Fighting academia’s feminist tentacles
– Perth exercise scientist leads the charge.
BETTINA ARNDT, 14 FEB 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.