Hang on. You can get a paper published in a serious journal by writing about wanking over comics? This looks like a standards of scholarship issue more than anything, to me. And yet this world arguably drives the political realm.
I’m persuadable either way on the question of whether what this guy gets off on is ‘harmful’ in some non-trivial sense, such as inspiring disgust or something. But I’m amused that writing essays about yourself for an academic audience has a name that confers it with a patina of scholarship.
But...is it weird that I feel a scintilla of sympathy for the guy, caught in the spotlight of prurient popular media? I have a gut impulse to push back at the moral drivers in play here (driven by personal antipathy to the judgement of ‘crowds’) while at the same time feeling annoyed that you can get a doctorate by blogging about your kinks. But I don’t really know why that bugs me.
I think that certain sympathy is normal - social media pile-ons aren't nice!
But then again, Andersson has undertaken research which (I'm pretty sure) is illegal under UK law. And whilst drawings aren't as bad as photographs, I think that such 'research' normalizes child pornography/sexualization, making it very unethical.
Andersson also has a very dodgy past in this area - see Twitter for more!
It is unclear why you think the essay in question is a "promotion of child pornography." The images discussed were drawings and not photographs; nor would the author's sexual arousal by them necessarily be construed as an exhortation to others. Or is your point that masturbation is not an appropriate subject of inquiry for the ivory tower?
For the same reason that I don't think men in Washington should be getting to decide what women can do with their bodies, I don't straight people should try to determine what queer theory is, or what it should be. Let Anderssen be judged by a jury of peers and not a non-academic journalists hankering for juicy gossip.
>For the same reason that I don't think men in Washington should be getting to decide what women can do with their bodies,
This is inane. In arepresentative democracy, the elected government sets the laws. The sex of the elected is irrelevant. This is just special pleading to oppose a law you don't like. And ALL laws are fundamentally restrictions on what people can do with their body.
Oh, and of course, there's the basic issue that men and women in the US do not significantly diverge in their views on abortion the way that nearly all abortion advocates imagine they do.
>I don't straight people should try to determine what queer theory is, or what it should be. L
Okay, great. But if "queer theorists" continue their decades (centuries?) long tradition of pedophillia apologetics, then everyone else has the right to criticize them.
This article confirms my worst fears about current academia - groupthink has gone to extremes and now anything with a leftish viewpoint is acceptable but anything of a rightish viewpoint is absolutely not. I was involved in academic philosophy 15-20 years ago and this political groupthink wasn’t nearly as pronounced. The Sokal/Bricmont scandal had occurred and was perhaps the first uncovering of the groupthink tendency to find acceptable just about anything that included a soup of the right words. To my mind this masturbation paper is a proper representation of current academic sociology - mainly worthless rubbish.
It's embarrassing that you've seized on this to somehow link it into trans people and other groups you don't like. Correlation equaling causation is highly frowned upon, this would get you even les far in academia than that nutjob's methods. And at that, you can scarcrely justify the connection beyond there being pushback during discussion, the very thing you are supposedly advocating for! You should take a good long look in the mirror.
Also, on your misrepresentation of academia, major trans healthcare has been offered in the west for around half a decade. It's not some new 'symptom', and it certainly didn't pass into the medical sector and protections in law without a stable groundwork of academia. Saying you have a dearth of peers who ignore that does you no favours.
"Many academics proclaim commitment to justice and truth, activism being fashionable."
"Justice" of a sort, activism undoubtedly. But most of the disciplines you are talking about long junked the idea that there is even such a thing as truth.
Only opportunistically. They regularly proclaim things are being true (perhaps with other language), and their deconstructive epistemological beliefs are only trotted out when more objective and quantitative sciences make findings that contradict their ideology.
Hang on. You can get a paper published in a serious journal by writing about wanking over comics? This looks like a standards of scholarship issue more than anything, to me. And yet this world arguably drives the political realm.
Yes, it's absurd. Check out the New Real Peer Review account on Twitter to see more such 'papers'.
