Women Talking: The Assault of Motherhood

an interview with Amanda Montei, author of Touched Out

“American parenting in particular has been set up to manipulate and abuse women’s bodies and psyches, to put them to work for free and call it love, then to gaslight them into thinking they have done something wrong that led them there. But powerlessness has always been the point.”

Amanda Montei, Touched Out

I first met Amanda Montei in an online class she taught through Corporeal Writing called “Writing and/as the Mother.” It was a group of roughly twenty-five women and we engaged with writing by mothers, about motherhood, while also responding to writing prompts. Once a week we gathered on Zoom to discuss the material and anything we had been ruminating on regarding being a mother and a writer.

I’m not sure if it was just the right gathering of women or the right moment in time (Fall of 2021) or whether Montei possesses an otherworldly ability to extract the best from her subjects, but it was a class that provided not only incredible growth for me as a writer but also writer friends I am still in contact with to this day. (Remember my piece published by Isele Magazine: “Words: on the linguistic indoctrination of a woman”? I drafted it in response to a prompt from this class).

Montei has since become a friend. She lives in the East Bay, while I am on the Peninsula and thus we’ve been able to meet up several times for writing retreats, as well as at AWP this past March. We also started Substack’s around the same time, and as many of you know, I find her Mad Woman newsletter essential reading.

When I first read her Slate article on feeling Touched Out, I felt like someone had put into words the aching of my soul. And I still feel that way about her writing. Her ability to combine seemingly disparate concepts and illuminate how they are inextricably tied together is unparalleled.

She does that in her new book Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent and Control, exploring how the expectation that women’s bodies will be available for the taking by men (sexually) is related to our expectation that their bodies will be endlessly available to their children. That it is in fact the rape culture we are immersed in that makes motherhood feel so confining, disempowering, and sometimes, triggering. “My body did not belong only to me,” she writes early in the book. “I struggled with the physicality of caring for children, but even more with my growing awareness that the lack of autonomy I felt in motherhood reiterated everything I had been urged to believe about my body since I was a girl.”

Montei came into my life during a time of intense transformation. She has been pivotal in my awakening of who I am as a mother, writer, and woman. Below, she was gracious enough to answer my questions. (I’ve also conversed with her about the idea of sex as marital duty. Don’t miss that juicy interview here.)

Montei’s book goes on-sale September 12. Do yourself a favor and order it now.

If you’re a Bay Area local, meet us both at her book event at Green Apple Books in San Francisco on Tuesday, September 12 at 7 pm, moderated by Tracy Clark-Flory.

Cindy DiTiberio: In the book, you discuss “a culture that sees women’s suffering as inevitable…just as we normalize sexual violence against women, we normalize the suffering of mothers.” Do you consider this book fueled by the experience of the pandemic? Like those unfair terms awakened in you the seeds for this book - that we are done suffering, that we no longer have to submit to these unsustainable terms?

Amanda Montei: I wouldn’t say this book, or the ideas in it, are unique to pandemic life, no. I was already working on this book before the pandemic, and the idea that suffering is part of women’s nature can be traced back to many of our earliest origin stories. Men and women have long used the idea that childbirth is painful, for example, as supposed proof that women are destined for suffering.

I explore in the book how the exploitation of women’s free labor in the home is foundational to capitalist life, how we can trace the false divide between public and private life back to antiquity, and how patriarchal attitudes predate capitalism, an economic system that just codified sexist beliefs, like the idea that women belong in the home because they have wide hips meant for sitting.

I also outline how in the last century, feminine idleness drove stay at home mothers to prove they were in fact working, and hard. We can see the legacy of this in intensive parenting today, and the way in which motherhood has become a kind of athletic sport.

Obviously a lot of the issues Americans face with respect to care work were brought to the surface by the pandemic. The childcare crisis during the pandemic helped many people who otherwise had enough financial and racial privilege to shield themselves from how hard parenting is in this country understand those issues as part of a larger system of undervalued and under-supported work.

That cultural awakening made the book feel much more urgent to me, as an author. I had been turning over all these ideas about so-called women’s work and feminist aesthetics for years, sorting out how to apply them to my experience of new motherhood and the experiences of parents I knew, alongside national reckonings with race and sexual violence. During the pandemic, suddenly a lot more people not only wanted to have these conversations, but also the feminist ideas that before had seemed radical or extreme, or those that had simply been dismissed as impossibilities—such as the idea of paying for housework—now made sense to a lot more people.

CD: You describe the expectations of American parenthood as an assault. Why do you think motherhood feels so violent and violating? Could there be a version of motherhood in some realized utopia that isn’t? What would that look like?

