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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   14973 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

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I recently finished the book Fathers and Sons and found myself amused by the way Turgenev described three different young ladies (each quote taken from a different part of the story):

He was forever haunted by that pure, delicate, timidly raised face; he felt on the palms of his hands that soft hair, and saw those innocent, slightly parted lips, through which pearly teeth gleamed with moist brilliance in the sunshine. He began to watch her with great attention in church, and tried to get into conversation with her. At first she was shy of him, and one day meeting him at the approach of evening in a narrow footpath through a field of rye, she ran into the tall thick rye, overgrown with cornflowers and wormwood, so as not to meet him face to face. He caught sight of her little head through a golden network of ears of rye, from which she was peeping out like a little animal

“Pardon, monsieur,” while she bowed, smiled, and suddenly seemed frightened, and ran away, though at the bend of the staircase she had glanced rapidly at him, assumed a serious air, and blushed. Afterwards, the first timid visits, the half-words, the half-smiles, and embarrassment; and melancholy, and yearnings, and at last that breathing rapture. …

When Katya spoke, she had a very charming smile, sweet, timid, and candid, and looked up from under her eyebrows with a sort of humorous severity. Everything about her was still young and undeveloped; the voice, and the bloom on her whole face, and the rosy hands, with white palms, and the rather narrow shoulders. … She was constantly blushing and getting out of breath.

For being three different characters, these sure are all the same character. Clearly Turgenev had a type. (An archetype!) But it's probably also the type that many (most?) guys have. And in 19th-century literature, characters could just exist as that archetype without needing to justify it.

Whereas in the context of modern media — post-postmodernist but still poisoned by the subversions of postmodernism — it seems like the archetype can't exist without justifying it somehow. When I see quotes like this:

Malfoid is an independent person with many valid, in-universe reasons to dislike and be a foil to Potter, and she's an immensely effective foil. She is actually a unique, deep, intelligent, principled, capable character who is a genuine challenge to contend with.

…I'm strongly suspicious of whether that's actually the reasons why the character is appealing vs being the necessary rationalization baggage for the modern reader, so that they can accept the character as "realistic". And it seems like the necessary rationalizations are getting ever more elaborate, where now you need to borrow a whole media franchise's backstory and then additionally rewrite a good chunk of its content further.

All this is to say: Turgenev comes across as quite horny, but his writings are still probably healthier to consume than whatever the internet is doing.

What's the archetype here, the young coquette who machine-learned that a certain kind of awkwardness that comes naturally gets her male attention? That would be fair enough for the Turgenev paragraphs, but I don't really see it in the female Malfoy samples, unless you want to lump together any and all forms of non-self-aware romantic behaviour (I think even saying "affection" here would be reading too much into Turgenev as quoted).

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