Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9512676" data-attributes="member: 8461">I just finished reading How to Get Laid in Fairy Tales, by <a href="https://jeanajorgensen.com/wordpress/biography/" target="_blank">Dr. Jeana Jorgensen</a>, and my initial reflection is that this is a work which has suffered from its transition from one format to another.To reiterate, this was apparently a talk that the author gave several years ago, and decided to polish up and turn into an ebook (which, in full disclosure, I converted to a PDF after I got my copy). It's quite short, being only forty-four pages long, with over a dozen of its pages being devoted to the bibliography, acknowledgments, copyright info, etc. This is, in other words, more of a paper (or perhaps it's more apt to call it an article) than a book per se.The reason I bring this up is because Dr. Jorgensen's writing still sounds like a talk, despite being a paper, and while I suspect this says more about me than about her, that just rubbed me the wrong way. While I have no doubt that the frequent use of the first person, snappy asides, and pointed comments would work great in an oral presentation, their use here struck me as off-putting in what was otherwise a research paper on various aspects of sexuality in fairy tales. I suppose it's just my expectations, but while I can appreciate someone bringing charisma to a spoken lecture, I prefer a more staid presence in academic writing; to do otherwise strikes me as the difference between watching an episode of Seinfeld versus reading the script for it.That's unfortunate, because Dr. Jorgensen clearly has some insights to make into the nature of sexuality in fairy tales, noting several types of patterns and contrasts, e.g. how fathers who make incestuous advances on their daughters rarely meet with a bad end, whereas mothers who do the same to their sons usually experience a grisly death. Likewise, the use of cross-dressing as (not-so-)subtle instances of homoeroticism between characters, or the differences in how men approach serial monogamy in fairy tales versus how women do, etc.Ultimately, however, it's not the irreverant tone that undercut this paper/article for me (though that's something I've <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/understanding-history-why-serious-scholarship-of-d-d-matters.698849/post-9073077" target="_blank">complained about</a> before), but simply the overall brevity. Dr. Jorgensen has several books to her name (a few of which are currently sitting on my shelves, waiting to be read), and that's the length that this particular topic necessitates, with what's here being too short to act as anything other than an appetizer to the topic of sexuality in fairy tales.Instead, we get an almost lightning-round-esque take on several different instances of sexual motifs coming up in various stories, along with some extremely light inquiry as to the values they reflect/promote, along with a few nods at other authors in this field that she either agrees with or disagrees with, and then the entire thing ends. I'm sure it makes for a good TED Talk (or wherever she originally gave this), but as a piece of writing it's more of a sampler of her work than anything else.</blockquote>

Verification