Me (25f) and my husband (25m) have been a little rocky lately. It’s a long story and would end up being a whole novel, but a conversation happened last night that also made me wonder if maybe he’s sexist. We were watching The Good Place and we were on the episode where she remembers seeing a video of a coffee shop owner belittling and groping a potential employee.
I jokingly asked him if he’d still go to a place if he knew the owner did that and he said yes and said that not going wouldn’t help. I explained that it’d help them get shut down and that someone who does something like that doesn’t deserve to own a business. He had been drinking, but he started talking a lot about gender and saying “oh, it happens to guys too and no one cares about it and they just keep quiet so women should too.” He kept going on about how it’s bad to want to ruin someone’s life for it and how the woman “let” it happen because she didn’t say anything to him when he did it (even though it was in the middle of a hiring interview at a public coffee shop). I asked him what gender had to do with it and why he was bringing it up because I’d think it was just as awful if it were a woman doing it to a man, then he said that you never hear about that happening because men are afraid to talk about it but it probably happens to men wayore often than women. I said they should speak up about it then and everyone would support them through it too, then he said no one would care if it happened to a man.
I kept trying to figure out why that was a gender issue in his eyes and he said that he knows I don’t think women and men are equal because I’ve said that men have it generally easier than women. I said that was my opinion and it was okay to disagree but it wasn’t changing my opinion. He then said that men have things a lot harder.
The whole conversation was very confusing to me, but then he switched it to asking why I even care about something like that unless it happens to me. I told him it’s because I care about people in general, and he said I shouldn’t speak out about it unless I’m going to do something about it to stop it. Then he asked me what I’d fight harder against, sexism or autism awareness (we are both on the spectrum) and I said they’re both equally important and he wouldn’t take that answer. Then he said he was upset because I have an opinion on that, but I don’t agree with him that the court system “always sides with the woman on everything, especially if children are involved.” We never agreed so we eventually turned the show back on and went to bed after the episode.
I’m starting to wonder if maybe he has some kind of hatred toward women or something. We just moved into a new house and ,although it’s a nice house, it’s in a rougher neighborhood and his family all told him to protect me and his 3 year old daughter when we moved and then a few days later we were arguing and he said it wasn’t fair that everyone told him to protect us but never told me to protect him. He was trying to say they should have told us to protect each other instead of just him protecting me. I’m not saying this in a conceited way, but I’m a cute, 5’1, 100 pound girl who looks 16 or 17 years old. And his daughter is, well, 3, so very defenseless. I feel like it should have been obvious why they’d tell him to protect us.
Tl;dr this conversation made me feel like maybe my husband is sexist, what do you guys think?