Circling the wagons
https://stuartritchie.substack.com/p...ing-the-wagons
There was no defending that appalling "autoethnography" paper on masturbation. But a lot of academics defended it anyway
Stuart Ritchie Aug 11 2022
A conservative politician attacks a peer-reviewed research paper by a Humanities PhD student.
Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? Anti-free speech. Anti-academic freedom. A chilling atmosphere for researchers. But before you get out the loudhailer and head to protest outside Parliament, perhaps it would be good to get a little context. First, here’s the tweet, from Conservative Party MP Neil O’Brien:
My instinct upon seeing a tweet like this is to click the link to the paper—in this case, one published this year in the journal Qualitative Research—and take a look at it. The instinct of several other academics on Twitter was to instantly, reflexively defend the paper from O’Brien’s criticism. But we’ll get to those academics in just a moment. For now, let’s actually look the paper - if we can stomach it.
I think O’Brien buried the lede in his tweet (sorry to use this annoying journalistic term - it just means “didn’t immediately mention the most important part of the story”). That’s because the shota to which the author is masturbating isn’t just “normal” Japanese pornography - it’s Japanese pornography that heavily features pubescent boys. In other words, it’s hand-drawn, simulated, child porn.
You don’t need to look far to see this - you can find it in literally the first line of the paper’s Abstract:
I wanted to understand how my research participants experience sexual pleasure when reading shota, a Japanese genre of self-published erotic comics that features young boy characters.
The recently-single researcher—a PhD student named Karl Andersson at the University of Manchester—describes an “experiment” where, for a period of three months, he masturbated only to shota magazines. He kept a diary, updated each time he masturbated, detailing “which material I had used, where I had done it, at what time, and for how long”.
It’s quite difficult to choose which parts of the paper to quote; I actually recommend you read the whole thing (it’s not long), just to see how unbelievably weird “autoethnography” research—studies where the researcher describes their own personal experience and tries to draw some wider lessons for society—can get. But here’s one quotation (note the “very young”):
The examples above, with stories from a past childhood, were believable to me, as in ‘that could have happened’... But more often, very young boy characters would greedily jump over the first cock that presented itself. That too worked for me, but it was different. If the boyhood stories enhanced a sexual curiosity that was there from the start in the typical pubescent boy that the characters were modelled on, these other stories pasted an overly virile sexuality onto characters that would not be sexual to start with (or at least not that sexual, or in that way).
And here’s a quotation from one of Karlsson’s diaries (I have to re-emphasize that this was published in a peer-reviewed academic paper):
I continued in bed, arranged the pillows until I was in a comfortable position, a bit ceremonial. ... The boy is now observing Tokio-kun through the window, on the veranda, while jerking off. He slips on the snow and is discovered. Tokio-kun angry, but also excited even as he keeps repeating ‘I’m not ****!’. The boy who has admitted to everything has nothing to lose, so he throws himself over Tokio-kun and starts sniffing his cock and licking his smooth balls, and while waiting for the shot I came!
Some of it is just bizarre:
3D [as opposed to the 2D comics] is my culture, just like milk and muesli is my breakfast, and not fish and miso soup, which you might be served for breakfast at a traditional ryokan in Japan. I can enjoy both, but I think I will never overcome my preference – I wonder if any of us truly can. And so, it was necessary to be diligent enough to abstain from the ‘milk and muesli’ of porn during this experiment, in order to see what happened to my body on a long diet of ‘fish and miso soup’.
Towards the end, he tries to make some kind of insightful point by writing:
When we masturbate, someone else is always there. During this fieldwork, others were there with me, both in the form of the characters that populated the dōjinshi, but also in the form of the invisible creator of these characters and the other readers who were enjoying them.
“Fieldwork”! As someone who does quantitative (as opposed to qualitative) research, I always have a boggle reaction when I see papers like this. This counts as research?! To be unreasonably charitable to autoethnography in general, it might occasionally be useful: it could generate hypotheses which we can then properly test in quantitative studies, with actual data, rather than just a diary (what’s frustrating is when researchers stop after the qualitative part, or even argue that qualitative research is better than quantiative).
But even for autoethnography, this paper is terrible. A masturbation diary isn’t “research”. There is absolutely nothing we learn from it apart from gaining a disturbing insight into the mind of the author.
And that mind is a very warped place. The writer Ben Sixsmith dug into Andersson’s background and found that he used to run a magazine with eroticised pictures of boys “as young as 13”, and gave a terrifying interview to Vice magazine in 2012 which has to be read to be believed. I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t want to push this, but if you look at the relevant UK law, I don’t see how the shota materials he has in his possession are legal (but as I say: not a lawyer).
What I’m mainly interested in is the reaction from Karlsson’s fellow academics. Happily, there were many academics who were repulsed by the paper and said so loudly - and good for them. But when some other academics saw a Conservative MP tweeting about the study, it was simply too much. They sprang into action - and also blundered straight into what was—deliberately-set or otherwise—a trap.
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