The Penis as a Social Construct

No, it isn't.

The skeptic community is deeply misogynist and sexist. So I find the subject of their hoax to be telling. You know, this is the community that turns a blind eye to sexual harassment and sexual assault by members of their own community, be it online or at their conventions. Hence why the subject of their hoax is just so glaringly obvious. It's a two pronged approach. One, they get yet another dig at feminists which they are known to detest and sexually harass and threaten constantly and two, they get their laughs at a humanities based journal, which by the sounds of it, is not a real journal.

Did you not read the editor's note? Or the whole article you linked? The intent of the hoax was to out what they believe to be the ridiculousness of what they deem to be an "extreme ideology".. A bit rich coming from people who support a community that openly harasses and sexually threatens and harasses women, don't you think?

Your own link makes a clear point of their motives:

Our aim was smaller yet more pointed. We intended to test the hypothesis that flattery of the academic Left’s moral architecture in general, and of the moral orthodoxy in gender studies in particular, is the overwhelming determiner of publication in an academic journal in the field. That is, we sought to demonstrate that a desire for a certain moral view of the world to be validated could overcome the critical assessment required for legitimate scholarship. Particularly, we suspected that gender studies is crippled academically by an overriding almost-religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil. On the evidence, our suspicion was justified.3​

Their other motive was to point out what they deemed to be a problem with the "Left", that say what they want to hear and it will be published. That what they did clearly showed what is wrong with Gender Studies.. Then the usual tripe about what they deem to be the 'evil left'. It is a constant complaint in their writings, by the way and not this hoax article, but their books and other articles. They blame feminists and the left.

So you see the pattern here. Sure, the content was bad because it was rubbish, but that would be why they were recommended to go with a 'pay to publish'. Not only that, they went with a pay to publish website no one has ever really heard of before.. Because this is supposed to show just bad Gender Studies is? Really? From James Taylor:

In brief, two academics, Peter Bognossian and James Lindsay, submitted an obviously silly article to a journal Cogent Social Studies. It was accepted after what seems to be very cursory peer review, and, from this, they’re claiming that the entire field of Gender Studies “is crippled academically by an overriding almost-religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil.”

It might be. But their hoax gives us absolutely no reason to believe this. First, let’s look at the “journal” that they were accepted at. Like all the digital, open-access journals run by Cogent (a house most people have never heard of before now) it charges authors fees to publish. No reputable journal in the humanities does this. Worse yet, it allows authors to “pay what they can”. This appears to signal that this journal publishes work from authors who can’t get institutional support to publish in it. (Or, if they could, don’t seek this as they would prefer it not be widely known that they’re paying to publish.) The journal boasts also that it is very “friendly” to authors (a clear sign of a suspect outlet) and notes that it doesn’t necessarily reject things that might not have any impact. (!) It also only uses single blind review. The whole thing just screams vanity journal.

Now, the hoaxers are aware of all of this. But they try to duck the “facile” objection that they submitted to a junk journal by noting that it’s part of the Taylor and Francis group, and that it’s “held out as a high-quality open-access journal by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)”. Yet even a quick perusal of the journal’s website makes it clear that it operates entirely independently of Taylor & Francis, and that its publishing model is utterly different to theirs. And the DOAJ is a “community run” agency with (it seems) no official standing–and whose express criteria for something being a peer-reviewed journal with quality control is that it “must exercise peer-review with an editor and an editorial board or editorial review…. carried out by at least two editors”. As far as I know, most vanity presses meet this very minimal standard.

Having managed to pay for a paper to be published in a deeply suspect journal the hoaxers then conclude that the entire field of Gender Studies is suspect. How they made this deductive leap is actually far more puzzling than how the paper got accepted. (It’s thus more than a bit embarrassing that one of them’s a philosophy professor–who, ironically, teaches critical thinking.) I’ve no doubt that there are many things to criticize about Gender Studies. But that a suspect journal published a hoax paper whose topics was gender studies-ish isn’t one of them.

UPDATE: The first journal that Bognossian and Lindsay submitted their hoax paper to, and that rejected it, was NORMA: The International Journal for Masculinity Studies. This journal doesn’t even hit the top 115 journals in Gender Studies. So, what happened here was that they submitted a hoax paper to an unranked journal, which summarily rejected it. They then received an auto-generated response directing them to a pay-to-publish vanity journal. They submitted the paper there, and it was published. From this chain of events they conclude that the entire field of Gender Studies is “crippled academically”. This tells us very little about Gender Studies, but an awful lot about the perpetrators of this “hoax”…. and those who tout it as a take down of an entire field.​

Which says a lot about the authors of the hoax... And those who get sucked in by it.

And just so you are aware, for example, that Peter Boghossian, one author of that Sokal type of hoax.. When one woman was so sexually harassed and threatened with rape from the skeptic community, Boghossian was one of the people on twitter, tweeting and egging people on to sexually harass and threaten her. It got so bad, she suffered from PTSD as a result. And I mean, that is just the tip of the iceberg. Boghossian is a revolting human being. Just google his name, from his attacks on women and women who dare to be feminists, to his vapid comments about LGBT.. He blames everything on the 'evil left'.

 

Even his own supporters have had to intervene in some instances, when he would openly try to grope women or try to get them drunk to the point of losing consciousness to have sex with them without their consent. He is bad enough that female attendants to these conventions, female speakers and journalists, have to be warned in advance by other committee members and those in charge, because of the fact that they know he will sexually harass or possibly even sexually assault if given the chance.

And of course he won't lose any sleep over it. He is protected within that community. One woman, a scientist who attended one convention, was nearly sexually molested by him in full view of other scientists, who physically intervened to stop him. Complaints were filed with the organisers of the convention. But when the risk of it becoming public became clear, that poor woman was pressured into silence by the very people who intervened to stop him from sexually molesting her. His other victims are afraid to refer to what he did to them as rape, for fear of further harassment and abuse by others within that community. And what he did was rape. Getting someone blind drunk with the specific intent of getting her so plastered that she cannot refuse or say no, it's rape. If a woman is that drunk, she cannot consent. The two different versions, from him, astonishingly enough, kind of says it all.

So everyone knows he won't lose any sleep over it. Randi, as revolting as his views are on this, sees it as being problematic enough that he had to warn him that if he continued or it got any worse, his access to these conventions would be restricted.

Think about it though, what recourse do these women actually have? When witnesses to his sexual assaults put pressure on the victims to remain silent, when the victims are threatened, harassed, sexually harassed daily and openly if there is any risk of speaking out, why do you think he would lose any sleep over it? But there were other witnesses and it just goes to show just how bad that movement is when it comes to misogyny and sexism. Hell, the wave of harassment and threats of rape to any woman who dares voice even mild disagreement with any of the male figureheads of the whole movement should be enough of an indication.

Shermer is a sexual predator, from plying women with alcohol to have non-consensual sex with them, to sexually harassing women, to playing with himself and masturbating while talking to at least one woman, to groping women, to propositioning women openly, in one instance, in front of the woman's husband at one event.. He's a predator and he has the full support of that community.