"They're Cute, of Course"
An academic journal is "investigating" after discovering it published the masturbation fantasies of a notorious Swedish pederast who promotes "boy love."
The journal Qualitative Research launched an investigation yesterday into an anthropological article it published in April in which the author discussed himself masturbating to drawings of young boys after anthropologists took to Twitter to condemn both the article and its author, a notorious Swedish advocate of so-called “boy love.” The journal did not acknowledge the reason for its investigation and instead said it would adhere to Committee of Publication Ethics standards before taking any action.
“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,” the editors wrote in a notice on the Sage Journals’ website. “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.”
The article revolves around the author’s efforts to understand a Japanese genre of erotic comics known as shota in which young boys are depicted in sexually explicit situations. To do so, the author sought to reproduce how Japanese men use these comics. He masturbated using only the comics for erotic gratification over the course of three months and wrote a graphic reflection on the pleasure he experienced from self-stimulation while contemplating pubescent boys. “I experienced a sense of self-care, which I also call the ‘spa effect’, since I often felt so relaxed after these sessions that it reminded of going to a spa,” the author wrote. He also described his joy at realizing that another man had previously masturbated with a secondhand copy of a book that the author used for his own autoeroticism, claiming that the book was “charged” with happiness and functioned as a magical talisman.
The author failed to disclose that he is the publisher of several shota comics and profits from them.
The exercise was academically worthless since the author admitted to not knowing if his findings “are unique to me or shared by my research participants.” In other words, we read a very long description of one man’s sex fantasies while masturbating, with no real application to the alleged subject, Japanese shota subculture. Nevertheless, the author makes a useful observation, unfortunately one he does not evaluate thoroughly, or, really, seem to understand. He describes his sexual desire as located not in the physical bodies of young boys but in the memories they evoked of his own adolescence, in this case his discovery of a childhood friend’s porn stash:
And as I stroked myself to orgasm, Shigeru’s story mixed with my own, tweaking my past and providing me ‘a happier version’, as one of my research participants had put it. This is not to say that things like those in the dōjinshi necessarily should have happened when I grew up. But to enjoy this alternative version for half an hour in the comfort of my bed felt good.
This observation is interesting in terms of its connection to what Japanese men said about the nostalgia factor in their love of shota stories, but the author makes no effort to explore this idea in detail, nor does he carry it to its obvious conclusion: Does this misdirected desire to return to one’s own youth also provide psychological insight into pedophilia? The reason for this failure to draw these parallels is quite clear when we discover who the author is.
Karl Andersson is a Swedish artist and writer who has spent his career promoting pederasty and/or ephebophilia and the eroticization of teenage boys. Andersson is best known for his Destroyer magazine (2006-2010), a gay-themed publication focusing on sexualized images of boys as young as thirteen. Andersson claimed at the magazine’s launch that its purpose was “to bring back the adolescent boy as one of the ideals of gay culture.” Andersson wrote a book about the controversy over the magazine and followed it up with a worse publication, the online news site Breaking Boy News, which combined stories of crime and violence featuring young boys with heavily eroticized images of seminude boys, some as young as ten, which he took in the Global South, sometimes without the boys’ awareness or permission.
Andersson told Vice in 2012 that, more or less, he thinks of pubescent boys as the human ideal. “I have this philosophy of the boy as the essence of humankind,” he said. “The boy is the one who does all the things we learn later in life not to do. He discovers things, tests limits, helps people, but he also robs, rapes or even murders. And they’re cute, of course. Boys are like kittens, it’s hard to take your eyes off them.”
He defended pedophilia, ephebophilia, and pederasty as a gay “sexual orientation” and claimed that his publications were a rebuke to gay men seeking to sever “boy love” from mainstream homosexuality. “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.”
Obviously, this is not a man who should be writing anything about boys and sex, much less a defense of masturbating to pictures of kids. But he isn’t wrong that a sort of institutionalized ephebophilia was long prominent among gay European intellectuals. Men like Oscar Wilde, André Gide, and Michel Focault—the last cited by Andersson—and many others were open about the sex they had with boys. Intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre even demanded governments legalize man-child sex. Gide, a winner of the Nobel Prize, spoke more or less like Andersson when he rhapsodized about fucking boys. “That such loves can spring up, that such relationships can be formed, it is not enough for me to say that this is natural; I maintain that it is good; each of the two finds exaltation, protection, a challenge in them; and I wonder whether it is for the youth or the elder man that they are more profitable,” Gide wrote in his journal, published in 1948.
Andersson refused to answer questions about whether he has had sex with adolescent boys, and he told Vice it was “interesting” that people want to know.
The arguments men like Andersson make, and have made for a century, are centered on the man’s pleasure and wants and discount the boy’s physical and mental health and safety as unimportant; indeed, Andersson specifically laughs at the idea of “protecting” boys, claiming they want it because of their overwhelming sexuality. It is an old form of patriarchal control dressed up in philosophical drag.
The fact that the sexual exploitation of teenage boys has not yet been fully excised from the gay community, and that people like the editors of Qualitative Research, unintentionally or not, abet it because it seems impossible or invisible, remains an ongoing shame.
Thanks yet again for your tireless work to protect the vulnerable and your laser like capacity to catch the justification of all kinds of abuse buried in our culture. I have been a fan of Oscar Wilde for many years. I never connected him with pedophilia. I cannot put my hands on it now. However I did start to read a book written by Canadian Lesbian mothers who adopted a son. They wrote it seemed to me about classic Greek culture's view that " loving" relationships between older Greek men and boys was very healthy for sexuality. I may have misread this and cannot quickly find this book. At the time, my late husband was ill and I was trying to learn all I could about how to raise boys. I was raised as a Roman Catholic in Ireland and received zero sexual education. My family were caring and loving. However my mother volunteered my services as a baby-sitter for people she barely knew , when I was thirteen and I effectively fended off some very unwanted overtures from very drunken adults. I remember being really mad at my mother for being me into a potentially risky situation. As my husband was ill, I was the parent that attended all kinds of sporting events with our sons. Based on my own frequent unsolicited overtures as a young woman , I tried to be vigilant to protect our sons, when they were younger. I volunteered ,whenever a parent was allowed to attend any sports related activities, which involved overnight stays. Despite my best efforts. My younger son recently shared that a young woman hired as a care-giver for my late husband had begun to touch my son inappropriately on one occasion , when he was eleven. My son moved away from this young woman quickly and for a number of reasons I did not hire her. She was a new immigrant, very personable and pretty. She expressed a lot of negativity about her Middle Eastern homeland and I strongly suspect that she might have been molested or neglected herself.
It seems protecting children requires great vigilance even, when we as parents and guardians are trying to protect and raise children with love. It is very concerning to think of the vast numbers of babies and children, who are orphaned, abandoned, abused and neglected.https://www.who.int/health-topics/violence-against-children#tab=tab_1
Have you considered writing a book for allies of the LGBTQ community on how best to protect all children from sexual abuse ? This is a topic about which I seek to be as educated as possible. Thanks for your work.