Fighting academia’s feminist tentacles – Bettina Arndt 14Feb 2024
https://bettinaarndt.substack.com/p/fighting-academias-feminist-tentacles?
– Perth exercise scientist leads the charge.
FEB 14, 2024
As the toxic sludge of feminist claptrap seeps through the academic world, there are many principled researchers grinding their teeth at this blatant ideology and poor scholarship. Most don’t dare put their head above the parapet. But now there’s a lone warrior calling it out, well aware he is likely to implode his academic career in the process.
James Nuzzo (pronounced ‘NEW zo’) is a Perth-based exercise scientist who grew up in rural Pennsylvania keen on sports and weight-lifting. A high school anatomy and physiology course inspired him ultimately to pursue a PhD on the neuroscience of strength training at the University of NSW, followed by several successful years researching the physiology of muscle strength and fatigue. He’s currently affiliated with Edith Cowan University, busily churning out academic articles on topics like exercise neurophysiology, physical fitness testing, the history of exercise research and strength training equipment, and sex differences in exercise preferences and performance.
Men’s health has also been one of his key interests and he wasn’t happy to see his discipline infiltrated by gender ideologues whining about women missing out while totally ignoring the health outcomes of boys and men.
He came across one article which took this bias to a whole new level. A bunch of mainly female exercise physiology students from UNSW cooked up the dubious argument that “gender-based violence is a blind spot for sports and exercise medical professionals.” That was the title of their journal article published in Sports Medicine, an article which could be used as a primer for feminist tunnel-vision.
The ideologues started off with a position statement from the peak American sports medicine body alerting healthcare providers to the health impacts of sexual violence. But then they did a neat pivot, without any explanation, to devote their entire article to regurgitating all the usual dogma about gender-based intimate partner violence (IPV). All the familiar cherry-picked data is there showing women as the only victims – the only mention of men referred to their “socially determined privilege,” an alleged cause of violence against women. No mention of young male victims of abuse by coaches or fellow athletes, of which there have been plenty, nor of lesbian perpetrators of abuse (lesbians top the chart of rates of IPV). And not one word about the decades of research showing men and women are victims of IPV at roughly equal rates.
Nuzzo set out to put them straight, seeking to get the true facts published in a letter in Sports Medicine. And he succeeded, but only after nearly a year of back and forth with the journal. It helped that he combined forces with Deborah Powney, the University of Central Lancashire psychologist doing work on male victims of coercive control, and John Barry, from the Centre for Male Psychology in London.
It was revealing that Sports Medicine took the unusual step of submitting the letter to peer review but, amazingly the three reviewers all concurred with the critique by Nuzzo and his co-authors. Next, the original authors were given a chance to respond – but after months, they declined that option. So ultimately the letter was published – one small victory for proper scientific inquiry.
Their published comment proved it was the UNSW academics who had the blind spot, by providing a summary of some of the best research showing equal gender rates of IPV victimization, which also applied in sports environments.
Interestingly, there was a male lead author amongst the predominantly female UNSW academics, and I thought I’d have a chat to him about what had happened. The good professor agreed to have a chat – and a fascinating conversation ensued. Unfortunately, he’s now decided that our chat was off the record. How’s that for retrospective revoked consent?
Storm in a teacup, you might conclude. Perhaps. But it is a telling example of how the feminist take-over of our universities is playing out. We now have increasing numbers of radical young female academics and students, probably indoctrinated back in their school days, all keen on displaying their feminist credentials in their so-called scholarship. Increasingly they are forcing this sludge into diverse disciplines, right across all academia.
And hardly anyone calls them out. One wonders about whether all their professors are simply wimps, too nervous to attract the wrath of these wildcats by challenging their blinkered rants, or too lazy to do the work and check out whether there’s evidence to support these radical views, or perhaps they are themselves all captured, convinced the feminist perspective is the only truth. Sometimes it is senior, suitably indoctinated academics who are leading the charge, now that they have been successfully installed at all levels of our universities.
Let’s not forget these are the teachers of the next generation, intent on convincing young women they are set for a life of persecution, abuse and discrimination. They are teaching our future bureaucrats who’ll be setting key policies, the future lawyers, judges, social workers, and the politicians who will be deciding where the dollars are spent. Their goals are transparent and the process is unfolding before our very eyes.
I had a chat on video this week with James Nuzzo, talking not only about his Sports Medicine skirmish, but also all the other sacred cows he’s been targeting in his published articles, blogs and podcasts.
This brave guy deserves a wider audience. Check out his Substack, The Nuzzo Letter. You’ll also find him on X and LinkedIn, and his research is indexed in Google Scholar.
It’s infuriating to read Nuzzo’s research and discover how much we’ve been hoodwinked. How often do we hear complaints about the “underrepresentation” of female participants in research studies? Nuzzo points out that in America the Office for Research on Women’s Health was established within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1990, predicated on allegations of the “widespread exclusion of women in clinical trials.” This assertion was later debunked, and annual reports from the Office reveal that women constitute 55-60 percent of all participants in NIH-funded clinical trials each year.
Yet thirty years later, the Office is flourishing, pouring out funding for women only projects. Similarly, all the Australian governments fall over each other to prove their commitment to improving health outcomes for women and girls – as Nuzzo shows here.
Another of Nuzzo’s published articles concerned bias against men’s issues in the UN and WHO. He conducted a content analysis showing consistent promotion of women’s issues whilst men are ignored. The UN’s sustainable development goal on ‘gender equality’ is exclusive to females. The organisation observes nine International Days for women’s issues/achievements and one day for men. They operate 69 Twitter accounts dedicated to women’s issues and none for men. And so it goes on.
If this issue presses your buttons, perhaps you’d like to sign a petition to defund the UN? DAVIA (the Domestic Abuse and Violence International Alliance) has launched a petition that calls on groups to “suspend their funding of the United Nations until all UN agencies fulfill their pledge to respect the ‘dignity and worth’ of all persons and assure the ‘equal rights of men and women.’ Surely that is a worthy goal.
It’s encouraging to see these growing signs of rebellion. But, also, a pleasant change to find someone looking for the good in men. I loved Nuzzo’s most recent blog on Men: The Martyrs of Medicine. He’s unearthed a 1929 medical journal article listing the names of male doctors and researchers who died as a result of acquiring the disease they were studying or medical technology they were developing. Brave men who gave their lives trying to save others from yellow fever, typhus, bubonic plague, and other infectious diseases. It was quite a story and a welcome change to see the risk-taking now so often labelled as toxic being promoted as valuable, even inspiring.