Finally, I have finished my master thesis. Below you can see the exact moment when I am officially submitting the hardcopy to the 'pigeonhole' (postvak in Dutch) of my supervisor.

 And then came the moment of celebration: by opening a bottle of champagne on campus with Brittany and Jessica. We wanted to execute this project outside, but the weather was not cooperating so we sneaked into a building and popped it there.

As further celebration, we had an excellent BBQ at Brittany's and Alistair's place, I would hereby like to thank them again for making this happen. This is how the party looked like from outside, with a lovely HOERA sign in the window (meaning 'hooray' with silly Dutch phonetics).

And from the inside with a backwards HOERA and lots of food - and a happy master's person:

To continue towards the title of this post, my thesis is about gender ideologies on adult video-sharing websites - so basically about a segment of online pornography. The research took me about 3-4 months, and the end product is the wonderful 72 paged document that you can see in the first picture. Apparently my topic still creates some uproar, so I have summed up the convenient and less convenient elements of this process, for my amusement and as advice for future researchers in this direction.

Pros:

+ it certainly grabs people's attention in a conversation
+ it's funny to observe the scale of reactions, ranging from perplex to 'WOW!'
+ it can spark interesting debates with open-minded people
+ makes you feel 'special' because there is SO LITTLE about your topic
+ makes you feel cool because there are so many prude people who would be unable to do this
+ you would never imagine what hilarous storylines they make up for porn! like a guy 'selling' his girlfriend to be able to pay the rent
+ meetings with your supervisor are always 'funny'
+ the thesis defense will surely be even more 'fun'
+ you can write 'cock', 'blowjob' and 'pussy' into your academic text
+ local achievement: encountering only 1 hungarian video among 100 porn clips!!

Cons:

- watching hours of porn is boring
- mainstream porn is extremely boring
- many people don't take your research seriously
- many people don't take YOU seriously
- guys don't take you seriously because they think you're on a 4-months-porn-watching-holiday
- girls only take you seriously if you prove you are a feminist
- there are also annoying reactions like laughing out of embarrasment, or envy for your 4-months-porn-wathcing-holiday
- having to explain your weird bookmarks and browser logs
- having to close the curtains while writing your thesis unless you want your neighbours see that you take notes while watching porn and think that you are a pervert
- huge traffic of pornsites slowing down your work
- noisy pop-up stuff on porn sites killing your computer
- don't bother with screenshots/images: your supervisor will sooner or later tell you to take it out
- there is not much literature on your topic
- if there is, then the librarians laugh and make comments when you borrow books titled like 'porn studies'