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The original was posted on /r/twoxchromosomes by /u/reenelle on 2023-08-23 08:01:19.
Hi, since last year me and my bf fight pretty often. It started with me saying that I hate it when random men on the street tell me/women to smile, to which he responded with, “It is not sexist, you take it too serious, women say it to me too”. He doesn’t say it to women but he doesn’t understand what is the problem.
When I talk about sexism in general, he starts being defensive as if I say that only women are treated shitty, even though I always say that all people suffer from sexism/patriarchy and explain how/why.
Our last conversation ended up with me JUST explaining that the phrase (…that he said to me) “let’s never fight/let’s calm down” translates as “I don’t wanna hear about this problem, I don’t care about your feelings about it, I just wanna chill”. His answer is that I am imagining things, he never meant it, ofc he cares, i take it too serious blah blah, it has nothing to do with sexism blahblah. And ofc we never continue talking about this issue anymore. Ironically, he was asking me if our relationship will ever be like it was before, without fights. Because it makes him feel sad. For me, “before” is when we never talked about global problems.
I have a lot of examples where he says that the topic has nothing to do with sexism when it clearly does and I thought it is obvious, like “smile” and “calm down”, being emotional etc.
It seems that he thinks being sexist means calling women sluts, shaming them for the their appearance and forcing them to be housewives and that’s it. He tells me that he wants to be a better person even though he doesnt think he is a sexist because he doesn’t do things that i listed above.
Any ideas of how I can help him to understand it better? Books maybe, idk anymore.