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.”
The 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.”
The Thesis
The editorial’s argument is structured around a few moves the reader should be able to recognize.
The first move is to observe that men, on average, have higher carbon footprints than women, driven principally by transportation, tourism, and meat consumption. This is true and unremarkable. It is also a population-level statistical regularity that says approximately nothing about what causes climate change at the planetary scale, global emissions are driven by the energy intensity of feeding, housing, transporting, and supplying electricity to eight billion people, not by who eats the most steak in Helsinki.
The second move is to observe that men dominate the leadership and ownership of extractive and energy-intensive industries. This is also true. It is also a description of a far broader pattern, men dominate the leadership and ownership of essentially every dangerous, dirty, physically demanding, or capital-intensive occupation in every society for which we have records, including the societies the authors would not consider patriarchal. The editorial offers no mechanism by which masculinity itself causes fossil-fuel use, as opposed to causing men to disproportionately end up in jobs that involve producing the energy modern life depends on. The correlation is treated as a moral indictment without the causal step being argued.
The third move is the one that does the most work, and is worth quoting directly:
“climate denialism often combines with misogyny”
This is the rhetorical heart of the entire project. It converts substantive disagreement with the consensus framing into a personality defect, a gender pathology, specifically. It is the same maneuver Hultman performed in his much-cited “Cool Dudes in Norway” paper, which framed climate-skeptical Norwegian men as suffering from a particular configuration of threatened masculinity. In the new editorial, the move is generalized: doubt is now diagnosed.
This is not a serious method of intellectual engagement. It is what one does instead of engaging. If your model of the world holds that the people who disagree with you are not making arguments but expressing psychological wounds, you have constructed a framework in which you cannot lose, and from which you cannot learn. It is, in a precise sense, unfalsifiable.
The Unstable Subject
A further problem runs through the editorial that may be worth flagging for readers who don’t follow this literature.
“Men” is not a stable category in the paper. Sometimes it means roughly half the human species. Sometimes it means “elite white eurowestern men” specifically. Sometimes it means far-right political elites. Sometimes it expands to include all participants in industrial economies; sometimes it contracts to the leadership of oil majors. The category gets re-sized whenever the rhetorical situation requires it.
This is convenient but corrosive. If “men” caused industrial civilization, then most men in human history are exempted, because most men never had access to the kind of industrial capacity the editorial describes. If only “elite white eurowestern men” caused it, then the indictment of masculinity-as-such collapses, because what is being described is a thin slice of a particular class in a particular region during a particular two centuries. The editorial wants to make the broader claim while only being responsible for the narrower one.
Real analysis requires picking a category and sticking with it. Activism does not.
The Genre
There is a genre of scholarship developing at the intersection of activist humanities and climate framing, and this editorial is a clean specimen. Its features are recognizable across dozens of similar papers: the premise that climate change is settled and catastrophic; a gendered, racialized, or postcolonial reframe applied to it; an analytical move that treats disagreement as pathology rather than as substance; and a closing exhortation to “play our part in collectively creating gender-equitable and ecologically sustainable” futures, or some near variant.
It is a genre that has its own journals, its own conferences, its own grants, and its own footnote ecology. The editorial under discussion cites Hultman’s earlier work, which cites the prior literature, which cites Hultman. The “(M)Anthropocene” coinage itself comes from a 2019 chapter by Hultman and Paul Pulé in a Routledge handbook also co-edited by Shefer, one of the present editorial’s authors.
This is academically accepted. It is also not climate science. And it should not be passed off as climate science by a press service whose readership reasonably expects the word “research” to mean something specific.
What This Costs
The closing point is the one worth dwelling on.
The authors are at publicly funded universities. The journal is on the catalog of a major commercial publisher. Phys.org’s piece will travel onward into other outlets. None of this is illegal. but all of it is paid for, and what is being paid for is a body of work whose function is, at this point, indistinguishable from activism. The editorial does not pretend otherwise; it calls on readers, especially men, to “play our part” in a particular political program.
It is fair to ask what the science press is doing when it presents that program as “new research.” It is fair to ask what universities are doing when they fund and promote it as such. And it is fair to ask whether the climate question is well served by a literature in which one half of humanity has been credentialed as the cause and the other half as the cure.
The full editorial is open access. Anyone who suspects this account is uncharitable should read it for themselves.
