“Unlocking Pleasure: The Surprising Truth Behind the Great Vibrator Myth That Everyone Gets Wrong!”
journalists about a decline in the practice. Because fact-checking is not a routine
practice in scholarly publication, factual challenges to scholarship, particularly in the field of
history, are rare, and can be perceived as personal attacks rather than part of the scholarly
Process…
Unless a spirit of fact checking and fearless critique is built into the culture of scholarly publishing, false historical narratives like Maines’ will continue to be published and even praised.”
In many ways, the unchallenged publication of The Technology of Orgasm resembles an inadvertent version of the Sokal Affair, an infamous scholarly hoax which similarly revealed a disturbing lack of academic rigour in the humanities. In 1996, Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University and University College London, submitted a deliberately nonsensical academic paper to the journal Social Text to find out whether:
“…a leading North American journal of cultural studies…[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.”
As expected, the paper, titled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, was not subjected to peer review by an expert and duly appeared in the journal’s spring/summer issue. Three weeks later, Sokal published an article in the magazine Lingua Franca revealing the paper to be a hoax, causing much embarrassment and controversy.
Speaking of embarrassment, in response to Lieberman and Schatzberg’s paper, Rachel Maines expressed surprise that it took twenty years for someone to challenge her claims, stating in an interview with The Atlantic that:
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