Mmm.... I don't think you're accurate in assuming that nobody thinks it's a valuable field. It's a topic taught in most major universities, it's a field with a LOT of work being done in it (mostly crappy ******** work IMO, but still), and there are a lot of papers being published on that topic. So clearly someone thinks it's valuable - valuable enough to have entire publications devoted to the topic. And those publications get referenced by people who use them as support for their ideology on the topic of gender.
I do, however, agree with your conclusion: nobody will change their minds. True believers will still be true believers, apostates will still be apostates. Personally, I think that this sort of demonstration *should* change people's minds... but I'm an apostate.
I think absolutely nobody should be persuaded either way by B,L and P. The reason is because the different studies went to differenr journals of presumably differing quality and their may have been differing ways in which they were accepted.
Take the dog park one. On the face of it, there is nothing obviously absurd about writing a paper which observes the behaviour of dog owners and seeing when they intervene to stop their male dog raping another male dog or allow their male dog to rape a female dog or intervene to stop fights etc... What dog owners permit and dissuade
could say something about a culture. What makes this more pernicious, in my opinion, and not to the hoaxers' credit, is that they included "results" of data which they in fact wholly fabricated. So what apparently makes this paper ludicrous? Mostly the fact that there is heavy reference to feminist and queer theory. But this becomes question-begging. They already thought that such literature was ridiculous so getting it published in a journal related to field says nothing at all. This is not like the Sokal hoax, because B, L and P already admit that, unlike the Conceptual Penis hoax, they actually read and studied the relevant literature rather than, say, went to the postmodernism generator and copied and pasted the results. (They even say that they had initially tried to submit papers that did this but they all got rejected!!! That seems an important point that their cheerleaders overlook). So, I am not impressed by that particular hoax paper.
Similarly, I am not impressed by the one that was apparently based on Meine Kampf. They seem to think it is self-evidently ridiculous that a journal would publish a work from Hitler that has a feminist spin. However, as
this Hitler scholar in Haaretz points out, it is utterly dishonest because they used a chapter from Meine Kampf that was about organizing a party and of course B, L and P had to remove so much to make it unrecognizable from its "source material" that this is what was left:
So what did the text in the article accepted by Affilia actually look like? Was it, as Fox News claimed, a "feminist Mein Kampf", suggesting men should be treated the same way as Hitler victimized Jews?
It is surprising, to say the least, that none of the journalists reporting on the controversy actually bothered to compare the two texts. If they'd done so, they would have found that the Affilia article didn't contain anything that could be recognized as "Mein Kampf" even by a Hitler expert, let alone a lay person.
The best way to illustrate this is to highlight a section of what remained of Hitler's text, spread out as it was over several paragraphs on several pages:
[…] to appeal to […] contented and satisfied, […] to embrace […].
[…] half-measures, by […] a so-called objective standpoint, […] the goal […]. That is to say, […] in the sense […] many limitations, […]. […] countered only by an antidote, […] only the […]. […] people […] neither […] nor […]. […] abstract knowledge […] directs their […]. […] is where their […] lies. […] receptive […] in one of these two directions […] never to a […] between the two.
[…] emotional […] stability. […] than respect, […] is more […] than aversion, […] weakness) […], […] will […] power.
The future of a movement is […].
The lacunae between these preserved pieces of text were filled with material that was either re-written, or entirely new (including references to bona fide scholarship). This created the convincing illusion of an original philosophy paper. Neither the words nor the intent were comparable to "Mein Kampf"; indeed, the intent was the very opposite.
Now apparently Lindsay has responded in some hour and a half long podcast episode on "New Discourses", where he thinks he has discovered some trick by his critic of using the name "NSDAP" and then declares to his audience that he looked up NSDAP and discovered it meant "Nazi Party" (I'm not kidding, he really thought this was a gotcha!), and he reads out the meaning, claiming not to know what "Arbeiter" means. Hmmm... I begin to wonder if Lindsay is pretending to be as ignorant as he sounds.
So, honestly, a paper accepted by a journal that just basically talks about what a feminist movement should look like, isn't really that impressive either.
It's pretty obvious that this was a sensationalist stunt with so much dishonesty thrown in, that, like I said, I ended up perversely feeling a grudging admission that no, gender studies journals DON'T just publish any old tripe.
And really, the bottom of the barrel journals they picked exist in pretty much any field. This is how academics keep their jobs. It is known as "publish or perish". And most of these journals in special interests are read by almost nobody and are peer reviewed by volunteers who spend their unpaid time trying to be helpful to authors who are often not very good at writing (hence there is a lot of feedback that B, L and P gleefully cackled at in their videos).
This is why pretty much all fields are plagued with bad scholarship. But maybe you need to see some actual data rather than this kind of anecdotal "study" which you can do, if you like, by going to Retraction Watch and plugging in any subject and seeing how many papers have ended up retracted for problems with data:
Link
And, to beat a dead horse, just look at how many papers in the medical field are turning out to be costing people's lives. Look at the studies of ivermectin that turn out to be out and out fraud, yet Boghossian's buddies the Weinsteins happily trot them out to send their viewers galloping off to buy horse paste.
But no, the real moral panic is to do with some obscure unread publications like Fat Studies which are apparently taking over the universities (hasn't this left-wing take-over been happening since the 1960s?). So Boghossian runs off to cry on the shoulders of Glenn Beck and Dave Rubin because nobody takes his grievance studies thing seriously and because what he did was unethical and because he RESIGNED and hee wasn't cancelled, while Lindsay is busy tweeting anti-semitic, conspiracy theorizing, anti-vaxx, pro-crazy-loons-at-parents-meetings propaganda. Helen Pluckrose, I imagine, is probably wondering if she has joined a weird cult of nasty reactionary lunatics by mistake.
