{"id":444094,"date":"2026-05-13T12:26:06","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T19:26:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=444094"},"modified":"2026-05-14T15:01:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T22:01:10","slug":"masculine-behavior-bad-for-the-planet-says-phys-org-we-read-the-paper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=444094","title":{"rendered":"\u201cMasculine Behavior Bad for the Planet,\u201d Says Phys.org. We Read the Paper."},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From Watts Up With That?<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Charles Rotter<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last Tuesday Phys.org, a science aggregator widely picked up by mainstream outlets, ran a piece under the headline<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201cMasculine behavior bad for the planet says new research.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Masculine behavior bad for the planet says new research<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The press release<\/a> opens by announcing that \u201cmajor 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.\u201d A reader could be forgiven for assuming that some new study had measured something, found something, and produced a finding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is not what happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u201cresearch\u201d in question is an editorial introduction<\/a> to a double special issue of NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies<\/em>, 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 \u201cpro-meat online influencers in Finland\u201d to discussions of pipeline politics in Canada. The editorial\u2019s organizing concept is \u201c(M)Anthropocene\u201d, the Anthropocene with a male prefix bolted on the front to signal who, in the authors\u2019 view, is responsible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I read it so you don\u2019t have to. Here is what is actually going on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What This Document Is<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is the first problem with the press coverage. The Phys.org framing, \u201cnew research,\u201d \u201cmajor new research on climate change\u201d, 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<\/em> and then proceeds to assign causal and moral responsibility to a gender category.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s 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 \u201celite white eurowestern men\u201d gets the headline treatment without so much as a \u201cresearchers argue.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Thesis<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The editorial\u2019s argument is structured around a few moves the reader should be able to recognize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The third move is the one that does the most work, and is worth quoting directly:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201cclimate denialism often combines with misogyny\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cCool Dudes in Norway<\/a>\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not a serious method of intellectual engagement. It is what one does instead of<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Unstable Subject<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A further problem runs through the editorial that may be worth flagging for readers who don\u2019t follow this literature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMen\u201d is not a stable category in the paper. Sometimes it means roughly half the human species. Sometimes it means \u201celite white eurowestern men\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is convenient but corrosive. If \u201cmen\u201d 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 \u201celite white eurowestern men\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Real analysis requires picking a category and sticking with it. Activism does not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Genre<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cplay our part in collectively creating gender-equitable and ecologically sustainable\u201d futures, or some near variant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s earlier work, which cites the prior literature, which cites Hultman. The \u201c(M)Anthropocene\u201d coinage itself comes from a 2019 chapter by Hultman and Paul Pul\u00e9 in a Routledge handbook also co-edited by Shefer<\/a>, one of the present editorial\u2019s authors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cresearch\u201d to mean something specific.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What This Costs<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The closing point is the one worth dwelling on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The authors are at publicly funded universities. The journal is on the catalog of a major commercial publisher. Phys.org\u2019s 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 \u201cplay our part\u201d in a particular political program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is fair to ask what the science press is doing when it presents that program as \u201cnew research.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The full editorial is open access.<\/a> Anyone who suspects this account is uncharitable should read it for themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

_____________________________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah, you’re right to be skeptical\u2014it’s largely junk science in the sense of ideological synthesis masquerading as objective analysis.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The “new research” is a double special issue <\/strong>of NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies (2025\u20132026), edited by Kadri Aavik, Jeff Hearn, Martin Hultman, and Tamara Shefer, with contributions from 20+ authors across 13 countries. It’s not a single empirical study with new data but a collection of review\/theoretical pieces in critical studies on men and masculinities (CSMM)<\/strong>\u2014a field rooted in feminist theory, ecofeminism, intersectionality, and concepts like “hegemonic masculinity,” “(M)Anthropocene,” and “petro-masculinity.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These journals prioritize critiquing power structures (patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism) over falsifiable hypothesis-testing. The language frames “elite white Western men” and associated norms (dominance, risk-taking, status via big cars\/meat) as the core drivers, while calling for reshaping masculinities. This is activism scholarship, not neutral climate science.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some underlying observations have empirical support from other sources:<\/p>\n\n\n\n