A British college has been criticized by a lawmaker after it allowed a student to use masturbation as a research tool as part of a Ph.D. project. Student Karl Andersson at the University of Manchester was researching a genre of Japanese comic books called “shota” that feature teenage and prepubescent boys in “suggestive or erotic” situations. Andersson wrote in his abstract for the project, which was published by the university, that he desired to “understand how [individuals] experience sexual pleasure when reading shota.” So he set about masturbating while reading the comic books for three months, recording detailed notes of how he felt after each session. An angry backlash to the project on social media branded the research a “Ph.D. in masturbation” and conservative lawmaker Neil O’Brien tweeted: “Why should hard-working taxpayers in my constituency have to pay for an academic to write about his experiences masturbating to Japanese porn?” The university said it was investigating Andersson’s work, adding that it was taking the complaints “very seriously.”