For a long time, women have been having to fight for their rights in every aspect of life. The right to vote? The right to own property? The right to have a job? The right to equal pay? The right to not be discriminated against? Securing all these (and many more) have been vital moments in history, because for too long women were living with no rights at all, all because of the gender they’d been born.

Things are a lot better now in most parts of the world, but sometimes it still feels like women are fighting a battle against a society that expects them to behave in certain ways. Only recently, companies were taken to court for requiring female employees to wear skirts and heels while their male counterparts were allowed to wear trousers. It was wildly unfair – as are plenty of the expectations that women face every day.

Of course, there are plenty of people who still think that women should be ‘womanly’, whatever that means to them. It could be about politeness, wearing makeup and shaving their legs, or even not engaging in certain activities in public. And there is one word for what the people with those opinions are: wrong.

The woman in this story has lived a chill life with her roommate for a while, and nothing the roommate has ever done has really bothered her. But now the young woman has brought a guy she’d like to be her boyfriend home, and suddenly there are a lot of issues with the roommate that he’d like her to take care of. First on the list of things to change: her having bodily functions.

Read on to find out why.

AITA for asking my roommate to be more polite toward my guests?

So I (20, female) live with “Erica” (27, female). She’s usually nice and cleans up after herself and all that stuff, but we had an issue recently.

Last week, a guy I’m seeing (Josh, 21, male) came over sometime in the evening. When he arrived, she was in the kitchen cooking some kind of curry.

Josh and I went up to my room almost right away, and once we got up there he sort of awkwardly said that he absolutely hates the smell of curry, can’t really be around it because it makes him want to barf and he had to leave.

The last time before that when Josh slept over, apparently Erica was blowing her nose an ungodly number of times in the morning, he could hear it because her room shares a wall with the bathroom, and it grossed him out a ton. Apparently he also heard her fart super loud when he went to the bathroom late at night once too.

And this is leading to issues in their relationship.

Basically he thinks she’s super gross and as a result, can barely stand to be at our house. We’ve actually had discussions about getting serious, but he said the Erica thing is holding him back from it since he didn’t feel like he could date me if he didn’t think I had the kind of friends he’d want to be friends with or set up with his friends.

This morning, Josh came over and Erica was hard boiling eggs and again, the kitchen smelled like farts and he had to leave.

I confronted Erica about trying to be a little less loud/cook less smelly food all the time because I feel like it’s really rude toward Josh that she’s literally making him so uncomfortable that he needs to drive back to his house 25 minutes away and waste all that gas.

To my surprise, Erica (who is normally calm and polite, ive never seen her mad before, even when I accidentally ruined some of her expensive kitchen stuff – she didn’t even ask me to pay for it because “accidents happen”) got really angry and said that she wasn’t going to “adjust her whole life” for random people that I’m sleeping with.

Uh-oh. Read on to find out how this situation continued.

I was really hurt by the “random people” comment, because it’s not like I’m sleeping with different strangers all the time. I told her all the things Josh had said about her just being generally disgusting, like with the nose blowing sounds and the farting, and she said her bodily functions were going to happen like it or not.

I was still hurt and told her it was no wonder she was still single at her age, that she couldn’t show basic respect to other people, and also said the thing Josh said about not wanting to be serious with me because he thinks I surround myself with bad/impolite people.

Erica then said “the reason he isn’t committing to you has nothing to do with me, it’s because you’re gullible enough to believe him when he feeds you **** like that, once again. I’m not changing my life or magically stopping my bodily functions because of someone who has not said more than 2 words to me at a time.”

I basically just walked away crying at how much it had escalated.

AITA?

Wait, what? This girl’s boyfriend won’t be in a relationship with her because she (checks notes) lives with someone who cooks curry, blows her nose, and farts?

Is this guy seriously for real?

Poor Erica, just trying to live her life and being shamed by her roommate’s weird not-boyfriend.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a teacher who learns a lesson of his own from his student’s essays about personal responsibility.

Let’s see what the Reddit community made of this.

This person was appalled by Josh’s words.

While others were firmly on Erica’s side.

Meanwhile, this Redditor thought that Josh’s issues were the problem here.

Listen, you can’t come into another person’s home and try to dictate the way they live their lives. Sure, at 21 you might not have reached peak maturity, but surely by the time you’re an adult you can understand that other folk have bodily functions too, and it’s absolutely okay for anyone (even a woman! Gasp!) to blow their nose and fart in their own home, regardless of who else might be there.

It’s a wonder that this young woman wants to be in a relationship with Josh at all. He’s going to dictate what she can and can’t cook and eat, and if she ever needs to blow her nose or pass some gas? Those things won’t be acceptable in Casa del Josh. God help her if she gets a cold, or any stomach trouble, because Josh really wouldn’t like that.

You have to feel sorry for Erica, who is being treated like she’s completely unreasonable for living her life in her own home. It sounds like things were good between these roommates until Josh got involved, and now they’re at odds because of factors that never once bothered either of them. There’s one person who’s a problem here, and it’s not either of the folk who actually live in the house.

Are there any bigger red flags that Josh could wave in his misogynistic arms? He’s completely toxic – how much clearer could he make it?

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a tenant who decided to stop returning his neighbor’s misplaced laundry after two years.