Sexist nonsense at Nature Publishing Group's Laddie Magazine

November 17, 2011

Hur, Hur, Hur….good one Nature, good one.

Those women, they just aren’t like us real members of the academic world, right? Good thing they take care of our needs so we menfolk can do the hard thinking, eh?

What a load of adolescent bollocks. Imagine my surprise to find that it was Edited by our old buddy Henry Gee. You remember Hank.

Normally I’d advise ignoring this sort of intentionally offensive attempt to draw attention to a print magazine. After all, this is just what they do when they feel their circulation and readership are flagging. But, this is one of the more high profile academic publications. And unfortunately that means the promulgation of old sex-role tropes needs to be addressed.

You will find excellent commentary which will help you to catalog the many problems with Nature’s latest piddle on the carpet of Academia at the following links.
Paul Anderson
Isis
Emily
Anne Jefferson
Janet Stemwedel
Christie Wilcox

___
UPDATE:

this comment nails it. especially with

Finally Mr Gee, since Nature seems not to be discriminating about what fiction it publishes, I have three stories of my own you might wish to consider publishing in future issues of Nature:

Gayspace (a hilarious tale of how gay people access parallel dimensions to look fabulous)
Blackspace (a hilarious tale of how black people access parallel dimensions to be fast sprinters)
Jewspace (a hilarious tale of how Jewish people access parallel dimensions to save money)

Or maybe you’d have the sense not to publish these. Because they are offensive, and based on stereotypes. And you’d be right.

No Responses Yet to “Sexist nonsense at Nature Publishing Group's Laddie Magazine”

  1. Pinko Punko Says:

    DM- did you read the nice metacommentary in the comments to the article? The Ed (Hank) drops by as well as the Ed (writer) and his wife.

    Sad.

    Like

  2. drugmonkey Says:

    Yes, Henry’s “why didn’t my transparent troll work? waaahh!!!!” is kinda annoying. I’m pretty sure it violates the 7th rule of FWDAOTI

    Like


  3. […] The ‘story’ can be found here, and a summary of some of the commentary it has provoked is here. […]

    Like

  4. marc Says:

    I thought the best comment was that the story seemed to violate the terms that one has to agree to in order to sign up to comment on said story.

    Like

  5. drugmonkey Says:

    Same comment, I believe. The guy has it as a blog post which I’ll link when I get a chance.

    I’m not a fan of their civility policy and this episode shows one reason why it is stupid. Offensive content is so clearly eyes-of-beholder territory. What the NPG policy really means is “we will remove whatever WE don’t like and not be bothered if our stuff offends anyone else.”

    Like

  6. physioprof Says:

    Gee is a fucken angry control-freak douchebagge.

    Like

  7. Isabel Says:

    Apparently I am the only person who finds the premise a little off as well. Busy preparing dinner, his wife sends two midddle aged men on an emergency shopping trip to buy little girls’ panties. wtf? A goal that we are reminded of about twenty times in the short article.

    Like

  8. drugmonkey Says:

    Oh PP, you have to let that last manuscript review go dude!

    Like

  9. drugmonkey Says:

    Isabel,
    I will admit I’ve been trying hard to ignore that bit of weirdness…my gorge has been over exercised of late what with the Penn State University pederast and all…

    Like

  10. wantsChange Says:

    Nature should be shopping for a new editor. It’s completely inappropriate for Gee to openly declare himself a sexist in this way and have him remain in power over what gets published at Nature. I’m surprised there hasn’t been more of a call for a boycott of manuscript review for NPG. I certainly would decline to referee their manuscripts until NPG bags Gee.

    Like

  11. Anonymous Says:

    Totally agree, wantschange.

    Like


  12. What wantsChange says.

    But what do I know, I’m only a social scientist. If an editor in my field had done something like this, the apology would already have been written at this point.

    Like


  13. I caved in and read the article this afternoon. What a badly-written, scrotocentric piece of inane twaddle. It’s an insult to anybody who has half a brain and knows how to use it, irrespective of gender.

    I guess none of these smug idiots realise just how repulsive and self-centred they sound (and doubtless are). I gave up on trying to do a parody of this mess, but I did rewrite the text to make the protagonist a little more self-aware.
    http://blog.anarchic-teapot.net/2011/11/19/pratspace/
    It’s not very good: I did it quickly and the source material was appalling, but I reckon that is the version that should have been published.

    Like

  14. dsks Says:

    NormalSpace can easily be mistaken for WomanSpace by chaps who haven’t reached the prerequisite escape velocity to get out of ArseSpace. It’s the way the light bends around that cosmic mass of ignorance that warps one’s perspective so.

    Like

  15. Eli Rabett Says:

    When guys go shopping. Much funnier and some physics to boot.

    Like

  16. Eli Rabett Says:

    Past time that Nature throw Gee out. Otherwise expect more of the same.

    Like


  17. […] Sexist nonsense at Nature Publishing Group’s Laddie Magazine, DrugMonkey […]

    Like


Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: