Qualitative Research: how did this get published

August 10, 2022 7:01 PM

The 2022 American Sociology Association Conference has had some drama, between podium tipping, security calls for gang affiliation, and most notably, a presentation about The Paper. What is The Paper? Which to be precise was a 'Research Note'. Content note: masturbation, depictions of CSA in fiction, CSA and CSEM

I am not alone - we are all alone: using masturbation as an ethnographic method in research on shota subculture in Japan by Karl Anderssen has galvanised significant critique from academics, and the usual anti-humanities folk and homophobic/transphobic commentators alike. The journal - Qualitative Research Journal - has launched an investigation as to exactly how it got published. The paper itself details Anderssen masturbating to a variety of shota material - erotic and pornographic texts, images, or animation that depict underage boys - as a means of ethnographic study into the subculture. The research is part of his broader work about the topic - both shota as per Unreal Boys his "graduation film" about three Japanese men who produce and consume the genre, and his now defunct magazine Destroyer – Journal of Apollonian Beauty and Dionysian Sexuality which featured photographs of boys in various suggestive and erotic poses including children from the Global South. Unsurprisingly the university he is associated with is also investigating the issue.

Many commentators are riffing off the auto in autoethnography, or claiming an issue with qualitative research, sociology, sexuality studies, and ethnography as a field. Some are pushing back but very few - even with some established autoethnography using similar methods (whiskey consumption for example) however, the serious ethical and academic issues in the research note are causing not just outrage about the topic, but also the potentials for clickbait in academic publishing, and privileges afforded to the author when other research has been rejected.

posted by geek anachronism (28 comments total)

It’s like a distressingly sticky matryoshka doll of layer upon layer of fetishization and objectification
posted by DoctorFedora at 7:19 PM on August 10, 2022 [7 favorites]

whiskey consumption for example

Wait, someone really did "supersize me except with whiskey"?
posted by BungaDunga at 7:23 PM on August 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

Well slightly more than that but yes.
posted by geek anachronism at 7:31 PM on August 10, 2022

What a fucking asshole. Pulling a stunt like this deligitmizes good work (qual and quant) by actual scholars. There’s a ton of great work at this conference but we’ll all hear about some jack off instead.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:32 PM on August 10, 2022 [21 favorites]

or no
posted by zenon at 7:36 PM on August 10, 2022

Historian @madjane_ talks about the author's history in this twitter thread.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 8:04 PM on August 10, 2022 [7 favorites]

For...for science?
posted by The Tensor at 8:12 PM on August 10, 2022

WHAT?
posted by Fuchsoid at 8:49 PM on August 10, 2022

Trying to follow a twitter thread of any length on Twitter is like drinking a glass of water with an eye dropper.
posted by jamjam at 9:20 PM on August 10, 2022 [22 favorites]

Professor Weide and his students harassed a speaker. It was reported by multiple attendees and were told to leave the conference by the organizers. When they refused to leave security was called and they were escorted out., It doesn’t seem like this had anything to do with gang affiliations; just some asshole behaving like an asshole, getting bounced and then making a scene on social media about it pretend it was actually this great injustice.
posted by interogative mood at 9:28 PM on August 10, 2022 [4 favorites]

I'm hesitant to follow the links too far--but are we sure this is even real?
posted by praemunire at 10:38 PM on August 10, 2022

Trying to follow a twitter thread of any length on Twitter is like drinking a glass of water with an eye dropper.

Here's the threadreader link for the historian's thread giving the paper author's backstory.

I'm hesitant to follow the links too far--but are we sure this is even real?

The backstory makes it sound extremely believable that this particular person would write this particular paper, though the question of how the paper was approved for publication remains open.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 10:51 PM on August 10, 2022 [7 favorites]

I'm hesitant to follow the links too far--but are we sure this is even real?

Yes. It's on the journal website, for example.
posted by mark k at 2:03 AM on August 11, 2022 [4 favorites]

Yeah maybe a more descriptive title than CSE/CSEM because I'm not up on my child porn acronyms.

So in short he masturabted to a bunch of cartoon porn of young boys and graphically described the experience but did so in an academic way so he could get published. If this is not a satire on getting a paper published I don't know what is.
posted by geoff. at 2:13 AM on August 11, 2022 [10 favorites]

Given that it takes about 2 minutes of googling to find this guy as the subject of a Vice article entitled 'I Publish a Magazine Full of Half-Naked Little Boys', one does wonder what in the world those enabling all of this are thinking.
posted by robself at 2:21 AM on August 11, 2022 [4 favorites]

Oh wow, he uses the line "ancient Greeks were okay with it," which is like that creepy dude who shows off his Victorian porn and calls it classy.

This guy is just a straight pedophile and people who are giving him attention are enabling him.
posted by geoff. at 2:39 AM on August 11, 2022 [3 favorites]

Lucille Bluth's comment on the matter
posted by bigendian at 3:22 AM on August 11, 2022 [4 favorites]

In case producing one magazine full of half naked boys isn't indication enough, Jpfed's twitter link indicates that andersson later published a second magazine full of half naked boys and talked it up to Vice magazine.

I am a cis white man in academia and I know full well that academia overwhelmingly favors cis white men. But sometimes I can still be surprised that amid all of the absurdly qualified and well-vetted competition, pricks like this still make it through. Dude must possess a sociopathic amount of self-confidence layered on top of the cis-white-guy-ness.
posted by cubeb at 5:48 AM on August 11, 2022 [5 favorites]

Ugh this jerk made the news out here in the Balkans too. Good job providing ammunition to all the ghouls using this bullshit research to score political points.
posted by each day we work at 6:31 AM on August 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

From his Vice interview:

"Destroyer was my first self-published project, and it started out of frustration of the current politics of the gay movement, which becomes ever more non-inclusive of the less flattering expressions of homosexuality, most notably male attraction to boys."

