How much of ourselves can we afford to efface?

Amanda Montei on women as desiring machines, the economics of identity, and being "touched out."

In an article for Slate,

Amanda Montei

writes this about feeling “touched out” - both as a mother and as a woman.

My days as a mother were, in those early years, filled with pulls of skin, pokes of face, smears of food across my chest. Despite my attempts at boundary-setting, I had become not just jungle gym but also transport, toy, chair, napkin, utensil, and comfort object. As I loaned my body to my child, I thought back on my own experiences with assault and harassment. At times, my rejection of touch felt like a form of rebellion, however misaimed, against a misogynistic culture that expects women not only to service the emotional and physical needs of their children but also the needs of men. Other times, when I ran from my child or pushed them away—or when my need to not be touched transformed into rage—I spiraled into cycles of regret, confusion, and shame, knowing how American culture side-eyes any negative emotions felt by mothers, especially when those emotions lead to rejections of closeness or tenderness.

I’d be hard pressed to find a mother who doesn’t regularly crave physical solitude, the absence of sticky fingers eternally reaching towards her, and the emotional space to simply be. But until I read Amanda’s new book, Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control, which comes out next week, I hadn’t connected these claustrophobic, sometimes rage-inducing feelings with my experience as a woman in patriarchy.

It is considered right and natural for mothers to submit to touch, for us to [joyfully, willingly] give up our bodily autonomy in an act of loving service towards our children. I’ll never forget desperately searching one of the Sears’ books for literally anything that might get my first baby to sleep for more than one hour at a time, or anything that would coax him to sleep somewhere other than in my arms, and ultimately finding a passage about cluster feeding which said something to the effect of: “During these stages, it’s natural for baby to prefer Mom - try to take it as a compliment!” I still feel vestiges of fury and helplessness recalling how very small advice like this made me feel, back when I was an open wound of a person.

But far before we strap newborns to our chest, we are taught to use our bodies as conduits for men’s needs; their sexual desire, their anger, their misogyny.

As Amanda writes in Touched Out:

I saw that a mother’s body is slowly made over time, groomed from birth by the ideologies of womanhood that descend on us the moment we are born, piled on us all our lives, and calcified by the beliefs we inherit about what it means to be a mother in America. Fuck that.

Fuck that indeed. This book smoothed out a jumble of strings that had been messily knotted within me for years and sorely in need of a thorough disentanglement. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Sara: You write in the book about how lockdown and the pressures of motherhood made you feel both rage and desire. Can you talk about why you think the two emotions are often intertwined when it comes to physical autonomy and motherhood?

Amanda: I think a lot of the rage mothers feel comes from a lack of autonomy, a feeling that their lives are suddenly spinning beyond their control, their whole identity getting swallowed by the demands of motherhood. In the early years of parenting, because of the absence of equitable national leave policies, affordable early childcare, and more communal models of caregiving, the lack of physical autonomy is perhaps the most visible, because we are so often, even when we’re not in a global pandemic, trapped at home alone with little kids. But as I write in the book, unless we have lots of money, that lack of autonomy extends to other areas of our life as well, such as our ability to continue doing the work we may have previously done outside the home, or even just our ability to access our own psychic space.

I had a wise mentor tell me, not long after I had children, that I wouldn’t get my psychic space back until my children were both in grade school. That happened this year.

Which means I had to work incredibly hard (and pay lots of money to many childcare providers) to secure access to my own mind and write this book.

We expect mothers to be completely devoid of desire – not just in the sense that professional ambitions are taboo or put off for another time. Sexual desire and any intellectual or creative desires are also off limits. As I write in the book, we get the message that we should hollow ourselves out and replace our voices and the way we carry ourselves not just with more maternal versions of ourselves, but with a kind of stock image of what a mother should be.

Ironically, though, in a culture that tells us that we cannot want whatever it is we want (women aren’t supposed to want anything other than to care for their kids and spouses), I think we just become even more desiring machines. Without an outlet to express that desire or fulfill it, so many emotions bubble under the surface—not just rage, but longing, shame, frustration, confusion, depression, anxiety, a desire to control our children or exert some power over someone or something. Add to that the really disembodied way in which we expect mothers to parent—giving over their bodies, whether to breastfeeding or baby sleep or being the household regulator of emotions—you just get all these feminine bodies roiling with rage and desire.

