His argument for why he should do this is just straight up gross ::: spoiler CW, justification for pedo stuff The solution had been there all along, printed in plain language in the interviews –I had just not seen it so clearly. Because no matter how my research participants’ takes on shota differed in terms of favourite theme, preferred age and style of characters, how they related their own selves to the story, and so on, they had one thing in common: almost all of them said that they masturbated to shota material. I tried to inquire about the details of these masturbation sessions, but it was hard to know what to ask, and the conversation sometimes stalled. In addition, it would have been impossible for me to grasp how the intellectual reasoning, for example, of entering an alternative past, was connected to the bodily sensation of masturbation without me ‘doing it’myself. Audre Lorde (1997: 282) has written: ‘The erotic cannot be felt secondhand.’ Indeed. And so I realized that my body was equipped with a research tool of its own that could give me, quite literally, a first-hand understanding of shota

:::