Manchester University is investigating a PhD student after he wrote a paper documenting his experiences of masturbating while looking at ‘extreme’ comics depicting sex with underaged boys. You know, for ‘research’.

Karl Andersson spent three months wanking to a subgenre of underground Japanese comics called ‘shota’ and keeping a journal, eventually writing a 4,000-word study on the subject titled ‘I Am Not Alone – We Are All Alone: How Fans of Subcultural Comics in Japan Experience Desire and Think About Sexual Identities’.

Here’s how ‘Shota’ is defined on Google:

And the sort of drawings Karl confesses to jerking off to during his research (obviously more explicit than this – but you get the idea):

Yikes.

In the essay,  published in the Journal of Qualitative Research, Mr Andersson writes:

‘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.

My desire did not only emanate from the content…but from the fact that other people too were excited by this often extreme content and masturbated to it.

The feeling was enhanced when I read a secondhand comic, 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’.

Jesus Christ. Full marks for honesty I guess, but this is some seriously creepy sh*t and it’s a wonder how this research was even signed off and allowed to get to the point where he completed and published a whole 4,000 word essay. I mean WTF was his advisor doing? What about the reviewers who approaved it for publication? Surely there’s no way they failed to discuss the ethics of his paper, or even the legalities of it?

Well finally, the University of Manchester is taking action. A uni spokesperson said:

‘The recent publication in Qualitative Research of the work of a student, now registered for a PhD, has raised significant concerns and complaints which we are taking very seriously.

We are currently undertaking a detailed investigation into all aspects of their work, the processes around it and other questions raised.

It is very important that we look at the issues in-depth. While that investigation is ongoing, it would not be appropriate for us to comment further at this time.’

Hopefully ‘looking at the issues in-depth’ involves taking a peek at this guy’s hard-drive too. Apparently this comic material wouldn’t even be legal to possess in the UK, so it again begs the question to how he was able to research the topic to this degree. Even his justification is insane. He’s essentially saying “I wanted to know how my research subjects felt when masturbating to this porn. So I started doing it.” What a sick guy indeed.

For the ‘fictosexual’ man who married a hologram bride before tragically losing her to a software issue, click HERE.