AM: I don’t think caring for children is an innately violating experience. Sure, we have to learn to share and negotiate space and needs and wants and feelings and bodies whenever we care for another person. As I write in the book, drawing on bell hooks, love requires a certain surrender of the “will to power.” But when a parent has been made to feel powerless elsewhere in their lives, or when we have been taught that power equals control and domination, or when we feel our life has suddenly started to spin beyond our control as we try to fulfill some image of the “good mother,” things get murky. We tend to reenact not just what our parents taught us, but what society at large teaches us about what power looks like– again, that idea that power means the domination of one being over another.

When you’ve grown up hearing that your voice and your desires do not matter, and then you enter an institution like motherhood, which today just re-emphasizes this idea, it’s quite sensible that you might at first try to make yourself disappear, or exert control over your child, who often seems like the one who is inflicting all this stress and limitation. This is what patriarchal power does to us— it turns us against our partners, our children, ourselves.

“Submission felt familiar, as did the question I found myself posing so often in early motherhood: Did I really ask for this?”

Amanda Montei, Touched Out

I am skeptical of any utopia, but I think the lessons of indigenous and Black mothers on the power of collective care have much to teach those of us who may have forgotten that care work is powerful work—and that work is completely separate from the catalog of impossible expectations embedded in the institution of motherhood.

Lately, my utopia involves white men stepping down from public office to work in early childhood education, outnumbering the women of color who do the bulk of professional childcare now. This shouldn’t sound as radical and ludicrous as I think it sounds to many people.

CD: I love some of the historical references in the book, for example, the concept that in order for men to have access to the public sphere, they needed servants. “Man’s access to the ‘good life’…depended on the degree to which his body was unencumbered by the labor that took place in his home.” Now we no longer have servants but men are still not expected to take on the domestic labor. It is left to women, who often now also have careers. I loved this sentence: “Both mother and wife are forms of work, not identity positions.” Why do you think these roles are venerated as lofty positions when the reality is, they are just fucking work?

AM: In antiquity, the degree to which men could enjoy the freedom contained in the public sphere and have access to the “good life” depended on the degree to which he was unfettered by the private sphere, or by domestic work. In many respects, we see the legacy of this idea today. Many people see maintenance work, or the work of taking care of the home, as a drag, as the feminist artist Mierle Ukeles put it. The wealthiest individuals don’t clean their own houses, aren’t encumbered by domestic duties, but rather pay someone (usually a woman of color, and usually not very well) to do that work for them. This is not only an example of how childcare and housework has been privatized and reserved for those with the most economic privilege, but also how, culturally, we continue to venerate forms of work performed outside the home, for the market, and devalue everyday maintenance work.

We’ve seen this in white careerist feminism as well— this idea that women should employ others (again, usually a woman of color) to take up domestic duties to achieve the liberation that supposedly women can only attain through public life. The issue here is of course that public and private life are dependent upon each other, that the market also benefits from the high-value work performed in homes. We’ve been convinced that private life is somehow separate from the market, which just isn’t true.

To the question of identity, motherhood has long been sold to women as the highest form of womanhood, and as a means of self-actualization. Silvia Federici writes that this is one the greatest tricks of capitalism, that women are convinced to seek out this unpaid work as “the best thing in life,” the thing that will make them a real woman. This makes it seem as though caregiving is part of the feminine condition, rather than a form of labor in which we can and should all participate.

“Motherhood feels like a script written for women by men because it is.”

Amanda Montei, Touched Out

CD: This book is about motherhood but also sex and how the blank slate required of women in sex is similar to how we have to ghost ourselves as mothers, “sidelining my own desire and of waiting for others to finish…” I mean, of course there would be parallels between sex and motherhood as sex is often what leads us into this state. But so much of our culture separates sex and the mother so to see you bringing together these two spheres in such powerful ways was deeply illuminating. Women are not taught we have agency or a woman who dares to exercise her agency is labeled in negative ways so we are conditioned to hang back and cede decisions and authority and opinions. 

AM: Sex does lead many of us to become parents, but not all, and this is sort of where the connection between sex and parenthood tends to start and stop. There are also power dynamics in sex we need to examine. There are gender roles and expectations. There are lessons we learn about desire and pleasure and the give and take of those forces between two (or sometimes more) people. There is wanting and not and what we do with that. There is the question of agency, as you say, in a coercive misogynistic culture that tells women their stories will not be believed, and the underexplored phenomenon of choice, which is always conditioned along lines of gender, class, race, sexuality, and sexual identity. I think in general we need a much more robust conversation on the unfinished sexual revolution and the culture of gender and sexual violation we still live in. The statistics are there— the problems are far from solved.

