I'm guessing the headline kind of gives it away, but yeah, content warning.
Like, not a soft warning about low-level profanity or the risqué double entendre or two. I mean red lights flashing, sirens blaring, and spike-strips-laid-across-the-road content warning.
[Editor's Note: Seriously, not for the little ones.]
A leading university has launched an inquiry after it emerged that one of its PhD students has written a research paper about sexual attraction to young boys.
Okay, that doesn't sound too bad on the surface. The sexualizing of children and related predatory behavior is a present and growing danger in our society and it's best that we endeavor to understand it so as to…
Karl Andersson spent three months recording his thoughts and feelings while masturbating over images of young boys in Japanese comic books.
No words suffice.
This is possibly criminal depending on the relevant statutes.
In the abstract for the paper, Andersson, who is interviewing fans of shota comics for his PhD, said he wanted to "understand how [they] experience sexual pleasure when reading shota."
That isn't science. That's method acting.
Do you really need to understand, on an intellectual basis, sexual pleasure? And if you experience it beyond that, as in actually deriving sexual pleasure from looking at comic book depictions of young boys engaging in erotic behavior, you don't belong in a PhD program. You belong in therapy.
Or jail.
At least this man wasn't studying serial killers.
In the paper, Andersson explains how he will document the details of each masturbation session in a journal as "a kind of critical self-reflection".
He did.
He describes how he gave up all other sexual activity, from sex with other people to other types of pornography.
He's just that dedicated to science.
"I happened to live alone during this experiment...
I'm thinking he might have cause and effect mixed up.
...and I had newly become single after a long relationship –
Can't imagine why it didn't last. Maybe they were incompatible when it came to big life decisions, like buying a house, having kids, or being attracted to underage boys. You know, typical relationship troubles.
...these factors probably contributed to my willingness and eagerness to explore this method," he wrote.
Eagerness.
Long-time readers know that I like to check out source materials. Surely it can't be this bad, this ridiculous, this depraved.
And sure enough, I was right.
It was worse.
Comically so, but for the nature of the issue.
It is less a research paper and more a 4,000-word cry for help.
The paper was published by Qualitative Research, part of the family of Sage Journals, an august organization specializing in social sciences and representing the very best our elite educational class of dimwitted inbreds and over-educated MAPs can offer.
While the piece had been published months ago, it was only after people outside the world of academia started noticing it that action was taken.
Roll that around in your head for a bit.
This peer-reviewed paper, read by hundreds if not thousands of people within the academic world, raised not so much as an eyebrow. In their coddled environs of tenure, mediocrity, and sociopathic detachment from the society in which they live, this was A-Okay.
In any case, the jig was up, and the cockroaches scattered faster than a federal raid on a Jeffrey Epstein compound.
This is what you get now when you go to read the study.
Due to ethical concerns surrounding this article and the social harm being caused by the publication of this work, the publishers have now agreed with the Journal Editors and have decided to remove the article while this investigation is ongoing in accordance with COPE guidelines.
Oh, now they agree.
Fortunately, or unfortunately as the case may be, the study remains accessible through the Wayback Machine.
Let's start with the title.
I am not alone – we are all alone: Using masturbation as an ethnographic method in research on shota subculture in Japan
(Note, it is within the shota subculture in Japan that these amateur-produced comics are produced and read.)
First off, "I am not alone - we are all alone."
No, no we're not.
However, Andersson very much is. This man needs help. He does not need affirmation.
Which brings us to the second part of the headline, "Using masturbation as an ethnographic method in research on shota subculture in Japan."
What is the ethnographic method?
Ethnographic methods are a research approach where you look at people in their cultural setting, with the goal of producing a narrative account of that particular culture, against a theoretical backdrop.
That's legit, at least in the social sciences. It's rife with biases and personal baggage. It's barely science at all as the data is corrupted from the start. But at least it attempts, if unsuccessfully, to resemble science.
That's what Andersson started with, but it wasn't, um, satisfying.
I had hit a wall in my research. Semi-structured interviews (Bernard, 2006) can only take you so far, especially when the topic is sensitive (Lee, 1993), which mine is.
He "hit a wall" in his research.
So far everything makes sense. Semi-structured interviews had been transcribed, coded and funnelled into neat findings. A bit too neat, maybe. I had a persistent feeling of only having traced the surface of my topic, and of wanting to go deeper.
What I needed was a method that could remove the ‘separation of mind and body' (Stoller, 1997: xv), and so give me an embodied understanding of my topic.
