But credible enough to pass peer review, apparently.
The paper states that the penis as a form of “’hegemonic masculinity and cultural construction,’ presented in the ‘essence of the hard-on’,” and even argues that man-made climate change is happening because of “patriarchal power dynamics,” brought on by the conceptual penis.
It seems to me that this sort of story deserve comments that consist only of puns. Hard science. Scientific Con sensus. Whatever.
It didn’t really make it past a peer review. They were rejected by a low tier journal which recommended they resubmit at a vanity journal. The vanity journal was, of course, happy to take their money and publish anything but that’s in their nature. For details.
Per other sources…
“To the many wondering if the paper was printed just as submitted, they wrote that they received comments from two peer reviewers, both of whom praised the paper. One asked for minor changes. “We effortlessly completed them in about two hours, putting in a little more nonsense about ‘manspreading’ (which we alleged to be a cause of climate change) and ‘dick-measuring contests.’”
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/05/22/faux-scholarly-article-sets-criticism-gender-studies-and-open-access-publishing
The test would be if another paper that was contrary to the received wisdom about feminism would be published.
Of course, no high level journal in the field would publish a paper without high status authors.
Fake news.