A Swedish academic who triggered severe public backlash after writing his PhD thesis about masturbating to fantasy child sexual abuse material… has now released a book on the topic. Karl Andersson, previously a PhD student at the University of Manchester in the Japanese studies department, announced the publication of his new book, Impossibly Cute Boys: The Healing Power of Shota Comics in Japan, in a recent YouTube video where he states that the text incorporates his “philosophy of boy worship.”
That would be this chap here, mentioned previously. The chap for whom three months of masturbation constitutes “research,” the basis for a PhD. And given the not uncommon consequences of childhood molestation, Mr Andersson’s use of the words healing and worship may strike readers as somewhat perverse.
When this unobvious approach to scholarship – “an experimental method of masturbating” – first came to wider attention, four months after its submission, Mr Andersson’s peers and supervisors had apparently not noticed the particulars of his vigorous, hands-on investigations, or the legal and reputational implications of such pederastic probing.
Except, of course, for those who rushed to his defence, among them, the University of Manchester’s Professor Steven Fielding, who, in a now-deleted X post, invoked the universality of masturbation, before hailing the project as “socially useful,” albeit in ways left entirely mysterious.
A pattern of approval seemingly repeated:
In his new book, Andersson claims to have received only praise for his paper from his academic peers prior to its publication.
His own academic supervisor, Andersson claims, complimented the paper as “pretty damn good” and described it as his “best piece of writing.” Additionally, one reviewer for the academic publication Qualitative Research emphasised that the rationale behind using masturbation as a research method was “well justified,” and said of the shota-obsessed academic: “The author has conducted provocative research by use of a highly bold and innovative application of autoethnography. Best of all, the author has done this extremely well.”
According to Mr Andersson, other academic colleagues have hailed his “queer autoethnography” as “wonderfully written, reflective, analytical and intriguing,” and have described it as “very publishable.”
Readers will doubtless recall the dizzying rigour of Mr Andersson’s academic work, noted in the post linked above, in which we learned that his feverish wanking gave him “a more embodied understanding of the topic.”
As I said at the time,
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.”
Clearly, the frontiers of human knowledge are being pushed back, heroically, selflessly, by our “visual anthropologist.”
The paper itself, now removed from the website of the journal Qualitative Research, is remarkable chiefly in terms of the author’s self-involvement and the sheer flimsiness of its content. The lines quoted above – about a “feeling of intimacy” and the luxurious wrappers of Mr Andersson’s porn stash – are much of the supposed substance of the thing. The rest is largely flatulent, self-involved rambling – as “autoethnography” generally is.
This, then, is what is considered “very publishable” in academia’s Clown Quarter. That progressive fiefdom.
However, one topic that Mr Andersson left oddly untouched was the matter of his own relationship to the law – child pornography, including shota, being illegal in many countries, including the United Kingdom, where his self-pleasuring project was so proudly conducted. That this detail doesn’t appear to have concerned Mr Andersson, or his peers and supervisors – at least until the project came to wider, incredulous attention – possibly tells us something about the academic circles in which he moves – or rather, moved.
Conceivably, this kind of contrived edginess, this exulting in pathology, is itself found titillating among his peers. An indicator of radical sophistication.
One might, I think, regard Mr Andersson’s paper, his boldness, and his pretence of intellectual heft, as a kind of provocation, a shit test. Readers may wonder whether, as Ben Sixsmith suggested, the field of “queer studies” is often spared even basic scrutiny, regardless of its content, or lack thereof, for fear of seeming bigoted and, with dark irony, anti-intellectual.
Readers may even 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. Or at least, daring those sufficiently hamstrung by their own pretensions.
As commenter [+] quipped at the time,
The pedos want their ‘pride’ now.
Certainly, there has been quite a bit of nonce-as-oppressed-minority sentiment appearing recently in academia’s Clown Quarter and Clown-adjacent areas – Allyn Walker, Miranda Galbreath, and Ole Martin Moen come to mind – along with the conceit that in order to ensure the safety and wellbeing of children, we must stop being judgmental of the adults who wish to molest them and thereby ruin their lives.
Such is the eye-watering progress of our times.
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