Disregarding The Body – Podcast
The Crisis of our Time
Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art
Companion Posts
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Starting Again
I was born in the sixties. But I am not a child of the 60’s. My family was lower-middle class, and by the standards of the time, traditional in most every way. Dad was a minister. If he or mom had lived into their 90’s they would not have imagined the social changes we have witnessed in the last 20 years. It would be too easy to say the sexual revolution of the 60’s caused all this change, as some conservatives maintain. But the roots of this change go back much further than the swinging 60’s.
So I’m embarking with some misgivings on a survey of cultural history. There are deep intellectual and cultural traditions that have shaped our everyday lives. We’ve come to a point in the Western world where the statement “I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body” is comprehensible to many public leaders, at least in public. That phrase would be completely incomprehensible to my parent’s generation, in public or private, not to mention every preceding generation. It is still incomprehensible to many, if not most people today. But if you express your bewilderment in public, say at many workplaces in the Western world, increasingly the odds are you will be regarded as stupid, immoral or worse. You may be reprimanded for your irrational “phobia.” You might even have your career derailed. If you broadcast your view on a public forum, say Twitter, expect the Twitterati to pounce with the ferocity of a caged unfed Tiger. In certain parts of the world you may even be charged with a hate-crime for your expressed incredulity at the latest massive cultural shift. (See the following posts, here & here.)
As a 60’s poet might say, “The times they are a changin.”
The tectonic cultural shift in the last 20 years is quite breathtaking. Regardless of what you think about gay marriage, we have gone from year 2000 where the majority of Americans were opposed to gay marriage to today where normalization of Transgenderism is fast approaching.
A long and winding road brought us to this point. I want to offer a thoughtful and hopefully generous exposition, from a Classic Christian point of view, of how we got here. As I go, I’ll be documenting some disturbing current events. (Read my next post). I hope that even those who disagree with Classic Christianity will find here a fair and readable assessment of our state of affairs. (post continues page 2)
When Queer Theory Meets the Cradle
Queering Babies and the Academic Void Where Ethics Should Be
So after marrying shrimp, what’s next? Apparently, queering babies.
In part two of the Citation Needed Podcast pilot, Colin Wright and Brad Polumbo wade into even more disturbing territory: a peer-reviewed paper titled “Queering Babies: Autoethnographic Reflections from a Gay Parent through Surrogacy.”
Let me start by saying this clearly: I don’t toss around accusations lightly. But this paper is deeply inappropriate. Not because it’s about surrogacy, or unconventional family dynamics. But because it tries to sexualize infants under the guise of academic theory—and then gets published in a reputable journal.
What’s the Paper Arguing?
Yes, you read that right. The author, Balazs Boross, attempts to apply queer theory to infants, claiming that because babies defy adult expectations and are not yet “straight,” they are therefore queer.
In short: that babies are inherently queer.
It’s intellectual nonsense—and worse, it veers into incredibly creepy territory.
Autoethnography or Navel-Gazing?
As the podcast explains, the method used here is “autoethnography.” Sounds academic, right? But in practice, it’s just the author journaling his personal feelings and labeling them research.
He reflects on moments like his newborn daughter’s instinctual attempt to nurse from him—an entirely non-sexual, biological behavior—and describes it as “animalistic and perverse.” He says there wasn’t “much intimacy or innocence there.”
Frankly, that’s horrifying. That’s not academic analysis. That’s projecting adult notions of sexuality onto infants, and then publishing it as research.
When Theory Becomes Dangerous
The problem here isn’t just the lack of scholarly rigor. It’s the loss of moral grounding.
Queer theory, as used here, is obsessed with destabilizing boundaries: between man and woman, adult and child, even decency and indecency. In this framework, nothing is off-limits—not even babies.
Colin and Brad hit the nail on the head: this paper doesn’t just explore taboo topics. It removes the taboos entirely, all in the name of challenging “oppressive norms.” That includes norms like age-appropriate sexual boundaries.
If you’re not disturbed by that, you should be.
Why Are Journals Publishing This?
That’s the million-dollar question. Like the brine shrimp paper, this one was published by Springer Nature—a giant in the academic world. The journal? Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society.
So again, this isn’t fringe. This isn’t some Tumblr blog. It’s the academic mainstream.
And as the hosts rightly point out, when peer-reviewed journals accept “research” that cannot be independently evaluated (because it’s just someone’s diary), the entire peer-review process becomes meaningless.
This Is Why People Don’t Trust Academia
When academic journals become playgrounds for ideology and personal confession, they lose their authority.
We’re told to trust experts. But what happens when the experts are publishing manifestos about shrimp weddings and breastfeeding selfies with psychoanalytic commentary? Public trust collapses—and deservedly so.