At one time in history, these were hysterics. Now, I guess, they’re “touched out” or they have PMADs, and that’s supposedly less stigmatized, it’s “normal,” but to my mind, it’s a legacy of bodies bucking against the forces that suppress and control women’s bodies, so that we can be put to work in service of male power and pleasure.

Sara: How does the pervasive cultural assumption that girls and women don’t know what they want (or understand their own desires) contribute to rape culture AND the systematic disenfranchisement of mothers?

Amanda: Well, first I’ll say that the idea that girls and women must know what they want at all times is also something we see come up both in sexual politics and the contemporary political conversation on motherhood. Girls and women are often blamed for their own assaults or rape or harassment on account of them not knowing what they wanted – they asked for it or put themselves in a compromising position or didn’t say no firmly enough, that sort of thing. We see this play out in political responses to demands for better policies for women and families as well – if you’re struggling as a parent, you asked for it, you should have been wealthier before becoming a parent/poverty is a choice, you should parent better, you shouldn’t want to work, you should work harder, you made all the wrong choices in life, your desires are bad, you’re a bad mother if you’re not enjoying your total loss of self and questioning an economics that relies on free labor in the home, etc!

So women and girls, apparently, don’t know what they want, but also they are expected to know what they want at all times to avoid having their bodies exploited by boys and men and male power.

This is of course all crazy-making gaslighting and victim-blaming. Those socialized as girls grow up hearing that they cannot trust their own version of events, because what they think is abuse or exploitation or unfair treatment is just hysteria, overreaction, or a wrong interpretation of events, and if they come forward they will be punished. At the same time, girls and women are expected to make . . . flawless choices at every phase of life. Of course there is no winning here, because all of this rhetoric is just designed to excuse male violence and misogyny. 

Sara: Mothers are famously expected to do it all. And to have it all. A fulfilling, lucrative career; happy, well-adjusted kids; a thriving marriage; a hot sex life. Each of these things should be the result of collaboration and joint effort, but often they’re viewed as the mother’s “natural” responsibility. Why do you think that is? Why are we targeted with (as you write) “listicles of tips for reviving post baby sex drive,” whereas men are targeted with pieces “addressing husbands as though they are impatient children sitting on their hands, trying desperately to hold back a force beyond their control?”

Amanda: Well, it’s very lucrative for men to have women working as mothers and wives! I cite Kristen Ghodsee’s work in the book, and she observes that unpaid labor in the home supports lower taxes, which supports those higher in the income ladder, mostly men. And of course this arrangement is foundational to American life and capitalism, as the divide between public and private labor is foundational to Western patriarchal life.

I agree with Rebecca Traister, who said we should strike the term “having it all” from the feminist lexicon forever because it misrepresents the aims of feminism and too easily allows us to slip into the trap of blaming feminism, rather than holding economic, social, cultural, and political inequalities accountable. She wrote this over ten years ago btw, so we still have a lot of work to do!

To the question of sexual desire, that kind of “science” is just not built on solid ground, and yet it circulates often in the domain of popular “expert” advice. As is often the case with popular science, especially the kind that attempts to explain sex, sexuality, relationships, or family, it’s just a mirror image of ideology, a cultural story we tell ourselves about sex: male desire is seen as this uncontainable spontaneous force, whereas we have this cultural assumption that women’s sexual desire is more responsive. This perspective just confirms regressive beliefs that men are more active, women are passive; and worse, it confirms a kind of male entitlement to women’s bodies, if we understand women’s bodies as passive receptacles.

Sara: One of the fundamental truths in your book is that sex (and sexuality) is a form of labor. I can think of many men who would balk at this assertion, and can imagine these men protesting that there’s something “wrong” with a sexual relationship if it involves work, or there’s something “wrong” with a woman if her sex drive is low, or if sex isn’t at the top of her priority list. What would you say to these theoretical men? And how do we reframe these conversations so that the protection of men’s egos isn’t the primary focus?

Amanda: Hah, I would say to these theoretical men that they should really talk to more women! More seriously, though, I think men grow up performing their sexuality in a way that is often less discernible to them. Women tend to grow up more aware of how they must make themselves into sexual objects and perform maternity. Even before I became a mother, as I write in the book, I knew to perform maternity for boyfriends and lovers—this was how I made myself into a commodity they might want to keep around. (Have you seen the recent season of Love is Blind?! There’s a male contestant who has repeatedly doubles down on his totally uncritical judgment of his castmate as not a motherly enough match for him!)