And then we have the question of how, knowing this, we talk to our children, especially given the censorship of sexual education in public schools. These are collective conversations I hope we can continue having instead of, like, talking about how mothers will ruin their kids if they say the wrong thing at bedtime.

“In the early years of marriage and motherhood, I didn’t know what I wanted. I only knew what I didn’t want. My love language was becoming one of refusal.”

Amanda Montei, Touched Out

CD: I think women are radicalized by motherhood when they feel, as you say, “a clamoring inside their bodies for change.” What do you hope women get from Touched Out? Where do we take the revolution from here? How can we stop making ourselves endlessly available?

AM: Those are big questions, and this book is not a policy brief. It’s become a sort of obligatory line in any piece of writing on motherhood to restate the policy change that is needed in this country. We need childcare, healthcare, a basic income, better postpartum care, the list goes on. We also need clearer ways to talk about why these changes are not happening.

Touched Out is as much a memoir of my own unique experiences, as it is a work of feminist theory. It’s not a parenting advice book. But I will say sometimes the simplest answers are pretty good ones: we can… stop making ourselves endlessly available. We can demand more of partners and policy. We can stop tying ourselves in knots by pouring over parenting advice, and devote our time to our communities in other, more meaningful, less individualistic, and more pleasurable ways. We can show up around our kids as our full selves, as my friend Rebecca Woolf says, and trust that they can handle that.

We can teach our children that consent and autonomy are valuable, and that even parents have a right to their bodies. In the book, I’m very clear that this is not easy or clear-cut work. Parenting is an ongoing conversation, an endless dialectic. It’s not what we see on an IG reel or quote card. It’s not just say this, not that. I find that kind of advice exhausting. It just becomes a whole new inner critic who polices everything I say. In truth, human relationships are complex, especially those between adults and children.

I hope this book starts conversations about who and what we think certain bodies are for. I hope it helps people understand the connections between rape culture and the institution of motherhood, and how these two sets of cultural beliefs connect to the broader onslaught of violent policy against not just women, but queer and trans communities. I hope it helps some people unravel their own confusing sexual experiences and times they were violated. I hope it helps them stop blaming themselves for what others did to them.

CD: We have talked previously about sex as marital duty and how consent fits into heteronormative marriage. You write about “how ignorant most men are of how it felt to be tasked from girlhood with the work of taking care of everyone.” What role does sexual refusal play in a woman reclaiming agency of her body? How can we teach young women sexual refusal as a right?

AM: Well, if a person doesn't have access to “no,” then they don’t have access to consent, right? I struggle with the term agency because it implies that it’s something people have or do not have. Same with choice. This is the result of our conditioning with respect to the neoliberal concept of “free will.” But free will is not evenly distributed in America or globally.

In the early 2000s when I was growing up there was this reflexive rebuttal of any argument that proposed that we live in a culture of misogynist control: so you’re saying women don’t have agency? Of course we all have agency, we make active choices. But some of us are more coerced into this choice or that choice. Some people are unable to make certain choices, such as choosing to have abortion care or childcare, because of state or national policies. Some are unable to choose safety everyday because we live a white supremacist nation with poor gun laws. So we need to continually unpack those sorts of terms.

Part of what I show in the book is how sometimes women play out social scripts, either because they are afraid of what will happen to them if they say no, or because they are attempting to fulfill some ideal, some expectation, of what a girl or woman does. Knowing this is half the battle, and I think helps us talk to our children about consent and autonomy. But I also point out in the book that the idea that mothers and young girls should bear the burden of consent is a problem. So I’d gently reframe your question as, “How can we teach young boys and cis hetero married men to care for women’s bodies? How can we teach all people to care for bodies that are different from them?”

FURTHER READING:

This video collects some of the writing that was generated in that class in the fall of 2021.

Amanda’s amazing conversation with Rebecca Woolf on her Substack: “Sexually, I was always a caretaker first”

Our conversation about sexual refusal: When Married Moms Want to Take Sex off the Table

Did The New York Times take note of our conversation? Here is their recent article: “When One Partner Wants More Sex Than the Other,” by Catherine Pearson.

Note Emily Nagoski’s forthcoming book is on this subject: Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections.

Finally, listen to Amanda, Minna Dubin, Patti Maciesz and I discuss how to create space for creativity in motherhood on Kaitlin Solimine’s Postpartum Production Podcast.