Because no matter how my research participants' takes on shota differed in terms of favourite theme, preferred age and style of characters, how they related their own selves to the story, and so on, they had one thing in common: almost all of them said that they masturbated to shota material.
Okay, great. Write that down. That's what researchers do. They observe things, and they write those things down.
I tried to inquire about the details of these masturbation sessions, but it was hard to know what to ask, and the conversation sometimes stalled...
...In addition, it would have been impossible for me to grasp how the intellectual reasoning, for example, of entering an alternative past, was connected to the bodily sensation of masturbation without me ‘doing it' myself.
Audre Lorde (1997: 282) has written: ‘The erotic cannot be felt secondhand.' Indeed. And so I realized that my body was equipped with a research tool of its own that could give me, quite literally, a first-hand understanding of shota.
Did I mention this was peer reviewed?
It was peer reviewed.
Here's their process.
Upon submission to a SAGE Journal, your paper enters peer review, where "peers" evaluate the quality of your work. Reviewers aim to ensure the work is rigorous, coherent, uses existing research, and contributes to the discipline.
Rigorous?
Technically, I guess. The dude masturbated a lot. Like, A LOT.
Coherent?
Uses existing research?
Contributes to the discipline?
I will torture you with just a few more excerpts. I don't want you to think I'm cherry picking. The entire paper is like this.
The whole structure surrounding the shared imaginations of shota and other genres creates a ‘feeling of oneness' or ittaikan (Galbraith, 2011: 224), which I would not have become part of without reading the works the way they were intended to be read: while masturbating.
I guess that worked out nicely for you.
Why the long period and the strict rules of masturbating to only 2D material? Because ethnographic fieldwork demands such consistency in order to yield results in the form of a ‘thick description' (Geertz, 1973) of the field.
Ooh, sciency.
The part where he masturbates to illustrations of child pornography?
While my previous masturbation habits had been rather routine, masturbating to shota became more of a ritual: carefully choosing a dōjinshi (what am I in the mood for today?), creating a comfortable position in the bed, dozing off a bit afterwards – it was all part of the ritual.
Dude! Get. Help. Now.
The three months of masturbation to shota comics resulted in 30 entries in my notebook.
Entries?
Despite the importance of understanding all aspects of being human, research on sexuality is often seen as ‘dirty work' (Irvine, 2014: 633), and researchers, not least of sexually explicit comics, are vulnerable to accusations of having a ‘prurient' interest in their research topic (Madill, 2018: 270);
Pro tip: If you don't want to be accused of having a prurient interest in your research, maybe don't make your own masturbation habits a focus of your research.
I will therefore make a point of writing this research note in a rather casual and hands-on way, without any ceremoniously delivered confession: I simply want to explore a method that my research question seems to call for.
Seriously? The paper is full of this, I'm pointing out only a couple so you get the idea. Oh, and just a reminder:
This. Was. Peer. Reviewed.
More than that, even.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen for commenting on an early version of this article, the two anonymous reviewers for providing useful feedback, and my PhD supervisor Sharon Kinsella for always encouraging me to go where my research takes me.
This is Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen:
There is an interesting Twitter thread on this that I don't want to put here, nor translate it, nor show some of the disturbing shota images it incorporates. Believe it or not, I kind of sugar-coated things here. But should you want to know more, here it is.
Moving on to Sharon Kinsella.
In her defense, encouraging someone to go where their research takes them is pretty benign advice. She has been asked for comment, but I have not yet found anything at this writing.
This notion of becoming your own research subject is a wholesale corruption of the very core of the scientific method, and it is not a one-off. This is coming into vogue as Andersson documents in defending his decision to proceed with this kind of "research."
And this is not one disturbed PhD student publishing an unhinged paper on his blog. It was peer reviewed. It was commented on by a professor. And while Qualitative Research claims it has been investigating the paper since April, it didn't actually do anything about it until forced.
Not only that, but once it burst into the open, academics continued to defend it.
Here is just one example, mostly screen captures as they have been largely deleted by the authors:
This is the man they are defending, which may explain why they deleted their tweets. (I will place a specific language warning here. It is a long tweet and a screen capture would not do it justice.)
These things may be unpleasant to look at, or even think about, and if we could leave them to fester quietly in dark corners, maybe we would.
But we can't, not anymore. It is infecting institutions that have enormous influence over society.
We must shine a light on it, a bright one, and not turn away as much as we might like to.
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