I think many women also balk at the idea of sex and sexuality as being related to labor or economics. I think it’s a complex conversation that I explore in the book. Part of the hesitation, though, I think comes from our very heteronormative ideas about love and sex and marriage. We like to think of these private spheres as separated from public realms like economics, work, and politics. When it comes to women’s sex drive, we’re clearly also still recovering from the legacy of frigidity. And we’re definitely still living in an age of male entitlement to sex, such that when women don’t want to have sex with men, they’re still often branded as cold bitches who need to get laid, or who are punishing men. This takes place, I think, to a much lesser, more subtle degree in domestic spaces and in marriage, where there is this culturally-sanctioned entitlement to the wife’s body, as I explore in the book.

I suppose I have very little interest at this point in protecting men’s egos. It’s just . . . not the time in history for that? I think men need to get curious and develop some empathy and resilience around talking with women about sex and sexuality, especially if they are partnered with women. I think they need to get really comfortable being uncomfortable if they want at all to be an advocate for gender equality.

Sara: Similarly, why do you believe that “Mother and Wife are forms of labor not identity positions,” and how does thinking about these roles as identity positions harm us (and society!!)?

Amanda: Both “mother” and “wife” are a set of cultural beliefs and assumptions and expectations about the kinds of work we do in these roles, just like any gender category. Mother and wife each imply certain types of work that it’s expected women will do, whether that’s housework, servicing the male ego, childcare, what have you.

Maybe we identify with these roles because we see ourselves in some aspects of them, or we find they have some political or emotional power for us, and okay. But they are first and foremost cultural categories–aspirational and idealized and performative ones at that, as you write about so well.

I don’t think identifying as “mother” necessarily harms us, but it can, especially when we find ourselves reinscribing this idea that cis women are natural childcare providers. It’s important to consider why we might feel attached to this very gendered term, “mother,” and when and where it’s appropriate to use.

I have even more trouble with the term wife! I don’t know that there’s any power in that term, at least not for me, and at least not at this point in history.

Sara: I love that you wrote about The Bachelor. I haven’t watched it for a few years, but I was a hardcore fan at one point (mostly, I think for the kitsch and soapy drama of it all). I don’t think I’m making a groundbreaking statement by pointing out that these types of narratives glorify a type of heteronormative relationship that is meant to be aspirational because it’s “natural,” because it “feels easy.” Real love, in other words, shouldn't be work. Talk to me about how such a belief sets women up for feeling like shit in their relationships!

Amanda: It’s a terrible show that should have been canceled long ago! It’s the modern fairy tale that keeps trying to adapt to the times but is always many years behind.

That said! We all have cultural attachments that define parts of us, and for me, this show was one that really defined how I thought about the mythology of love, marriage, and baby, even though I convinced myself I was watching it ironically and intellectually. I could spend hours analyzing the weird language of the show–the breaking down of “walls,” the hollow metaphors, the weird way contestants say they’re “falling in love” before they are actually “in love,” and the way they do and do not talk about love as “work.” Not to mention how the show has changed as its relationship to influencing and economics and therefore work has become harder to hide.

In Touched Out, I bring in the show because it really highlights how marriage is most often seen culturally as one stop in the “journey” to become parents, and how this furthers the hetero-fantasy of a relationship that exists outside the context in which the show is made. But that’s really what the show offers— this suspension of disbelief that I think many of us carry inside ourselves, that says maybe love or marriage can exist outside of the social, cultural, political, and economic forces that define it. Maybe ours can exist outside of history. In the book, I explore what I found when I came up against the institutions of marriage and motherhood, and that desire to refuse them.

Sara: You write that both sex and motherhood require women to make a number of “calculations,” to exist in a perpetual state of “waiting.” Say more!

Amanda: In the part of the book you’re referring to I’m citing Silvia Federici, who says that most women spend their life calculating how much of themselves they will give up, and how much they will get in return. It’s sort of an economics of identity. I appreciate Federici’s observation there because for me, that was often my experience of early sexuality. I waited for men to want me, to approve of me, to cum. And I tried to figure out who I was or what was left of me in all that. My sexuality and my identity were made up of a constant give and take between what I wanted and what I felt the world was telling me I should want, should be doing, should look like.

In motherhood, there were new but very similar calculations. I pushed through the discomfort of mothering, trying to figure out how much of myself I could efface, how much of my voice and my feelings and my identity I could modulate or adjust or abandon, because that’s what motherhood asks of us, before I just . . . didn’t really exist anymore?

