Erotic confessions
The erotic in research ranges from recognizing it as a benevolent influence in education (Pensoneau-Conway, 2009: 176) to anthropologists having sex with research participants in order to understand a certain practice, such as anonymous sex (Langarita Adiego, 2019: 1256). While there is plenty of literature on masturbation as such, few researchers write about their own masturbation habits. The glaring exception is Kristen C. Blinne (2012), who attempted to ‘break taboos and stigmas surrounding self-pleasuring’, but whose poetic style ironically reinforces the idea that masturbation is a sensitive enough subject to warrant special linguistic treatment. Forestalling the criticism of her culture (North America), Blinne goes into confessional mode: ‘Before I continue, I must confess: I masturbate.’ (ibid.: 955; emphasis in original)
Despite the importance of understanding all aspects of being human, research on sexuality is often seen as ‘dirty work’ (Irvine, 2014: 633), and researchers, not least of sexually explicit comics, are vulnerable to accusations of having a ‘prurient’ interest in their research topic (Madill, 2018: 270); studying lolicon made Patrick W. Galbraith (2017) ‘the lolicon guy’, publishing a seminal book on pornographic films turned Linda Williams (1999: ix) into ‘a professor of “porn”’, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2008: 59) felt the need to justify why she, as a woman, wrote about gay men. Why are you interested in this? seems to be the lurking question that researchers want to beat critics to. Williams did so by abandoning her initial ‘objective, distanced stance’ for a confession similar to that of Blinne: ‘I thus hereby admit … to a genuinely “prurient interest” in the genre of pornography’ (Williams, 1999: xi). As commendable as I find such bold admissions of prurience, I can’t shake off the feeling that they reflect and reproduce the historical Christian belief in a ‘truth’ or ‘individual secret’ that can and must be expressed through confession, as detailed by Michel Foucault (1978: 61). I will therefore make a point of writing this research note in a rather casual and hands-on way, without any ceremoniously delivered confession: I simply want to explore a method that my research question seems to call for.
Let us briefly consider why, in a society that prides itself on being sexually liberal, masturbation is still controversial. One reason may be that we’re living under the yoke of a Christianity that for centuries ruled that reproduction was ‘the only justification of sexual relations’ (Weeks, 2009: 22; emphasis in original), and masturbation certainly doesn’t produce any babies. But plenty of sexual acts don’t, and yet they are not as stigmatized as masturbation. Foucault argues that the ‘crusade against masturbation’ in the 18th century was connected to the nuclear family as a new unit of knowledge-power, which was responsible for surveilling and quenching anything deemed ‘abnormal’ in the emerging medical discourse of the time (Foucault, 2003: 327). These abnormalities were rounded up and juxtaposed with their sanctioned counterparts in Gayle Rubin’s ‘hierarchical system of sexual value’, in which coupled relations are ‘good’ and solitary practices ‘bad’; masturbation is thus seen as ‘an inferior substitute for partnered encounters’ (Rubin, 2007: 151). While other ‘bad’ sexual acts have climbed in the hierarchy since Rubin’s essay was first published in 1984 – homosexual sex, non-procreative sex and casual sex, for example – the monstrous figure of ‘the masturbator’ (Sedgwick, 2008: 9) is still invoked in
