Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control

by Amanda Montei

Every aspect of the world—from the culture we consume to our first sexual experiences—tells us how to be woman, largely indistinguishable from mother.

We don’t only normalize these expectations; we naturalize them as well. We have a wealth of scientific data proving that caregiving is not a biological predisposition accessible only to women and that the idea of maternal instinct is a myth created by men.

“Belief in maternal instinct may also play a role in driving opposition to birth control and abortion, for why should women limit the number of children they have if it is in their very nature to find joy in motherhood?”

Women’s struggles with meeting such expectations are generally understood as either an individual wellness problem or a natural defect (or cause for pharmaceutical treatment), rather than as the result of the intentional, systemic exploitation of women’s unpaid labor in the home.

the unpaid nature of mothering and housework makes housewives of all women because “no matter where we are they can always count on more work from us.” Women are expected to mother everywhere they go, to please and nurture and manage everyone’s emotions free of charge, because housework has not only “been imposed on women but also transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character.”

And there is no way to disentangle the exploitation of women in the home from assumptions about what women owe men in the streets, in the workplace, and in bed, nor from how much women are expected to give up in meeting such demands.

State governmental efforts to block gender-affirming health care for transgender youth, such as those seen in Florida, Missouri, and Texas, are also attempts to fix hierarchal social relations that rely on the gender binary. Bills like these strong-arm bodies into the heteronormative family, an economic institution in which women are meant to provide sexual, emotional, and reproductive labor to bolster men and male power.

girlhood primes women for this systematic disempowerment and disembodiment, the kind they find should they become mothers (as they are expected to do).

misogyny is not simply the hatred of women or even sexist attitudes toward them; rather, it functions like a shock collar, keeping women in line when they break away from patriarchal order or don’t give men what they think they are entitled to.

they felt the subjects of assault and motherhood were like “apples and oranges”—disparate, unrelated. “What’s the connection?” they said. To which I replied, “Our bodies.”

My generational identification as a millennial and my whiteness in some ways led me to believe I could do things differently than the women who came before me. I thought I could do motherhood right or better or more feminist somehow.

But the idea that we can each tape up the culture of misogyny on our own, alone at home, by being good—that if we parent better or harder, our children won’t face the struggles we have—is another myth mothers are continually sold. Fix the home, fix how you do things, fix yourselves, ladies, and you’ll get free, we are told. We cannot do this work alone.

But I worry every day about how my children’s lives may be forever altered by sexual violence, by gun violence, by reproductive control, by anti-queer policies, by the divestment of public education and healthcare, by economic inequality, by climate disasters, and by the systems of racial and gender supremacy that separate us all. My family lives a life of relative comfort, and still it feels as though the threat of harm is all around us.

we want to believe that to become a parent is an individual choice, something we can enter or reject willingly. But the relationship one forms with a child, perhaps like all forms of love, is something we must choose repeatedly, and no one should be excused from the table of care.

the parenting-choice essay makes it seem as though parenting is simply a singular personal decision, rather than a form of labor.

Maybe I should have known better than to have a child in America, given what I learned young about being a woman in America.

I did not ask for the kind of motherhood I was handed. None of us did. And I certainly never asked for parenting in America to feel so nonconsensual.

Susan Brownmiller wrote in her influential book Against Our Will, in which she argued that rape was about power rather than sex,

Deutsch’s ideas became so widespread in America that they “caused real—and incalculable—damage to the female sex, as has, it goes without saying, Freud,” because they each “mistook what sometimes is for what must be.”

women’s experiences of childbirth weren’t inborn, but rather tended to serve a misogynist agenda—one that relied on the assumption that women’s pain and suffering were to be expected, not resisted.

Their husbands’ predictable gags about women’s otherworldly resilience also angered me. It was hard not to notice the “I don’t know how she does it” mentality they brought to their wives’ stories, and how that mentality played out in their apparent division of parenting labor.