Conservatives are going to focus on this gay pedophile, while ignoring the fact that the gay pedophile is complaining about how the gay movement is intolerant of pedophiles.
posted by AlSweigart at 6:40 AM on August 11, 2022 [22 favorites]

Professor Weide and his students harassed a speaker. It was reported by multiple attendees and were told to leave the conference by the organizers ...

Thanks for the context. I knew that thread smelled bad. Here's Friedman's response.

AlSweigart: you're right. My guess is that this Anderssen guy is somebody that academics in every humanities field is going to have to hear about for years, the way we hear about NAMBLA, when that was only ever a circle of creeps (some prominent) with no real power.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:29 AM on August 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

Please, please don't let the doctoral students in my qualitative methods class next term ask me about this. I have enough trouble explaining Laud Humphreys and Tobias Schneebaum.
posted by yellowcandy at 10:15 AM on August 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

The Journal’s editors have launched an investigation and released a statement

On August 9th we began investigating the publication of the paper “I am not alone – we are all alone: Using masturbation as an ethnographic method in research on shota subculture in Japan,” published earlier this year. We are continuing with our investigations and will consider closely all guidance from the Committee of Publication Ethics and ensure that any actions taken comply with COPE standards.

posted by interogative mood at 10:24 AM on August 11, 2022

The Weide thing does seem related to gangs, at the very least the two scholars research re prison gangs in California and the topic matters in this dispute. I don't know either scholar, but do have a lot of respect for Homeboy Industries and the fact that Weide's students are coming from an insider perspective on LA and gangs also seems relevant? It doesn't mean they weren't harassing jerks, just that things getting personal and hyper emotional is not something that academic conferences actually make space for/handle well.
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:34 AM on August 11, 2022

Yikes. Looks like Weide has been aggressive/intimidating to women of color presenting on similar topics at previous conferences.... Older dudes being dismissive of younger(?) women of color at academic conferences is a thing I know well. At the same time, I feel weird about the accusation that he's using identity politics (formerly incarcerated) to score points. I mean yes, in this argument it's used as credibility, but also being a formerly incarcerated person in academia isn't easy.
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:50 AM on August 11, 2022 [4 favorites]

Looked up Laud Humphreys...

Because Humphreys was able to confirm that over 50% of his subjects identified as heterosexual men who were married to women,[2] a primary thesis of Tearoom Trade is the incongruence between the private self and the social self for many of the men engaging in this form of homosexual activity. Specifically, they put on a "breastplate of righteousness" (social and political conservatism) in an effort to conceal their sexual behavior and prevent being exposed as deviants. Humphreys tapped into a theme of incongruence between one's words and deeds that has become a primary methodological and theoretical concern in sociology throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.[12]

Humphreys' study has been criticized by sociologists and other social and behavioral scientists on ethical grounds[2] in that he observed sexual acts by masquerading as a voyeur, "did not get his subjects’ consent, tracked down names and addresses through license plate numbers, and interviewed the men in their homes in disguise and under false pretenses."[13]

posted by spamandkimchi at 10:55 AM on August 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

Just want to point out that aside from the total ethical egregiousness of this guy's "methodology," the paper itself is very, very poorly written. It reads like a remedial college student's half-assed essay for an Intro to Anthropology Methods course where he vaguely remembered the names of some early 20th century anthropologists (that no one even seriously engages with anymore for good reasons) to compare himself to. And his 'findings' are basically just like, 'uhh...yea, jerking off made me think about what my research interviewees told me they feel when they jerk off.' So much for ethnographic insight.

I'm reaaaalllly curious how Qualitative Research even justified accepting this paper just on the grounds of research quality.
posted by adso at 1:45 PM on August 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

The issues between Dr Friedman and Dr Weide have been detailed by attendees a bit more and "more of a comment than a question" turned to 11 with racialised elements and gendered ones is...intense. I had some unsettled feelings reading Weide's thread, simply because my experience with academic men who make a very very conscious effort to not codeswitch when in academic spaces do it as part of various forms of intimidation. They may be punished for it by other men, but not the same way as when I let my accent drop or talk about childhood poverty sans the academic sheen.

As far as Anderssen goes I'm still appalled. There are seemingly a whole strain of Japanese Culture researchers (my last brush with one was audience studies and sociology) who go to some strange lengths to justify and excuse depictions of fictional underage sex. In my last experience with it, it was an essay on cosplay. Before that translation. Neither are my areas so I haven't pushed back on either situation, but I have hope given the amount of backlash.

I do dislike how many folk have either taken it as a reason to deride whatever their humanities bugbear is, or alternatively accuse any critic of being sex negative and a prude. The research itself is bad and would have been bad without the content he was jerking it to. The content is illsuited to the method in so many ways as well. The fact that the content aligns with his personal politics is something I think is challenging more broadly, even without the ethical complications - if you ran a magazine with an ethos then start publishing research supporting that, I think that needs to be just as much of a conflict of interest as money and institutional support. Same with if you run a small business or whatever, publishing research that is aimed at supporting and legitimising it feels unethical without acknowledgement.
posted by geek anachronism at 9:13 PM on August 11, 2022 [6 favorites]