The University of Manchester has been criticised for allowing a student to complete a PhD documenting his sexual gratification from reading erotic comics involving children.
Karl Andersson wanted to research Japanese ‘shota’ comics, which depict adolescent or prepubescent boys in a sexually suggestive manner.
He said he wanted to find out how people “experience sexual pleasure when reading shota”, and the now-published research documents his own experiences of masturbating to pictures of young boys.
Sexualisation of children
The work was blasted as a “PhD in masturbation”, and Conservative MP Neil O’Brien hit out at the University for green-lighting the project.
He said: “Why should hard-working taxpayers in my constituency have to pay for an academic to write about his experiences masturbating to Japanese porn?”
The Christian Institute’s Deputy Director Ciarán Kelly also criticised the project. “How this so-called research was approved is incomprehensible.
“If this student had said he wanted to document his pleasure at watching child pornography, you would imagine the police would have been contacted immediately. These comics are not simply some alternative art form that can legitimately be appreciated and studied. They involve the sexualisation of children.”
Normalising paedophilia
In Pennsylvania, a licensed therapist working for the Department of Corrections posted a video on social media platform TikTok arguing that paedophilia is a legitimate sexual orientation.
She advocated using the term ‘minor-attracted persons’ (MAPs) over ‘paedophiles’ as these people are a “marginalised” population who experience “harm” when they are characterised in that way.
The therapist claimed that those who experience sexual desires towards children “have not chosen this attraction, just as the rest of us have not chosen whatever our attraction is.
“You don’t get to choose to be heterosexual or to be gay or whatever you are, and you don’t get to choose to be a minor-attracted person”.
Read more: University berated for allowing ‘PhD in child pornography’