Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control

by Amanda Montei

Over time, I became conscious that my body did not belong only to me. It was a tapestry to be admired or reviled, a tool to be used, a voice to be silenced, a vessel for reproduction, and a product to be primed for consumption.

For many women, the pressure to breastfeed becomes the first deep denial of their bodies’ needs and desires in motherhood. Clinical and colloquial conversations around breastfeeding rarely emphasize consent or autonomy, or consider a parent’s prior relationship with their body, assailing them instead with injunctions to just relax. Not to mention the absence of attention given to just how much time and effort breastfeeding takes. “Heaven forbid,” Kate Manne writes, “that whatever putative benefits breastfeeding has for the infant should be soberly weighed against the pain, exhaustion, and lack of freedom it entails for many of those who try to do so.” There is no neutral narrative, in other words, about breastfeeding.

I sometimes thought of the feminist artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who wrote in her “Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969” that “maintenance” work, the life-sustaining labors we all must do to keep showing up for collective life, is “a drag” because it “takes all the fucking time.”

I didn’t understand, before I became a parent, how significantly every aspect of society was designed for men with wives.

we often griped about how the parents we knew complained about caring for children. We swore to never treat our children this way—like they were such a problem. Once I became a parent myself, though, I saw these complaints as part of a hidden labor struggle—as complaints not about children, but about the daily grind of American parenthood, which is not an inevitable part of raising children and has nothing to do with the love we have for our children. 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 women’s powerlessness has always been the point.

Motherhood too was filled with an unbearable sense of calculation—of waiting, of pushing my body to the brink of what it could take, of counting down the minutes, of doing what I did not want to do, trying to get to the end of the day, just to do it all over again. It all stirred memories of sidelining my own desires, and of waiting for others to finish taking what they wanted from me. The first year we spent in California I gave my body over at the daycare, and when I went home, sitting to nurse or play or talk with Hannah, I let her too have her way with me, wondering whether life, for some women, was just a series of moments in which we grit our teeth and watch the clock.

In another popular TikTok, since taken down, one woman describes how motherhood changed her from “a hugger” who loved physical touch to someone who has not felt self-ownership over her body for six years. “All day my body belongs to another human being, and at the end of the day I am done being touched,” she says.

not surprisingly, my disdain for the intentional economic disempowerment of women and caregivers would grow as well, a special rage I would mostly fire at my husband, who had much to learn, but whom I also turned repeatedly into a straw man for all the maleness in the world. I would recoil from his touch again, my skin stunned not just by the physical contact two children would require but by every sense memory of how my body had been used by men previously.