The Academic Merit of "What I Did on my Holidays"

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.

Importantly, the fact that the paper touches on the author's use of porn that would - I believe - be illegal in the UK is one that I'll put to one side.  That is irrelevant to the academic merit of the paper; and it is desirable that researchers should be able to research the illegal and the dubiously-legal.  Criminologists, to give the most obvious example, will sometimes have to get quite close to criminal activity in order to understand the phenomenon that is their concern; and it would not be desirable to say that that research ought not to be done.  That said, the research would not warrant their participation.  There is a line; and this kind of research is, and should be, quite tightly regulated.  Of course, the regulation isn't foolproof - but that some research breaks the norms proves that there are norms there.

Relatedly, I'll discount the morally questionable nature of the material being researched.  Again, research into morally questionable stuff isn't therefore itself morally questionable; one has to make a separate case for that.

I'll also discount the fact, raised by several people on Twitter, that Andersson thanks his supervisors and that this shows either negligence or turpitude on their part.  The acknowledgement is standard boilerplate stuff, and does not indicate that they knew anything about the paper.  And even if they did, there's not really a heck of a lot they could do to veto it.  Any complaint must be about him, and the peer-reviewers, and the editors of the journal.

Likewise, I'll discount O'Brien's moan about public funding.  If you trace the funding streams back far enough in any discipline, you'll find public money; and sometimes public money turns out to have funded things with little to no academic merit.  That's just a product of the marketplace of ideas, though.  It's not an argument against public funding, whether that be in the humanities or in STEM subjects.  A good funding system will occasionally generate turdy papers, and this is true in all fields.

That said, we can still raise questions about whether the paper should have been published, because those questions can be framed wholly in terms of academic merit without reference to outside considerations.

Finally, I'm actually going to ignore most of the content of the paper, because I don't think it's all that interesting.  Were I actually a peer-reviewer, I wouldn't; but this is a blog, so tough.

And so with that covered, here we go.

Let's begin with the abstract:

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.  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.

A couple of points present themselves.  First, I'm not sure that one can do first-person participant observation.  One can't simply step back from oneself to make an objective observation; and so whatever the findings are will be discounted.  Second, I'm struck by the phrase "I wanted to understand how my research participants experience...".  Andersson talks about how he'd done semi-structured interviews; but one wonders what exactly was added by his own participation.  Surely all the understanding that's possible to glean would be gleaned by the interviews?  I can't for the life of me see what his own participation adds to his understanding of the phenomenon more widely.  At best, it just adds one more datapoint.  I'll return to this in a bit.

The paper proper begins a little oddly:

Semi-structured interviews (Bernard, 2006) can only take you so far, especially when the topic is sensitive (Lee, 1993)...

 I don't understand what those references are doing.  A minor quibble, maybe; but I've known PhDs to be knocked back for over-citation, on the grounds that citation betrays unoriginality.  But apart from that, the opening gambits seem superficially reasonable enough:

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.

So far, so sensible.

Things begin to get a little strange over the coming paragraph or so.

In my current research, I am asking how fans of shota comics in Japan think about desire and identity. [...] While the answers are sprawling, a few themes have emerged. My main finding, which I explored through filmmaking, is that some readers use shota as a way to relive an alternative version of their own pasts, which had sometimes been traumatic or uneventful.

Shota is a subgenre of comics "that feature young boy characters in a cute or, most often, sexually explicit way".  Wanting to understand users seems reasonable enough, though Andersson - as we can see - ends the paragraph by admitting that there main unifying theme is itself not all that unifying, and that while some users had had traumatic pasts, others hadn't.  My take-out from this is that there's not much to see here.  Neither does the rest of the paper give any indication that there is a unifying theme discovered or explored elsewhere.

Andersson's main concern at this point is that "my understanding of my research participants’ experience remained largely intellectual", to which we may ask, "Isn't that a good thing for an academic?"  But for Andersson, "I realized that my body was equipped with a research tool of its own that could give me, quite literally, a first-hand understanding of shota."

