Polishing the banister

It may come as a shock to readers to learn that pocket billiards, choking the chicken or bashing the bishop—choose your euphemism—is now a university level subject. It has always been available as an extracurricular activity but now it has officially moved to the mainstream, and someone is writing a PhD about it. Not only that, he (yes, strangely it was a ‘he’) is writing a PhD based on his own masturbatory activities.

As if that were not bad enough, it is about his self-stimulation while looking at cartoon pictures of young boys engaged in sexual activities. I must admit to a sneaking admiration for the chap; I just cannot get my head around how he is achieving the great feat of writing his PhD thesis only using one hand, and probably his left one at that. I am not making this up.

A student called Karl Andersson at the University of Manchester published an article in an academic journal, Qualitative Research published by Sage titled ‘I am not alone – we are all alone: Using masturbation as an ethnographic method in research on shota subculture in Japan’. The details of the article are not available as the article has been retracted and removed from the journal website. This is a very unusual step as retracted articles normally remain visible and available online but with a ‘Retracted’ watermark. The offending article, unsurprisingly, caused great offence and had to be removed completely.

According to Michael Salter, of the University of New South Wales in Australia, an expert in child abuse and victimisation, ‘This entire article describes the author masturbating to drawn child sexual abuse material.’ While we can imagine what was going through the head of young Karl, it is almost impossible to think what was going through the minds of the myriad people involved on the journey the article made from Karl’s sticky keyboard to publication in the journal. He acknowledges his supervisor at Manchester, but it is not clear if she read a draft. Another Scandinavian academic is credited with reading and commenting on a draft. The rest of the process will have involved at least an editor, peer reviewers, and a host of production staff at Sage. Did nobody think to stop him?

And what was the motivation for Karl going public about his hobby? Apparently, he ‘wanted to understand how (his) research participants experience sexual pleasure when reading shota’. In language typical of someone who has been reading too many sociology texts, the experience gave him a ‘more embodied understanding of the topic’ and that he learned ‘to attach greater meaning and value to the act of masturbation.’ He concludes ‘Masturbating made me understand.’ At one point he says, without irony, that he ‘hit the wall’ in his research. I leave you with that image.

Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.