The Choking Doberman
Dec. 14th, 2021 08:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingI saw this book referenced in an academic paper about urban legends, and I was like, “Sweet! An entire academic book about urban legends!” It was published in 1984, which I thought made it even more interesting. Like, what sort of shenanigans were people getting up to before the internet?
I’m about halfway through the book, and I think maybe it’s not for me.
To begin with, it’s not “academic” by any standard I recognize. The author simply repeats one story after another without explaining or contextualizing them. He also doesn’t talk about his sources, save to occasionally make snide remarks about how stupid people are for believing certain stories. It’s kind of tedious, to be honest.
Also, I guess I forgot that this used to be a thing in the United States, but the book is entirely 100% about urban legends spread within (apparently?) racially homogeneous white communities. A lot of these urban legends are about how Black people are dangerous. I feel like the author knows this is problematic, but like I said, he provides zero contextualization. Without this contextualization, the sparse explanations he does offer are ridiculous. So when he says that urban legends about Black teenage boys doing gang initiation rituals in K-mart bathrooms are an evolution of European folktales about Jewish congregations eating Christian babies at Seder, what does that even mean? I understand the analogy, but I think it might be good to unpack something like that just a little bit.
On an even deeper level of cringe, the author’s default mindset is to believe that everything a woman says is a “story.” To give an example, the fifth chapter is all about the “urban legend” of date rape, which is an urban legend because it always happens to “a friend.” As the author says with a sly wink to the reader, no one actually knows anyone who was date raped, right? It’s not like one in three women will experience sexual assault during her life or anything.
In conclusion, I guess it used to be way easier to get tenure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m about halfway through the book, and I think maybe it’s not for me.
To begin with, it’s not “academic” by any standard I recognize. The author simply repeats one story after another without explaining or contextualizing them. He also doesn’t talk about his sources, save to occasionally make snide remarks about how stupid people are for believing certain stories. It’s kind of tedious, to be honest.
Also, I guess I forgot that this used to be a thing in the United States, but the book is entirely 100% about urban legends spread within (apparently?) racially homogeneous white communities. A lot of these urban legends are about how Black people are dangerous. I feel like the author knows this is problematic, but like I said, he provides zero contextualization. Without this contextualization, the sparse explanations he does offer are ridiculous. So when he says that urban legends about Black teenage boys doing gang initiation rituals in K-mart bathrooms are an evolution of European folktales about Jewish congregations eating Christian babies at Seder, what does that even mean? I understand the analogy, but I think it might be good to unpack something like that just a little bit.
On an even deeper level of cringe, the author’s default mindset is to believe that everything a woman says is a “story.” To give an example, the fifth chapter is all about the “urban legend” of date rape, which is an urban legend because it always happens to “a friend.” As the author says with a sly wink to the reader, no one actually knows anyone who was date raped, right? It’s not like one in three women will experience sexual assault during her life or anything.
In conclusion, I guess it used to be way easier to get tenure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
