Everyone's a Critic

[legionseagle]

My (23M) girlfriend (20F) let me use her old computer while mine is broken and I found an old archive written by her when she was 16. It is a long story about a maid in the antebellum south that has a romantic affair with the man of the house. It is not as overtly sexual as you may be thinking. It has sex, mostly towards the ending, but it is mainly romantic and very emotional. The maid is clearly meant to be a version of my girlfriend. Everything was fine for me until the part when they arrived to a train station. The maid wanted to leave because she couldn't bear for their romance to be hidden anymore. The man was following her to try to convince her to stay.

The issue is that I found the general representation of the station (and, later in the story, the trains themselves) to be full of anachronisms. I am a train enthusiast and know a lot about the history of rail transportation in the United States. So, I talked to my girlfriend about it but she got upset. She has been saying I shouldn't have read the story because it was a personal thing from when she was a teenager. She is also mad my reaction was something as "superficial" as the level of train accuracy.

Am I the Asshole?

(original post now locked, Twitter discusssion here )

Comments

[legionseagle]

This has got me particularly riled up because everyone commenting over at Twitter seems to be falling over themselves to excuse the snooping boyfriend on the basis that he's probably autistic and anyway any teenage girl who sets a story in the antebellum south is almost certainly an unredeemable racist who deserves everything she gets. Personally I don't think being a boring pedant on the subject of trains is necessarily proof that someone's on the autism spectrum and, even if it is, by the age of 23 the OP ought to have learnt not to go snooping on every hard drive that someone lets him have access to just because he can.

[rmc28]

There are definitely circumstances in which I would find "oh, you've been nerdsniped by the trains" amusing and even endearing, but these are not them.

• Don't snoop on other people's computers.
• Check before offering unsolicited feedback on creative endeavours.
• Maybe mention the things you did like (after all you read the damn story to the end!) before moving to the very important pedantry.
• but mostly, don't snoop around on other people's computers, have you no manners?

[legionseagle]

Also, assume that most people's response to something they wrote when a teenager is probably, "Oh, God, that "coupled with agonies of embarrassment for many nights thereafter.

[oursin]

My rather more frivolous Twitter thread: guy who would turn around at point in Brief Encounter in which Celia Johnson does not throw herself under the train to mansplain points about the engine and carriages. And quite possibly mistakes in the station caff as well.

But yeah, we do not snoop. We do whatever task someone has kindly lent their laptop to us to undertake, and then we log off.

[cimorene]

Yep, the Twitter thread was very yikes. Someone mentioned how bad US history education can be and the brainwashing that goes on in the South and someone else replied to that with like "I grew up in the South and she should still know better because the evidence is there and you have to choose to view it with rose-colored glasses".

Like, this is true, and it's also my view for an adult, or for a teenager like... engaging in race relations. But we don't know the girlfriend's race, the race content and slavery content of the story, or her feelings about any of that, but we DO know that she was at an age when lots of people are still credulous of the crap they get fed in school. Sure, ON SOME LEVEL you have to choose to believe that "slave owners can be nice", but it's not a choice made in isolation when you're a child dependent on its family living in an environment full of social pressures dictating which way you should think about it.

I clearly remember most of the white people in my history class coming out of the Civil War brainwashing unit like "OK, slavery was overall bad, and mistaken, but MANY slave owners meant well and SOME were completely nice and good people who treated their slaves like friends and family and never questioned it because that's just the way it was but now they would know better." At this stage, and in the state of Alabama, you're probably liable to be disciplined if you even made the ludicrous suggestion that George Washington or Thomas Jefferson weren't thoroughly good and universally well-meaning people. I was friend(sish) with white girls from southern families who could have written a story like this, like "I'll just pretend this maid was white and they paid her" or "she's a slave but it's like a paid employee, exactly like, but without the salary", and I'm fairly sure they would all have outgrown that by adulthood.

[legionseagle]

I can think of several ways in which the story could have gone in which a sixteen-year old might have thought she was dealing very sensitively with the subject matter and then gone "Oh, my God" at a later date (possibly with a side order of "thank God that never got out onto the internet".) The fact is, she left it on her hard drive and no-one would have been any the wiser if the self-righteous arsehole she was trying to help hadn't dragged it out and decided to snark about it online.

[cimorene]

Yeah, and all the other stuff is rather beside the point after he went snooping into her stuff without permission, discovered it, and read it without permission. Actually, even if she's definitely racist, he's still in the wrong for that.

[legionseagle]

Well, cards on the table, I've kicked up plenty of fusses about trains in film, TV and literature before now, including the baffling sleeper train which appears to be the boat train from Charing Cross to Dover in Guy Ritchie's second Sherlock Holmes film (as a matter of fact, assuming the identification of Cranford with Knutsford and Drumble with Manchester, one could not have taken the train between the two at the date when the gallant Captain Brown was killed by one.) However, I don't do it to people I know, unsolicited.