Now, on the other side of those hard early years, I understand that there are areas of my life I have to let go of because of the limits imposed on my family life by structural or institutional forces. There are also other areas on which I’m not willing to compromise, and in some of those areas I have the privilege to set those terms.

But as a new mother, I pushed myself to the brink of exhaustion and erasure trying to do right by my kids. I loved them so much (they are the best!), and I thought that was the way to love them, and to be a “good mom.” It was familiar, this pressure to please and do away with myself in the process, and it was what I felt the job called for.

Sara: So much “having it all” advice warns mothers to not let their love for their children distract them from the health of their romantic relationships. Why is this advice overly simplistic, and how does it require more labor from mothers?

Amanda: Ah this one is easy, and I have a perfectly simplistic answer: that kind of marital advice is just a slick way of saying, ladies, put everything you have into motherhood BUT don’t let motherhood distract you from your sexual duty to men!

Sara: I so related to you throwing yourself all in to domestic work as a new mom. I went through a similar phase, I think hoping that adhering fully to a certain kind of feminine and maternal ideal would make me feel (for lack of a better word) ok? You cite aspirational momfluencer culture as being one of the things that propelled you forwards in your domestic goddess efforts.

The endless streams of aspirational content that supported this imaginative, futural work also brought me the promise of a home unlike my own–one where everything was beautiful, orderly, spotless, easy. A home I might achieve, someday, if I kept up hope and put in the work. But then I would stumble on a post guided by biblical verse and feel goaded, tricked by the culture of motherhood I was consuming. Throwing my phone down like it was contaminated, I thought about all the images I studied. My life was fading into a string of compulsions, and I could no longer distinguish between what I was doing because I felt it was the right thing to do and what I was doing simply because it fulfilled some image of motherhood at which I had gazed wistfully and for too long.

YES. Clarity of desire (and identity) is sometimes so infuriatingly difficult to ascertain as mothers (and women). How is this intrinsically connected to constructions of gender? And how is this bewilderment not an individual failing or weakness but one that’s been foisted upon us?

Amanda: Clarity of desire and identity are hard to find. That is, in a way, one thesis of my book. Especially given that we live in this world where our phones are always shouting at us to say this, not that, want this, not that, be this way, not that way, don’t fuck up your children, oops you already did, bad mom!, don’t dress that way, or that way . . . it’s absolutely unbelievable! It’s connected to gender, of course, because the conflicting double standards are always higher and stronger and more conflicting for women.

I love the way you put that, too: “this bewilderment is not an individual failing or weakness but one that’s been foisted upon us.” Confusion and shame and disempowerment are really the point when it comes to the expectations placed on women. I think the project of Touched Out is very much to explore what that feels like, to be in a body wading through all that. I hope that it will help some readers push away those grubby hands— not kids’ hands, but ideological-male-power hands.

And I hope the book illustrates something beyond what we get from terms like “self-objectification” and “internalized misogyny.” Those are good, useful terms that help us name how power lives inside us. But I wanted to show further how ideology becomes material. How the stories we tell about women and mothers become part of us, for better and for worse, and the complex work of navigating that, refusing that, and trying to create something different.

Sara: Back to the “good mom” in her “good home.” How have your beliefs about domesticity and “good” motherhood shifted as you’ve grown into your maternal identity?

Amanda: Hah, well I no longer aspire to be the “good mom” in her “good home.” But also I do, to be honest, because that’s how powerful cultural influence is! I think I’m much more aware now, though, of the impulse I have to carry shame or self-doubt because of how I mothered yesterday or today or two years ago, so I can sort of see these come up and flick them away most of the time. I also let go of so much of the shame and confusion I was carrying about how men treated me when I was younger— which is not to say that the damage they did is just gone, but that I was able to make sense of it in a way that allowed me to put it somewhere.

What’s really central to my work as a mother now is teaching my children about autonomy and care for others’ bodies. Everything else follows from this work for me – antiracist work, community work, lessons about gender and sexuality. If I can teach my kids that everyone’s body belongs to them, I think I will have done some good work as a parent. And that includes teaching them that my body—not in spite of being a mother, but especially because I’m a mother—belongs to me. I wasn’t always modeling that lesson for them, in my efforts to be that “good mom.” But now that’s a foundation to which I always return when I’m doubting the lessons I’m passing on or the way I parent.

