“Masculine Behavior Bad for the Planet,” Says Phys.org. We Read the Paper.
2 days ago Charles Rotter
By Charles Rotter
Last Tuesday Phys.org, a science aggregator widely picked up by mainstream outlets, ran a piece under the headline:
“Masculine behavior bad for the planet says new research.”
https://phys.org/news/2026-05-masculine-behavior-bad-planet.htmlThe press release opens by announcing that “major new research on climate change, global warming and environmental collapse, how they connect with what men do, and what to do about it, has just been published.” A reader could be forgiven for assuming that some new study had measured something, found something, and produced a finding.
That is not what happened.
The “research” in question is an editorial introduction to a double special issue of NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, written by Kadri Aavik (Tallinn University), Jeff Hearn (Huddersfield), Martin Hultman (Gothenburg), and Tamara Shefer (University of the Western Cape). It introduces twenty-two papers across two issues with titles ranging from analyses of “pro-meat online influencers in Finland” to discussions of pipeline politics in Canada. The editorial’s organizing concept is “(M)Anthropocene”, the Anthropocene with a male prefix bolted on the front to signal who, in the authors’ view, is responsible.
I read it so you don’t have to. Here is what is actually going on.
What This Document Is
This is not a study. It is an editorial, the introduction a guest-edited journal issue uses to set the table for the papers that follow. It is published in a humanities journal that focuses on gender theory and is, on its own terms, doing exactly what such a journal is supposed to do.
That is the first problem with the press coverage. The Phys.org framing, “new research,” “major new research on climate change”, invites readers to think they are encountering empirical findings about the climate system, or at minimum about emissions. They are not. They are encountering a theoretical framework, advanced in a humanities journal, that takes the existence and severity of climate change as a premise and then proceeds to assign causal and moral responsibility to a gender category.
This is the kind of distinction the science press is generally careful about when the politics run the other way. A working paper from a free-market think tank questioning a climate model’s sensitivity gets caveated to within an inch of its life. An editorial in a masculinity-studies journal asserting that climate change is the fault of “elite white eurowestern men” gets the headline treatment without so much as a “researchers argue.”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/05/12/masculine-behavior-bad-for-the-planet-says-phys-org-we-read-the-paper/