These aren’t just isolated flukes. They’re symptoms of a deeper sickness in academia: the prioritization of political ideology over empirical evidence, clarity, and basic ethical boundaries.
Where Do We Go from Here?
We need brave voices like Colin Wright and Brad Polumbo to keep pulling back the curtain.
We need academics who are willing to say: No, this isn’t scholarship. No, this doesn’t help anyone understand gender, sexuality, or ecology. No, you don’t get to sexualize infants and call it “research.”
And we need the rest of us—students, readers, citizens—to stop being afraid to say the emperor has no clothes.
[Citation needed podcast]
Check it out for yourself.
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Stay Human
Brine Shrimp, Queer Theory, and the Collapse of Academic Credibility
Have you ever read something so absurd, so off-the-rails bizarre, that you had to double-check whether it was satire?
Well, welcome to the first episode of the Citation Needed Podcast, where Colin Wright and Brad Polumbo do us all the public service of diving headfirst into the bizarre fringes of modern academia. Their pilot episode focuses on a real, peer-reviewed academic paper—published by a major journal, no less—about a queer feminist cyber-wedding between humans and brine shrimp.
No, I’m not making that up. And yes, it’s every bit as surreal as it sounds.
The Paper That Launched a Thousand Facepalms
The paper is titled “Loving the Brine Shrimp: Exploring Queer Feminist Blue Post-Humanities to Reimagine America’s Dead Sea.” Try saying that five times fast. Or once, honestly. It’s the kind of academic Mad Lib that only makes sense in the postmodern humanities world, where ideological signaling has completely replaced intellectual clarity.
Colin calls it “a surrealist love letter to brine shrimp,” which is both hilarious and disturbingly accurate. The author, Ewelina Jarosz (self-described “hydrosexual cyber nymph”—also not satire), writes from within a framework of “blue post-humanities.” If that phrase doesn’t mean anything to you, don’t worry: it was likely invented by the author herself and seems to center on the erotic potential of water.
Yes, really.
What Is This Even About?
As Brad and Colin explain, the paper supposedly critiques ecological damage done to Utah’s Great Salt Lake. But rather than laying out a clear ecological argument, it veers into performance art, eco-sexual activism, and bizarre theoretical jargon.
The central claim? Brine shrimp symbolize queer resilience. Water is a “non-binary, transitional, life-giving substance.” And by marrying shrimp and bathing in the lake, participants in this “cyber wedding” are resisting “settler colonial science” and capitalist commodification.
How is this considered science? That’s the million-dollar question—and the heart of what the podcast is trying to expose.
From Method to Madness
One of the most damning critiques Colin offers is how these papers completely abandon the rigorous structure of scientific research. No hypotheses. No data. No results. Just jargon, performance, and subjective “lived experience.”
This isn’t science. It’s ideological storytelling masquerading as research.
And it’s not harmless. When prestigious journals like Journal of Agriculture and Environmental Ethics—owned by publishing giant Springer Nature—give this stuff a platform, it dilutes the credibility of every legitimate paper they publish.
Why This Matters
We’re living in an age where we’re told to “trust the science.” But when “science” includes cyber weddings to shrimp and eco-sexual manifestos, that trust becomes increasingly fragile. If you want the public to believe in the legitimacy of scientific research, you can’t keep publishing ideological fan-fiction in academic journals.
This paper isn’t just laughable. It’s symptomatic of a broader rot in academia, where political signaling trumps coherence, and where the pretense of progressivism serves as a shield against critique.
The Takeaway
So no, you’re not crazy if you think this is nuts. It is. And thankfully, Colin Wright and Brad Polumbo are calling it out with equal parts humor and clarity.
Their podcast doesn’t just entertain—it shines a much-needed spotlight on how far some corners of academia have drifted from reality. And if we want to restore intellectual seriousness and public trust in research, exposing this madness is the first step.
[Citation needed podcast]
Check it out for yourself.
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Stay Human
Return to Reality in the UK
This is such a huge, huge win for sanity.
“The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom unanimously ruled Wednesday that a woman is someone born biologically female, a move that now excludes transgender women from the legal definition of a woman.
Fox News
Trans women can be excluded from some single-sex spaces and groups under the U.K. Equality Act, the five judges of the top court ruled. These spaces and groups include changing rooms, homeless shelters, swimming areas and medical or counseling services provided only to women.”
“The ruling means that even a transgender person with a certificate that recognizes them as female should not be considered a woman for equality purposes.”
I can’t believe we’ve come to this point in the Western world, that a ruling like this is required. But it is welcomed nonetheless. Stop the insanity! And while we are at it, stop the mutilation and sterilization of our confused youth.
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Stay Human