If I were to try, instead, to fit some basic mold of what mothers are supposed to say and do and be, I wouldn’t be me, and that’s no longer something I’m interested in. I think it’s okay for my kids to see what matters to me, and someday to decide that maybe other things should have mattered to me more, or less. That will be their right—their right to be them.

As for my home, it’s a mess!

Sara: Talk to me about Marguerite Duras’ idea of the “discontinuity” caused by young children. You write in the book that it felt like “infinite labor” and um yes yes YES.

Amanda: Yes, my home is in a constant state of discontinuity. Sucks for me, because I really like aestheticizing my home. I was raised by a mom who loved to decorate and to have “a place for everything and everything in its place.” I would be lying if I said I’d somehow overcome all that. I have not.

Duras writes that homes are always a reflection of the women who live in them. Messy homes are supposed to signify a woman who has lost her mind. I think today, at least in the niche parenting discourse you and I move within, we have some resistance to this—that a messy home is not a moral failing. But in general, I think the association between women and homes is still foundational to a lot of the way we think about both women and homes.

Duras also writes, as I discuss in the book, that most women never solve the problem of discontinuity caused by young children – the infinite messes. But there’s this way in which that discontinuity, and making women responsible for it, keeps women endlessly busy, such that she, conveniently, has no time for any other labors! Funny though, because in that chapter I also write about the legacy in writing on work, even within like Marx, to call the labor performed in the home unproductive, because it supposedly doesn’t produce anything.

So again, we can see how the whole way in which we understand Work is predicated on gender, and how “women’s work” has been naturalized not as work, but as an aspect of femininity, or as love.

Sara: I truly believe that so much of my postpartum disillusion can be blamed on the invisibility of mothers’ labor. I (like you!) “expected parenting to be challenging, taxing, life-altering, but in the ridiculously minor ways: perhaps I couldn’t travel as much or stay out late partying. Perhaps I wouldn’t get to watch as much TV.” SOB for our younger, clueless selves! How can we (as a culture) ensure that the work that goes into raising children is seen? How is careerism implicated?

Amanda: Sob, indeed. What a joke. I basically got a PhD in this subject, and still I was completely blindsided. I knew about “women’s work,” and wages for housework, and a whole history of feminist art that attempted to make domestic and maternal work more visible and more valued. But I had to become a parent to really see and understand how every level of society is set up to ghost this labor and to grasp what an absolute farce the life of a parent who works outside the home is, as we try to pretend we are not constantly underwater.

I think we need to not pretend. We need to be really angry about the presumption that women, and all parents, will work for free and won’t be valued. I think we need to actively center how capitalism and our understanding of work and its place in our lives and what family is and what gender is was all built on this farce.

I love the question you pose about how careerism is implicated, too. The supposed separation of private and public life is still very much going strong! We need to insist that the unpaid work we do is paid, literally, because that’s how we value things in this society, and paying this work wouldn’t just, like, make women rich (if only!), it would require that we completely rethink gender relations and economics and work.

We need also to insist that men do more of the unpaid work for now, so they understand it as work and advocate too, because they’re just not doing enough. We need to insist that people in our communities without children also get in on caregiving work, because again, that’s how it becomes visible and shared.

And if we’re in public positions of power in our waged work, we need to insist that the struggles we have “balancing” domestic life with public life is something we are talking about all the time because there are plenty of people who do not have the ability or privilege to insist on the above.

Sara: Why do you think so many of us are radicalized by motherhood?

Amanda: I think having to explain the very messed up parts of this world to our children is a significant part of it. Another is that we are faced firsthand with just how many institutions and systems fail and exploit women. We also see up close how things like gender socialization work, as our kids grow up and we see them groomed in various ways for different ways of seeing the world.

Because the family is a major source of social reproduction, as parents, we are faced with the question of whether we want to write a new story with our kids, or replay old ones. And we also see how culture and politics is writing this story often beyond our control. That can be terrifying.

But I also think it’s important to note that not everyone is radicalized by motherhood, and if they are, they aren’t always radicalized in a way that disrupts the status quo or acknowledges how patriarchal capitalism and white supremacy hurts us all. We are seeing now how conservative parents and political figures are radicalized in a very different way than what you or I may mean by this term– they are weaponizing parenthood and motherhood in local, state, and national politics to exert more control over children and educational institutions.

Because, again, the family is such a major site of social reproduction, it’s a place where we can really reimagine what a more equitable society might look like. Conversely, it can also be a place where a lot of violent institutions are passed on to the next generation.