Why Did So Many Professors Leap to the Defence of an Academic Who Wrote a Paper About Masturbating to Pornography?

Stuart Ritchie has written a good Substack post about why dozens of academics were so quick to condemn Niel O’Brien’s tweet about a graduate student at Manchester who’d written a peer-reviewed paper about… wait for it… masturbating to pornographic Japanese comics depicting children. Ritchie’s piece should be treated with some caution because he was enlisted by O’Brien to contribute to the website the MP set up to smear those of us who questioned the wisdom of the lockdown policy, including me. But not withstanding this lapse of judgment, the post is worth reading. (The person in the picture above is Stuart Ritchie, not the academic in question.) Here’s an extract:

Happily, there were many academics who were repulsed by the paper and said so loudly – and good for them. But when some other academics saw a Conservative MP tweeting about the study, it was simply too much. They sprang into action – and also blundered straight into what was – deliberately-set or otherwise – a trap.

Here are lots of highly-credentialed academic Tweeters – all but one with their credential prominently in their Twitter name or handle – responding to Neil O’Brien’s tweet by reflexively defending the paper about masturbating to cartoons of underage boys.

For example, here’s Dr. Fern Riddell, who is a cultural historian who writes about sex and related issues:

And here’s Prof. Steven Fielding, Professor of Political History at the University of Nottingham:

Here’s Prof. Nigel Driffield, Professor of International Business at Warwick Business School:

And finally, here’s Prof. Danny Blanchflower, Professor of Economics at Dartmouth:

There were other tweeters who joined in the wagon-circling, mainly making the false claim that Andersson wasn’t funded, or was self-funded. For instance, here’s Prof. Paul Bernal, professor of IT Law at University of East Anglia:

The claim that the paper wasn’t funded isn’t true: even though the paper contains a statement that no funding was received for that project specifically, Andersson mentions in his Twitter bio that he’s funded by his university department, has put a video on YouTube talking about how his PhD is funded through his department, and someone—most likely the university—has paid the ~£2,500 “article processing charge” required to make the article fully open-access. Someone is paying for this – and given how universities are funded, it’s perfectly reasonable to think it’s all, or at least in part, the UK taxpayer.

Worth reading in full.