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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   3866 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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I managed to successfully drag my poor wife through Berserk, Last Exile, Akira and a handful of others. But the look she gives me in Evangelion when Shinji gets tangled up in a fresh out of the shower Rei and "accidentally" gropes her, it's hard to defend why that's in there.

I think the error here is dragging one's wife through these shows.

Women don't need to defend why there's all this endless talking and nothing happens in some period-history romance show... That's their thing I guess. I'm not into it. I want to see some conflict and preferably some violence.

Holding male stories to female standards is no good. Berserk is for men, Eva too I think. It's possible for shows or books to cater to the interests of men and women but not all fiction needs to be like this. Underlying interests are different. I naturally think that certain things I like have Universal Self-Evident Value but they're not, they're just for me and maybe a subset of men like me.

I'm sure I'm not appreciating all the nuances of whatever they're talking about in Big Dresses and Bigger Stagecoaches, I just don't care to since it's boring. Much the same with women and Big Pauldrons and Bigger Bombs. See also my comment: https://www.themotte.org/post/877/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/187490?context=8#context

Previous discussion regarding whether it is possible/probable/desirable for men and women to share interests: 1 2

Long ago, I thought interesting women were women who were interested in the same things I was interested in. Which meant all the interesting girls were lesbians.

I think geeky guys often make the mistake of looking for women who are essentially men—and, yeah, there aren’t many of them. Men generally enjoy machines, systems, engineering, to a degree and in a way that women don’t, and likewise women generally enjoy creatures, cute things, fashion, social issues, learning about the dark side of the world, to a degree and in a way that men don’t. You’re unlikely to meet a woman whose personality and interests line up with men’s, or with yours.

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