This is where my main quibble about academic merit comes in.  Granted that published research is, presumably, to help the reader understand some aspect of the world, it is not at all clear to me what this paper is doing.  As indicated above, and assuming that Andersson does have interview evidence from habitual shota users about what's going on, why should the reader's understanding of the world be qualitatively altered by Andersson's having added his own testimony if testimony is insufficient to generate full understanding?  Looking at it the other way, Andersson may have learned something about himself, but why should that be of any interest to anyone else?  What, in short, is this paper supposed to achieve?  It's really not at all clear.  And absent that clarity, it's not at all clear what the academic merit of the exercise is.

I shall jump forward to the conclusion now, save to note a slightly hair-raising passage that talks about the erotic in research (!) as "a benevolent influence in education" (!!) to implied approval of anthropologists shagging their research subjects, when it's done anonymously and those subjects presumably don't know that they're the subject of research (!!!).

"What I learned," says Andersson, "was to attach greater meaning and value to the act of masturbation".  Why this should be so is unclear, because he'd said a few pages earlier that his ritualised wanking over this child-porn was different from his normal and preferred practice; and so all he seems to be saying is that an irregular wank is qualitatively different from the standard hand-job.  The same could be said of any activity, and it's hardly insightful.  It doesn't tell us about qualitative research, and the world is not really better off for knowing how one guy has had a slightly more interesting session wanking himself square then round again.  He continues to say that

[t]hinking 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’.

Ummmm...  Nope.  That's just weird.

So here's the thing.  Finding out more about shota users could easily be well worthwhile.  But I cannot for the life of me see that making himself the centre of attention is.  The whole thing's a bit "What-I-did-on-my-holidays", and I don't think that there's much heft to that.

Especially if what you did on your holidays involved child-porn.

I suppose that a possible line of defence might run along lines like this: that there is some important aspect of the shota phenomenon that cannot be understood unless one has a wank over it.

This may or may not be true.  For my money, I don't see how it could be.  But let's suppose that the position is arguable, and that someone sufficiently deft could make it at least vaguely persuasive to boot.  But of course this is not what Andersson's paper does, or even attempts to do.  So if that's the rationale, it's going to fail.  After all: he's not making an argument about research methods.  He's describing his own participation in this "method"; and that's a very different thing.

And even if, as an argumentative strategy, it could be made to work, we might still wonder why we should care.

Recall Andersson's opening gambit that 

[u]ntangling 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.

This is plausible.  But there is no reason that I can see to think that one would have to understand, first hand, every aspect of some behaviour in order to make policy about it.

Suppose that I'm in the business of writing a law to crack down on joyriding, and in the course of framing it I engage in some structured interviews with joyriders to try to understand their motivation, the better to draft a wise law.  And suppose that I am left with the impression that, no matter how articulate these joyriders, there's something about just doing it that I cannot get my head around from these interviews.  (Or think of Renton's claim in Trainspotting about how drug use is simply fun. or th Alice in Chains lyric about not understanding the user's mind.)  Well: so what?  That is not going to be a barrier to drafting a wise law.  Whereof, thereof, as a wise Austrian once mumbled (ironically enough, possibly while having a wank).

But here's another thing.  Suppose I do participate in a joyride.  Well, I'm now complicit.  And that'd be a moral, and possibly a conceptual, reason to reject the line of argument that I'm imagining being made in the shota case.  I don't think that it's true that masturbating to it helps understand it in an important way that structured interviews miss; but on top of that, tossing yourself off to child porn, I suspect, is more likely to make you unable to formulate sound policies.  And that's because it's actually not all that much like joyriding.  For want of a better phrase, persuading yourself to get turned on by child porn corrodes the soul.

And so, for all kinds of reasons, I am not persuaded of the paper's merit.  And that is sufficient for the peer reviewers and the editors of Qualitative Research to have rejected it.