Academia Comics The Thrill of Friction Those Poor Darling Paedophiles

Only Doing It For The Betterment Of Us All

August 9, 2022 by David 97 Comments

Time to revisit the world of “queer studies,” via the academic journal Qualitative Research:

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. I therefore started reading the comics in the same way as my research participants had told me that they did it: while masturbating.

Hey, I’m just reading what it says here.

In this research note, I will recount how I set up an experimental method of masturbating to shota comics, and how this participant observation of my own desire not only gave me a more embodied understanding of the topic for my research but also made me think about loneliness and ways to combat it as driving forces of the culture of self-published erotic comics.

It’s embodied, you see. And before you go getting any untoward ideas, it’s all being done selflessly, high-mindedly, for the greater good:

Untangling this largely unresearched knot of desires for fictional boy characters will give us a better understanding of human sexuality and provide a more solid basis for policymaking.

The, um, research in question – by Mr Karl Andersson, a PhD student at the University of Manchester – was not without its challenges and frustrations: “I had hit a wall in my research. Semi-structured interviews can only take you so far,” we’re told. “I had a persistent feeling of only having traced the surface of my topic, and of wanting to go deeper.” And the hence the masturbation, of course.

Further, annotated and fairly graphic, details of Mr Andersson’s paedophilic self-pleasuring project – sorry, “ethnographic fieldwork” – can be perused via the link above. Should that be your thang.

Update, via the comments:

Mags adds,

From mental masturbation to actual masturbation.

Stunning and brave.

Indeed, and given the rambling on offer, the words self-involved scarcely cover it.

As to the “embodied understanding” mentioned above, it remains unclear what exactly was achieved – beyond the obvious, I mean. Mr Andersson tells us that during three months of, er, research, and 30 notebook entries, his mind often wandered to thoughts of other gentlemen doing much the same thing with the same publications, including the copies he’d acquired second-hand. This is described as a “feeling of intimacy.” Dozing off afterwards is described as “self-care,” which is apparently important. And we’re informed that the Cellophane wrappers of his pornography collection “signalled luxury and investment in myself.” It’s Earth-rumbling stuff.

Oddly, there’s no mention of an obvious issue, to which one might suppose an enquiring mind might turn. As I understand it, the protagonists in shota are very often pre-pubescent. That this detail doesn’t appear to have concerned Mr Andersson, or his peers and supervisors, possibly tells us something about the academic circles in which he moves. Presumably, this kind of contrived edginess is itself found titillating. Sort of, “Ooh, aren’t we terribly daring. How sophisticated we are.”

And this seems apposite:

This isn’t just someone who gets off by masturbating over pictures of children. It’s someone who gets off by everyone knowing they masturbate over pictures of children. All under the guise of “research.”

But hey, progress!

As CJ Nerd notes in the comments, Mr Andersson’s paper, and his pretence of intellectual heft, feels like a shit test. And so, one has to wonder whether the widespread and rapid propagation, not least in academia, of transgender ideology and boutique identities has emboldened other niche psychological demographics – including, seemingly, paedophiles – to make themselves known while daring us to disapprove.

An earlier visit to the world of “queer studies” can be found here. And somewhat related, this.

Via Alice Sullivan.




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