There are no frequent or regular readers of this blog, because it is updated so infrequently and irregularly. It takes a lot to get me to add anything. Quite often, a longish thread on Twitter is as close as I get to blogging these days. But sometimes, things need a bit more working-out. Things such as this paper, "I am not Alone – We are all Alone: Using Masturbation as an Ethnographic Method in Research on Shota Subculture in Japan" by Karl Andersson, published in the journal Qualitative Research, which has attracted a fair bit of attention on social media in the past few days on the basis of a tweet from the Tory MP and culture warrior Neil O'Brien - a tweet that led a number of equal-but-opposite culture warriors to decide that since he'd condemned it, it must be worth defending (and then, at least sometimes, walking it back, as here and here; others have simply deleted their tweets in defence, presumably in the hope that we'll forget them.)
But Twitter is a notoriously more-heat-than-light sort of place, and so I decided to read the paper for myself, and to put myself in something like the position of a peer-reviewer. Is the paper actually any good? Does it have academic merit?
I don't think it does, and I'll explain why in a moment. But first, a few things should be noted.
