discussions. A recent article on the ‘foul’ practice of masturbating to someone’s Facebook photos can serve as example. The author uses the terms ‘perpetrators and victims’ and describes the masturbators as ‘very awful people’ (Zia, 2017). In a time when sex discourse flourishes and companies routinely paint their logotypes in rainbow colours to profit on a sexually liberal image, it seems that the worst sin is to simply be alone.
But are we alone? Blinne drags the reader into her masturbation sessions, addresses the reader ‘you’: ‘I long to know that this is mutual, yet you offer only silence.’ (Blinne, 2012: 958). Is this inclusion of an invisible reader a desperate attempt to overcome the shame of being alone? I thought so at first, but that was before I started to think self-reflexively about my own masturbation, to which we will now turn.
Masturbation as a method
This is how I set out to use masturbation as a method:
For a period of 3 months, I would masturbate only to shota comics. For this purpose, I would use dōjinshi and commercial volumes that I have bought or been given during fieldwork in Japan. In short: I would masturbate in the same way that my research participants did it. After each masturbation session I would write down my thoughts and feelings – a kind of critical self-reflection – in a notebook, as well as details about which material I had used, where I had done it, at what time, and for how long. I would not be allowed to have any other sexual relief during this ‘fieldwork’ in my own sexuality: no regular porn, no sex with another person, no fantasies or memories – it had to be shota every time. I happened to live alone during this experiment, and I had newly become single after a long relationship – these factors probably contributed to my willingness and eagerness to explore this method.
Among fans of shota and other subcultural comic genres in Japan, the fictional world is often referred to as two-dimensional, as in the lines on paper that a character in a comic is made of, whereas actual human beings are called three-dimensional, even when they appear in a photo or a video (Galbraith, 2019: 65). In other words, pornographic films are 3D, and erotic comics are 2D. Since my previous masturbation material had been almost exclusively 3D, immersing myself in the 2D world can be seen as a version of participant observation, the classic ethnographic method that Bronislaw Malinowski pioneered during his fieldwork on the Trobriand Islands of New Guinea in the beginning of the 20th century (Spradley 1980: 3). Malinowski’s radical quest to ‘grasp the native’s point of view’ (Malinowski 2002 [1922]: 19) by participating and observing started an ‘ethnographic revolution’ which came to define anthropology (Spradley 1980: V). It is this ongoing revolution that I want to contribute to by doing participant observation in the field within myself, while masturbating in the same way that my research participants do it. The ‘sensory ethnographer’ aims for ‘experience-based empathetic understandings of what others might be experiencing and knowing’ (Pink, 2015: 98), and so my task is to understand with my body what it may be like to read shota comics.
Why the long period and the strict rules of masturbating to only 2D material? Because ethnographic fieldwork demands such consistency in order to yield results in the form of a ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1973) of the field. It was therefore imperative that I kept living
