“Unlocking Pleasure: The Surprising Truth Behind the Great Vibrator Myth That Everyone Gets Wrong!”
In other words, Maines’s narrative was just too good to not be true so people ate it up.
But the general public falling for an entertaining story is one thing; the fact that it took nearly twenty years for any scholars to fact-check Maines’s book speaks to deeper issues within the field of academic history. As Lieberman and Schatzberg argue:
“The success of Technology of Orgasm thus serves as a cautionary tale for how easily
falsehoods can become embedded in qualitative fields….The success of her book suggests that academics rarely check each others’ facts carefully, especially when repeating stories that they want to be true.
…[Indeed] We believe that Technology of Orgasm is not an isolated case. The same pressures to
publish that produce flawed research in the natural sciences and quantitative social sciences also exist in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. In the humanities and qualitative social sciences, these pressures encourage narrow, banal, and irrelevant research, often disguised by horrid prose and vapid theorizing…
There are few safeguards against flawed empirical research in the humanities. Scholarly
publishing rarely involves any sort of fact checking. Peer reviewers and readers for academic
presses are not expected to confirm a manuscript’s empirical claims, beyond what they already
know. Book reviewers likewise rarely examine citations or sources. Far more fact-checking
occurs in a typical magazine article than in a scholarly publication, despite complaints from
Post Comment