I’m persuadable either way on the question of whether what this guy gets off on is ‘harmful’ in some non-trivial sense, such as inspiring disgust or something. But I’m amused that writing essays about yourself for an academic audience has a name that confers it with a patina of scholarship.
But...is it weird that I feel a scintilla of sympathy for the guy, caught in the spotlight of prurient popular media? I have a gut impulse to push back at the moral drivers in play here (driven by personal antipathy to the judgement of ‘crowds’) while at the same time feeling annoyed that you can get a doctorate by blogging about your kinks. But I don’t really know why that bugs me.
Maybe I’m just reading too much Girard 😂
I think that certain sympathy is normal - social media pile-ons aren't nice!
But then again, Andersson has undertaken research which (I'm pretty sure) is illegal under UK law. And whilst drawings aren't as bad as photographs, I think that such 'research' normalizes child pornography/sexualization, making it very unethical.
Andersson also has a very dodgy past in this area - see Twitter for more!
Bravo, Thomas!
Thanks Lisa! Hope you're well :-)
It is unclear why you think the essay in question is a "promotion of child pornography." The images discussed were drawings and not photographs; nor would the author's sexual arousal by them necessarily be construed as an exhortation to others. Or is your point that masturbation is not an appropriate subject of inquiry for the ivory tower?
For the same reason that I don't think men in Washington should be getting to decide what women can do with their bodies, I don't straight people should try to determine what queer theory is, or what it should be. Let Anderssen be judged by a jury of peers and not a non-academic journalists hankering for juicy gossip.
>For the same reason that I don't think men in Washington should be getting to decide what women can do with their bodies,
This is inane. In arepresentative democracy, the elected government sets the laws. The sex of the elected is irrelevant. This is just special pleading to oppose a law you don't like. And ALL laws are fundamentally restrictions on what people can do with their body.
Oh, and of course, there's the basic issue that men and women in the US do not significantly diverge in their views on abortion the way that nearly all abortion advocates imagine they do.
>I don't straight people should try to determine what queer theory is, or what it should be. L
Okay, great. But if "queer theorists" continue their decades (centuries?) long tradition of pedophillia apologetics, then everyone else has the right to criticize them.
This article confirms my worst fears about current academia - groupthink has gone to extremes and now anything with a leftish viewpoint is acceptable but anything of a rightish viewpoint is absolutely not. I was involved in academic philosophy 15-20 years ago and this political groupthink wasn’t nearly as pronounced. The Sokal/Bricmont scandal had occurred and was perhaps the first uncovering of the groupthink tendency to find acceptable just about anything that included a soup of the right words. To my mind this masturbation paper is a proper representation of current academic sociology - mainly worthless rubbish.
It's embarrassing that you've seized on this to somehow link it into trans people and other groups you don't like. Correlation equaling causation is highly frowned upon, this would get you even les far in academia than that nutjob's methods. And at that, you can scarcrely justify the connection beyond there being pushback during discussion, the very thing you are supposedly advocating for! You should take a good long look in the mirror.
Also, on your misrepresentation of academia, major trans healthcare has been offered in the west for around half a decade. It's not some new 'symptom', and it certainly didn't pass into the medical sector and protections in law without a stable groundwork of academia. Saying you have a dearth of peers who ignore that does you no favours.
> and protections in law without a stable groundwork of academia
The entire point is that few people are willing to oppose this work in academia so any appearance of an academic consensus is illusory.
He said nothing about trans people. He is talking about the policies supported by trans advocates.
>Correlation equaling causation is highly frowned upon, this would get you even les far in academia than that nutjob's methods.
This isn't correlation equaling causation
"Many academics proclaim commitment to justice and truth, activism being fashionable."
"Justice" of a sort, activism undoubtedly. But most of the disciplines you are talking about long junked the idea that there is even such a thing as truth.
Only opportunistically. They regularly proclaim things are being true (perhaps with other language), and their deconstructive epistemological beliefs are only trotted out when more objective and quantitative sciences make findings that contradict their ideology.