Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control

An overwhelmed Mom reveals the intersection between misogyny and American motherhood and tracks a path toward a more caring future.

Touched Out is a blend of memoir and cultural criticism that explores how the author's experiences with ambiguous forms of sexual assault come to resurface in early motherhood.

American women are encouraged to view marriage and motherhood as the pinnacle of success. Although Amanda Montei understood motherhood wouldn't lead automatically to fulfillment, even she found the narrative hard to resist. After giving birth--and even during pregnancy--Amanda struggled to adjust to the new demands on her physical body.

Structural conditions--the lack of paid leave, the childcare crisis, mothers as America's only social safety net--were depriving Amanda of her bodily autonomy, but without another outlet for rebellion, she found agency by rejecting intimacy with her children and husband. Amanda struggled with the physicality of caring for children, but even more with her growing awareness that the lack of bodily autonomy she felt in motherhood reiterated a feeling she had always had about her body; she had been taught to use it to please others, especially men, without necessarily considering whether she wanted to.

Amanda was not alone--she found a huge assortment of women online who described feeling "touched out" too. Women are supposed to care for and pleasure their husbands and children, and to do so by pushing their bodies to the limit, ignoring their own desires and needs. Motherhood, too, can feel like an assault. And just as we naturalize sexual violence against women, we have also come to normalize the suffering of mothers.

The author writes with a blend of emotion drawn from personal experience and power drawn from her academic background and a lifetime of engaging with feminist thinkers and writers from Chanel Miller and Kate Manne to bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Silvia Federici and Adrienne Rich. She draws a unique connection between rape culture and the bodily sacrifices women are expected to make for their children, making a powerful argument from a thoughtful and considered perspective.

Ultimately, Touched Out prescribes a path forward for caregivers to take back their bodies, pass on a language of consent, and write a new story about what it means to care in America.

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