RETRACTED: “I am not alone – we are all alone: Using masturbation as an ethnographic method in research on shota subculture in Japan”

I wanted to understand how my research participants experience sexual pleasure when reading s hota, a Japanese genre of self-published erotic comics that features young boy characters. I therefore started reading the comics in the same way as my research participants had told me that they did it: while masturbating. In this research note, I will recount how I set up an experimental method of masturbating to s hota comics, and how this participant observation of my own desire not only gave me a more embodied understanding of the topic for my research but also made me think about loneliness and ways to combat it as driving forces of the culture of self-published erotic comics.