The University of Manchester is facing questions over its funding of a PhD student who published a journal paper on masturbating to Japanese comics after it emerged that he has faced controversy for publishing a magazine featuring sexually suggestive images of teenage boys.
The institution and the Sage journal Qualitative Research are investigating how Karl Andersson was able to publish an article subtitled “Using masturbation as an ethnographic method in research on shota subculture in Japan”, reflecting on a three-month period during which he “masturbated only” to pictures found in the manga comic genre that depicted sexual encounters involving young boys. It has now been removed from the journal’s website.
Alongside scrutiny of any ethics approval associated with the paper and where the research was conducted – possessing fictional images of minors in a pornographic context is banned in the UK but some countries have different rules – scholars have complained that “masturbating to images of young boys and passing it off as scholarship normalises paedophilia”.