[wyomingnot]

All you need to pass asshole judgement is in the first sentence. He went snooping. Asshole. End of discussion. Nothing about the contents of the fic matters one bit. He's an even bigger asshole because then he followed up the violation of privacy with criticism of something she hadn't specifically asked him to read. Dude. Asshole.

Antebellum south shouldn't even be entering the conversation. Yeesh.

[legionseagle]

He's trying for (and judging by Twitter, succeeding at) the grand old social media strategy of "Whoever get's to call the other side a racist wins." It's a winning strategy because in the first place we live in a systemically racist society, so there's every likelihood that the GF's conduct can be judged racist when scrutinised, secondly the behaviour of people accused of racism who are racist and those who are not is functionally identical (I refer you to the Not The Nine O'Clock News Sketch, "It's got nothing to do with me" which is a Kafkaesque nightmare parody of the BBC's Watchdog show in which the person fingered as the alleged dodgy builder is the wrong person, but the more vehement their denials, the more the smug soundtrack repeats "'It's got nothing to do with me', they said" at greater and greater length, so at the end of the sketch even though the viewer has actually seen the original misidentification with their own eyes they are almost convinced that it has to be a lie, the voice-over sounds so certain.)

[oursin]

Oh, I've done that - cavalier ways with London geography, e.g. and just don't get me started on Bad/Improbable/Downright Impossible Library/Archival Practices, including several that completely undid the plots of the mysteries they were in. But somebody's teenage romantic fic that they did not even show you themself? Not enough codfish.

(With trains, I literally was just able to have an elopement across the border by train, it had been going for approx 6 months.)

[wyomingnot]

Which just makes him even more of an asshole.

[laurajv]

I do the same thing with rivers and tunnels for things filmed in my hometown, and I've also done locality checks for fanfic set in my hometown, but like everyone else here I'm horrified at doing that to someone's juvenile drawerfic that someone snooped to find. Just. oh god.

[legionseagle]

He also, by a side-wind, asserts that the main character is a self-insert aka Mary-Sue.

[troisoiseaux]

But somebody's teenage romantic fic that they did not even show you themself? Not enough codfish.

This did remind me of the fact that in 5th grade, my friends and I had an elaborate recess roleplay game about being spies during the American Revolutionary War that at one point featured a daring escape by train. You will see the problem with this immediately. We, apparently, did not??

(But yes, don't snoop on someone else's computer and definitely don't confess to having snooped by nitpicking their historical inaccuracies.)

[troisoiseaux]

Calling Whole Man Disposal Services......

[oursin]

I was going to suggest balloon would have been possible, but it was just a few years too early!

[minoanmiss]

*looks at the calendar*

1) LW, don't snoop. 2) getting trains right in a teenage wank fantasy is completely unimportant omg.

3) I can't believe I'm about to say this, but.... People have weird fantasies and I'm disinclined to judge someone as racist/condoning slavery because she wrote a story for herself where she was playing with the power dynamic of being subordinate to her lover. (I might judge depending on what she did with the story but it sounds like she just wrote it for herself rather than posting it anywhere/ trying to get anyone's approval for it.) I think this aspect might have been brought up by the LW as a smokescreen.

3a) Ask me about my pro-Mary Sue/ "Mary Sue is a term used to suppress women's writing" rant sometime. SOOOOOO many men have published self-insert writing. SO many.

4) Speaking of people and their identities, I kind of hate that whenever a man misbehaves someone says, "he must be autistic" as if that 1) equals misbehavior and 2) is an excuse for misbehavior.

[minoanmiss]

Oh unfuck him. *growls*

[legionseagle]

Of fucking course he knows exactly what buttons to press to get the internet on his side.

[conuly]

She was 16 when she wrote it!

[juniperphoenix]

Yep. Also, the letter writer doesn't mention racism at all. His concern is not about the racial content of the story. His concern is that a 16-year-old writing a romance story that incidentally included train travel was insufficiently expert in the history of antebellum rail transportation. He's being ridiculous.

[legionseagle]

Well, quite. Plus he didn't have the smallest excuse for reading it in the first place, still less putting details about it on the internet (whether or not those details are at all accurate.) But that hasn't stopped a lot of people ignoring his breach of privacy to basically say the GF (or let us hope ex) is obviously racist and untalented and so deserves what she gets.

[xenacryst]

This. There could be plenty to legitimately criticize, but he has to get his undies in a bunch about the historical accuracy of a transportation system that most people these days barely even knew existed. Oh, and after he snooped around to find it. He can fuck right the heck off.

[legionseagle]

I take the view that there is nothing to legitimately criticise because there was no justification for his either opening the file in the first place or putting a description of what it contained on the Internet. If she'd published the work, it would be a different matter but because she'd chosen not to do so it's akin to a diary or personal notes/ private fantasies. Admittedly on AITA there seems to be a letter every week from a teenager complaining that their parents have either removed their bedroom door or are threatening to do so, so it's clear my idea of privacy is not universal, but it's pretty widespread, I'd have thought.