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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4648 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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Yeah, Evangelion is in part a story about the horrible inner experience of male teenage sexuality - it's unsurprising that a woman viewing it either wouldn't notice it at all and just see fanservice, or be disgusted enough to just look away and not think about it.

I suspect a show with an equivalent treatment of female sexuality would disgust most men, probably far more so given that they don't have "ugh, men" as an easily available response. Which makes me wonder, now that I think about it, because I can't think of a work like that (to be fair, my reading list is pretty male and not very teenage). If we were to do a 2x2, where you have Evangelion as male/negative and, say, Twilight as female/positive, what's the female/negative?

My wife is always showing me young adult fantasy books for women, ones that she loves because she grew up reading them. I'm like, for God's sake, why does every one of these books have to feature the protagonist getting her period? Almost no books about male protagonists feature them ejaculating for the first time.

It doesn't disgust me though, but I'm more irritated by the fact that women are so obsessed with their periods.

Wait, what’s the male/positive fantasy? Cause I think Eva is completely distinct from Twilight in ways which don’t fit on either of those axes.

Someone has definitely written grim, psychosexual coming-of-age stories for teen girls, but I’m not really sure what. Gone Girl and Lovely Bones are pretty different. Carrie? Any one of the interchangeable angsty pregnancy dramas? There’s got to be some shoujo out there which fits the bill.

Wait, what’s the male/positive fantasy?

Every mecha anime that predates NGE? "I didn't do anything special to deserve it, but I suddenly got a massive new body that can perform feats I never thought were possible, and now everyone looks up to me and treats me as the humanity's only hope."

There’s got to be some shoujo out there which fits the bill.

Dear Brother, which was, interestingly, a significant influence on Evangelion.

Honestly don't have an obvious candidate to mind, it's not the sort of fiction/movies I go for. The South African novel series Spud would be a good example, though it's aimed at kids of that age and very much not high art - Spud suffers through all the angst and pimples, but he ends up in a loving relationship and on course to as normal a life as one can live in SA. Generally the sort of people who do more artsy things tend to be older, and more focused on the negative, or at least the aporeic aspects of the psyche.

Stephen King is one of the absolute last people I'd go to for an accurate portrayal of that kind of interiority. I think insofar as a man can write this, the obvious go-to is Twin Peaks - except that Laura Palmer has to be this cipher, that we only learn about from others, precisely because Lynch can't be in that part of her head (note the extremely strong parallels between the EoE hospital scene and the scene of Laura putting on her stockings in FWWM, both beating you around the head with "I KNOW YOU'RE TURNED ON BY THIS CHARACTER AND YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD ABOUT IT").

True crime?

Not really "about the horrible inner experience of [female] teenage sexuality", except, uh, maybe some true crime narratives I'd prefer not to read. Given the general higher cultural discomfort involved (as I typed that sentence with male/female I half-expected some jackass will call me a creep just for that), I'm guessing not a show, but a book by a woman author, maybe an Anna Kavan type. Maybe an arthouse film.

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