Shota porn masturbation fieldwork article sparks controversy

At Tokyo Kinky, we hope we don’t moralize. We like to stay as open as possible, even — and perhaps especially — when the tastes do not match our own. And given the kind of content we share, we are hardly qualified to get on a high horse and start preaching to the masses.

As such, it is with a touch of bemusement that we are watching a dispute unfold, first on Twitter and now in the mainstream media.

An article titled “I am not alone — we are all alone: Using masturbation as an ethnographic method in research on shota subculture in Japan” appeared in the respected academic journal Qualitative Research in April. For some reason that only the gods of serendipity know, it was only discovered a few days ago and discussion about it on social media (primarily Twitter) exploded, especially among fellow academics who specialize in Japan and anthropologists.

They have criticized the approach taken by the author — Karl Andersson, a Swedish PhD student at the University of Manchester — as unethical, academically invalid, and morally dubious.

The idea that autoeroticism — in a word, masturbation — can be the sole mode of “fieldwork” is provocative to say the least. This is literally intellectual masturbation. The author jerked off to shota porn in dojinshi in an attempt to discover what it was like to explore the fetish — and because he felt that he had hit an impasse in his more conventional fieldwork approaches (interviews, surveys, etc.). If this is indeed valid as an ethnographic approach, we at Tokyo Kinky should start a university. We would be full professors in days!

The author set serious parameters for this approach.

For a period of 3 months, I would masturbate only to shota comics. For this purpose, I would use dojinshi and commercial volumes that I have bought or been given during fieldwork in Japan. In short: I would masturbate in the same way that my research participants did it. After each masturbation session I would write down my thoughts and feelings — a kind of critical self-reflection — in a notebook, as well as details about which material I had used, where I had done it, at what time, and for how long. I would not be allowed to have any other sexual relief during this “fieldwork” in my own sexuality: no regular porn, no sex with another person, no fantasies or memories — it had to be shota every time. I happened to live alone during this experiment, and I had newly become single after a long relationship — these factors probably contributed to my willingness and eagerness to explore this method.

Shota or shotacon is a controversial, neglected, and little-known sexual subculture/fetish in Japan. Like lolicon, it is often understood as being the 2D sexualized depiction of prepubescent or pubescent males. It emerged in the 1980s in the form of amateur dojinshi/doujinshi publications, though the term is applied more widely today — including to “professional” porn and adult content.

The author, Karl Andersson, is pursuing a PhD on desire and identity in shota (and has reportedly run in trouble with his ethics committee overseeing his dissertation project). He was previously the editor of a controversial magazine in Sweden called Destroyer Magazine (a publication of “Apollonian Beauty and Dionysian Sexuality”) from 2006 to 2010 that was accused of being a platform for underage porn featuring boys from the Global South.

After excoriating the article on Twitter, where we first heard about it earlier in the week, reports about it are now appearing in major press outlets. The University of Manchester, whose School of Arts, Languages and Cultures is funding Andersson’s PhD, has promised an inquiry. The journal, though perhaps enjoying the perks of an uptick in traffic, make be forced to take it down. So far, it has issued a statement that it is investigating its publication, which is strange considering it was the journal who published it! Like many others, we are intrigued to learn how it passed the editors’ approval and peer review.

Though dressed in quasi-academic language — albeit with a self-confessed far more off-the-cuff style — and citations, the author arrives at some strange yet eye-catching conclusions at the end of his very, ahem, hands-on report.

“What I learned from this experiment was to attach greater meaning and value to the act of masturbation, and especially of doing it to two-dimensional material in the form of comics.”

Rather than masturbating as routine, the ritualistic and more formal process of choosing the dojinshi and taking idea to think about his masturbation had a rejuvenating effect on the author. He also discovered how diverse dojinshi and shota was.

“Thinking more critically about my own masturbation also made me wonder if all sex is masturbation, in the sense that people are focused on their own pleasure and use other people as ‘masturbation material.'” OK, but perhaps that’s not what a partner will want to hear on a first date.

Joking aside, he then raises an interesting point about cybersex and internet porn that we are all jerking off separating — yet also together, in unison. A kind of global glory hole.

“During this fieldwork, others were there with me, both in the form of the characters that populated the dojinshi, but also in the form of the invisible creator of these characters and the other readers who were enjoying them. In addition, my head was visited by people from my past, people I had seen on the street, my ex-partner.”

Though critics have quickly denounced Andersson for othering and orientalizing Japanese culture (since he is a queer, white, Western male), and using the fieldwork as a cover for consuming underage porn, he claims he was not turned by the shota porn itself. In fact, he makes a curious point about desire by proxy.

My desire did not only emanate from the content of the dojinshi, but from the fact that other people too were excited by this often extreme content and masturbated to it. Safely separated in time and space, we were sharing a sexual moment and maybe coming on the same pages, to the same frames. I did not want to see these people (at least not while I was masturbating), but just knowing that we were, in a way, doing it together added something to my pleasure. This feeling was enhanced when I read a secondhand dojinshi, which I assumed had been used for masturbation by its previous owner, and thus been “charged,” like a magic charm that would continue to bring happiness to new owners.

If it was Andersson’s intention to attract attention, he succeeded. If it was his intention to challenge norms about fieldwork, he succeeded. But if it was his intention to investigate shota carefully, not as smut or a subculture to be condemned but as something worthy of serious focus and consumption, he may not have succeeded just yet.