80 Percent

tales of misogyny and the fight to get free

I had just turned 19 and was dating the man I would end up marrying a year later. We were out to lunch with my dad after church, a pretty regular occurrence. I had told a story, who knows about what. My dad looked at my soon to be husband and said: “the thing you need to know about my daughter is anything she says, just subtract 80 percent from it and you’ll be closer to reality.”

Later, they used this as shorthand. I’d tell a story and they’d look at each other, in unison they’d say, “80 percent.”

It’s taken me until my forties to reckon with the way in which that was probably the most misogynistic move my dad ever pulled. For decades I just let it be my compass. His voice kept me subjecting myself to that same kind of misogyny in my marriage. When the man I married told me regularly while we were dating that I needed to lighten up… well, I still married him. I reminisce now about having been a teenager whose mother had just died in her home from a long, cruel illness that slowly took everything from her while dating a man who told me I needed to lighten up and I just sob for the way in which I fundamentally didn’t believe I had the right to exist.

My father had been training me to distrust myself my whole life but now he was training my husband to distrust my voice as well.

It’s wild how even now I feel all of these urges to explain that I am a passionate communicator who will occasionally say things such as, “there were like a hundred bees” to describe the way there were a lot of bees or “it’s ten bazillion degrees out” to say it’s really hot. There’s still a nagging voice inside trying to convince me it was all just about the way I spoke, that’s all my father meant by his warnings, and if you knew how I talked you’d understand and approve of his tactics and you’d certainly trust my ex-husband’s narration.

I have two brothers whose fervor and fury make me seem chill except that they’ve never been called fiery or dramatic a day in their lives and no one ever warned anyone they dated to dial back what they had to say. The kind of patriarchy I grew up in was overtly demeaning to women. There was nothing shy about the way we called men the head of the household while blaming women for the transgressions of men. In our church and therefore our home, it was women owing men their bodies, their allegiance, their secret keeping, their souls. We were not to tell a man no and somehow we were also supposed to remain pure and never cause a man to stumble. We were to submit while they laughed at our expense. I married in that context with the intention of upholding that lifestyle, that holy covenant of subjugation.

You cannot actually just walk away from the evangelical church, slap on the label of progressive, announce to the world that you don’t think it’s a sin to be gay and then magically expect your marriage to be healed of the deep seated misogyny it was contracted in. The evangelical church teaches you your whole life that a woman’s body and soul belong to a man. That shit needs excavated and that kind of reckoning requires two wholly motivated individuals which is tricky because marriage benefits men greatly, making it difficult for them to want to flip the whole thing on its head.

I dedicated a solid decade of my life after leaving the evangelical church to believing I could heal my marriage if I tried hard enough. The onus was on me to rid my marriage of the misogyny we were steeped in. It was a battle I’d never win because equality in a marriage can never occur if it’s a battle in the first place. 19 years into my evangelical christian marriage wrapped in a progressive christian facade, I gave up. The only way to ever be my own was to stand on my own and say no to the ways in which my husband was still trying to control and undermine my autonomy and agency. Divorce in that context would test my resolve like nothing else. I still today, almost four years out now, will sometimes think, “god it would have been so much easier to just uphold the status quo,” followed quickly by, “easier is so not the point, not the goal, not the way for me!”

“80 percent” still pops into my consciousness regularly. When I get angry with the way I’m treated and with the way my kids are treated, when I think something is wrong or inappropriate, when I think in full sentences on my own and stand by my own opinions about how things should be, when I’m a grown ass woman with a whole personhood of her own, I think “80 percent.” I’m learning, slowly and agonizingly, learning to follow it up quickly with a hardy, “fuck that so much.”