How to Market an Academic Book
We're all for academics sexin' up their work to sell, but this is a bit much. Lot's Daughters: Sex, Redemption, and Women's Quest for Authority, by Stanford's Robert Polhemus, "uses the 'disreputable Bible story of father-daughter incest' as a lens to understand family and gender relations through the centuries," quoth Publishers Weekly. "He casts a wide net over literature... to argue that the power dynamic between younger women and older men—in which daughters fall in love with their father's lives and older men are tempted by the intoxicating power and promise of youth'—is integral to our society." Oh, is it? Way to justify your Lolita complex, man. Middle-aged men can get away with anything.
Adds an anonymous tipster:
Also, the book is published by the press where the author is on the faculty. This is one step up from vanity press self-publishing (because he is familiar with the editors and his colleagues sit on the board of the press). For the record, I don't have a problem with the book's topic...I have a problem with the stupidity of the project. Coming from this person, it is skeevy. Take my word for it. But I never said that. And you didn't hear it from me.