I used to argue in high school with this girl who was obsessed with Jane Austen. She said she wished she had lived in that time period and wanted the kind of men from Austen’s novels to woo her.

We were both from dirt poor families and I argued that we would have been dirt poor back then, too. I argued that being dirt poor she would have almost no rights and definitely wouldn’t be crossing paths with the kind of men she pined for, which were generally of the aristocracy. I argued that she didn’t actually want to experience the horrors of rape and being treated like a piece of property. I argued that for the dirt poor like us, that was no past worth returning to at all, ever.

She fucking hated me for arguing any of this. I still feel that I was right to try to disabuse her of these absurd notions that her life would have somehow been better back then. Dipshits who think they’d magically be born into aristocracy when they certainly weren’t born into it now.