Woke culture is setting back progress by assuming all minorities are victims, warns author

‘Woke’ campaigning is splitting society apart and creating a backlash that could reverse progress on racial and gender equality, an author who placed fake articles in journals as a protest has warned. 

Helen Pluckrose was part of a team who successfully submitted parody articles about ‘dog rape culture’, ‘a conceptual penis’ and the ‘fat-exclusionary’ nature of bodybuilding to show how easily morally fashionable political ideas are published. 

She believes that the obsession with the politics of identity and grievance that she exposed in academia have spread to wider society and are now inflaming tribalism between people of different genders, sexualities, and races. 

Speaking to The Telegraph’s Planet Normal podcast, she predicted that a ‘sense of pride’ among minority groups would make them increasingly angry about being branded as victims. 

And, in turn, she argued that radical and aggressive campaigning for certain issues would lead to the public conflating these activists with the people they claim to represent. 

She said: ‘We’ve got into this kind of polarised position now where either you believe this or want to react against this.

‘People are feeling pushed into taking a stance where either everything is racist or nothing is racist, that we are either in favour of social justice or opposed to it.

‘There is danger of a reaction that is going to be much less tolerant. My fear certainly is that we could lose progress on racial and gender equality.’

Ms Pluckrose gave the example of trans people, who she said could face more hostility because of the prominence of militant campaigners. 

The author rose to prominence after she teamed up with Peter Boghossian from Portland State University, and the mathematician James Lindsay to produce 20 hoax papers on a field of study loosely defined as ‘grievance studies’.

These papers – seven of which were accepted and four published online – were based on just ‘nutty or inhumane’ ideas that they ran with. 

Their aim was to expose how easily morally fashionable political ideas are published as academic research.

One paper, published in Gender, Place & Culture, claimed to be based on a year observing sexual misconduct among dogs in a US park.

The paper said that parks were ‘petri dishes for canine ‘rape culture” and said people needed to be aware of the way dogs were treated depending on their gender.

It was written by fake author called Helen Wilson, who claimed to have a doctorate in feminism studies. The real authors were James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian.

‘I think that certain aspects of knowledge production in the United States have been corrupted,’ Dr Boghossian told WSJ.

The year before they had published a paper called ‘The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct’ in the journal Cogent Social Sciences.

Their scribblings included the phrases ‘gender-performative, high fluid social construct’, ‘exclusionary to disenfranchised communities’, and ‘isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity’.

They even associated male anatomy with climate change.

Another paper published in the journal Fat Studies claimed that body building is ‘fat-exclusionary’.

Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, prominent academics and science communicators, defended the stunt after it sparked criticism from some academics.