We’re guessing, but we imagine most of you are not regular readers of “Gender Place and Culture,” a journal of feminist geography.

Earlier this year it published an essay called “Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon,” by Helen Wilson of the Portland Ungendering Research Initiative. She claimed to study how dog parks are microcosms of hegemonic masculinist norms.

Here is just one passage: “The data suggest that the deciding variable for whether or not a human would interfere in a dog’s rape/humping incident was the dog’s gender. When a male dog was raping/humping another male dog, humans attempted to intervene 97% of the time. When a male dog was raping/humping a female dog, humans only attempted to intervene 32% of the time.”

Helen Wilson isn’t real. The Portland Ungendering Research Initiative isn’t real. And any “research” in the paper is all made up. The article was printed in May and retracted in October.

Portland State University may punish professor Peter Boghossian for this and other fake academic papers. He and two others submitted them to academic journals to ridicule grievance studies and the way they overwhelm academia and society at the expense of serious scholarship. A few were published.

Frauds and fakers have committed untold scientific hoaxes — fake giants, fake mermaids, fake cures, fake energy sources, fake scholarship. They undermine scientific integrity. They are unethical. They are no joke.

But that doesn’t mean that a scientific satire can’t be a piercing tool to ridicule and expose political orthodoxy. Boghossian has done the scientific community and the public a service to show how easily outrageous and fraudulent scholarship can appear in “scientific” journals. That hardly deserves punishment.