The main character, Esther Greenwood, and her boyfriend, Buddy, sneak into a maternity ward and see a woman cursing in pain as she labors unconsciously. “Here was a woman in terrible pain,” Esther says later, “obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn’t groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been,

It was not the agony of labor that shut me down, in other words, but the danger of what I saw as a man’s hands and ideas getting to me—an impending corruption—even though, for the duration of my labor, the only man present was the one I had brought with me.

telling stories about our pain helps us make the experience communal, rather than individual.

Women are expected to have unflagging clarity about what they want; men, however, are rarely held accountable for their unwillingness to be curious about what women want.

girls can never be good enough to not get raped in a culture that normalizes the exploitation and abuse of women and sanctions the control of women’s bodies—and that doesn’t believe what women say when they do come forward after they have been assaulted.

Many of my male students—most of whom came from small towns Upstate—openly accused women of sending confusing signals out at parties. They didn’t seem to believe consent was something they could authentically obtain from women.

Accusing women of not knowing what they want—as though that were not only a moral offense, but reason enough to be stripped of autonomy and protection—is one method boys and men often use to distance themselves from basic sexual responsibility. It also helps to culturally normalize rape as something that is just bound to happen to women because their minds and bodies are so untrustworthy—

American women are at the same time expected to detach from their sensual and sexual lives once they become mothers. They should take pleasure in their babies,

How much of the pleasure I felt as a new mother was related to a relief from the patriarchal pressure to have a child? I had done it, yes. Perhaps I was a real woman now.

spent hours on my phone reading about sleep regressions and nap transitions, and still more hours angry with Jon that he didn’t also devote all his free time to workshopping our domestic lives. I wanted him to care the way I cared,

“Choice,” nevertheless, is consistently weaponized against women seeking control over their own bodies. Thought experiments that ask citizens to imagine who an “unborn” child or a “promising” young rapist could have become if only, for instance, a woman had not had an abortion or not spoken up about a rape are each common rhetorical exercises in so-called pro-life discourses and American rape culture, which both police women’s voices and behavior, while excusing institutional and interpersonal abuses against women.

In antiquity, however, a man’s access to the “good life” of the public sphere—and it was only men who had access to the freedom contained in the polis—depended on the degree to which his body was unencumbered by the labor that took place in his home. This was how servants provided men with freedom: by emancipating them from domestic life.

The moralization of cleanliness has always been gendered—

Maintenance work was a drag, but mostly because our “culture confers lousy status” on it: “maintenance jobs = minimum wages, housewives = no pay.” I tried to take pride in my work at home, to remind myself my labor was valuable, creative, even if it was underappreciated and unpaid—

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

women’s desires for marriage and motherhood are not informed by biological or sexual destiny, they are coerced.

women are taught to pursue their sexual development by marrying and bearing children, rather than through pursuing their own pleasure.

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

The American economy has for centuries been shaped around the exploitation of unpaid labor, which has benefitted men not only in their ability to excuse themselves from the hard and dirty work of taking care of kids and the home, but financially.

Homemaker or slut, we have only ever had two options,

the theories we have available on how human development, psychology, and relationships both form and function are all inherited from white men.

because I had nannied years earlier—a job for which, as for this one, my only qualification was my gender—

As a mother I felt the way I had felt as a young woman: if I just made myself into an object that was accommodating and agreeable, perhaps I could fill my role.

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. Considering whether she might just force herself to be intimate with her husband, she says, “To lose myself to one more person would take away any control I do have over [my body].”

These anecdotes tended to follow a similar pattern: after describing the absurd physicality of caring for children in isolation in the domestic space, the narrative pivoted to the male partner returning from work who is shocked to find himself pushed away by his wife—a wife who has been home alone all day, alone, taking care of the home and children.

the expectations we place on mothers in America are merely an extension of all the highly gendered cultural rites we pass through when we are young. We are taught as girls to service emotions, to self-objectify, to take pleasure in the pleasuring of others.

psychopathy in men remains frequently linked to the absolute control of a too-close mother-son love.

American motherhood has always reeked of misogyny—of the expectation that women give and never receive, and of the belief that whatever women do give, it will never be enough, or it will be too much.

This is what a good mother is made of: largely nothing. No needs, no desires, no inadequacies, no hunger, no complaints, no body to speak of.