The first people to raise suspicions were journalists, who in July stumbled upon a bizarre study in the academic journal Gender, Place and Culture titled “Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon”. Surely this paper, which studied “rampant canine rape culture” for insights into how to train men out of sexual violence, couldn’t be genuine? When a writer at the Wall Street Journal tried to email the author, Helen Wilson, she instead received a response from James Lindsay, a mathematician, who confessed that the study was fake and had been submitted to the journal as a hoax.
Over ten months, Lindsay, together with writer Helen Pluckrose and philosopher Peter Boghossian, submitted 20 deliberately ridiculous papers to peer-reviewed academic journals specialising in critical theory. They cut their project short because of the growing media attention, but by the time their hoax was made public in early October, seven of their papers had been accepted for publication and four had been published, including one that rewrote sections of Mein Kampf with “feminist buzzwords” and another titled “Going In Through the Back Door” that purported to show how masturbating with dildos made men more feminist.
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