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8 belittle, unconsciously, practices that we don’t understand. Masturbating made me understand.

Thinking more critically about my own masturbation also made me wonder if all sex is masturbation, in the sense that people are focused on their own pleasure and use other people as ‘masturbation material’. This is most evident in various forms of cybersex, which has been described as ‘a novel masturbatory innovation’ (: 388), since the partners are physically separated. But the autoerotic aspect of sex is there even when we are physically together, and certain sexual practices enhance this aspect, as Pat notes: ‘Some forms of masochism and fetishism are actually very sophisticated and complex forms of masturbation.’ Similarly, constructions like darkrooms, where people have sex without seeing each other, or glory holes, which conceal everything but the penis or a body oriﬁce, let us build up the other as a fantasy in our heads from a minimal piece of actual ﬂesh. To a varying extent, that’s what we always do when we have sex with someone. We’re all alone, no matter if we are physically alone or not.

And at the same time, we are not alone. When we masturbate, someone else is always there. During this ﬁeldwork, others were there with me, both in the form of the characters that populated the dōjinshi, but also in the form of the invisible creator of these characters and the other readers who were enjoying them. In addition, my head was visited by people from my past, people I had seen on the street, my ex-partner. It’s impossible for your brain to be blank during masturbation, which is why invited ‘you’ to hers. It may very well be that masturbation is the activity during which we are least alone. That, in turn, may explain what drives dōjinshi culture: a yearning for being less alone in a society permeated by loneliness on a large scale.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen for commenting on an early version of this article, the two anonymous reviewers for providing useful feedback, and my PhD supervisor Sharon Kinsella for always encouraging me to go where my research takes me.

Declaration of conﬂicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conﬂicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no ﬁnancial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Karl Andersson https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0069-8683