Watch Carefully


I know, you’re all sick of Boghossian’s stunt. I am too. Still, I just spotted something I’d like to document. Here’s a passage from their methodology:

1. “Dog Park”
Summary: That dog parks are “rape-condoning spaces” and a place of rampant canine rape culture and systemic oppression against “the oppressed dog” through which human attitudes to both problems can be measured and analyzed by applying black feminist criminology. This is done to provide insights into training men out of the sexual violence and bigotry to which they are prone. Arguably our most absurd paper.

Here’s a passage from their article in Areo Magazine:

This process is the one, single thread that ties all twenty of our papers together, even though we used a variety of methods to come up with the various ideas fed into their system to see how the editors and peer reviewers would respond. Sometimes we just thought a nutty or inhumane idea up and ran with it. What if we write a paper saying we should train men like we do dogs—to prevent rape culture? Hence came the “Dog Park” paper.

Now, here’s a passage from their op-ed in USA Today:

Seven of our papers were accepted, many in top-ranking journals. These include an adaptation of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” which was accepted by a social work journal. Another develops the concept of “fat bodybuilding” for a discipline called fat studies, and a third claims to address “rape culture” by monitoring dog-humping incidents at dog parks in Southeast Portland, Oregon.

See the slippage? The “Dog Park” paper went from being their favorite to third-tier. It went from being about training men like dogs to addressing rape culture. Either this trio just happened to discover they’d misunderstood their own paper between October 2nd and 10th, or they realized someone had discovered what the paper was really about and are quietly trying to rewrite history.