

    Consider that they know he does this. They know he gets women drunk to have sex with them. They know that his sexual harassment and downright groping is bad enough that if they received more complaints, that they would have to limit his attendance at these conferences. That sexual assault and harassment is not really violent, just what boys do.

    Now consider that Smith is not his only victim. And that other victims have been pressured into silence, either through direct pressure, or through threats and harassment.
     
  23. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    And Poe's Law strikes, just as I predicted.
     
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