Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control

by Amanda Montei

“It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs, sodomizes our daughters and our earth.” Though women’s anger remains culturally taboo, for men, losing your shit is just part of the job.

I grew up with hardly any language with which to assert my own autonomy, only to find myself absorbing the widespread cultural belief that women should martyr themselves for motherhood.

But marriage has always been an economic institution. And in America, it has become rather common to talk about marriage as a form of labor, without questioning not only how gender plays out in the work married couples usually divide between themselves—such as childcare and housework responsibilities—but also in the division of sexual responsibility.

gender inequalities contribute to low sex drive and exacerbate the pleasure gap between men and women,

Some of this perception of entitlement came directly from him: Jon had made me feel, over the years, through this disappointment, that we should still be touching, that I should force myself to want it, to want him, until I did, because otherwise, our marriage would fall apart.

women are discouraged from being too sexual when they are young and when they are past their childbearing years,

I was no longer interested in putting up with men who acted like … men.

both of us searching for—something. And we had turned to the one place we had found it: caring for Hannah was taxing, but full of joy and discovery. She was a lesson in love, and though we were rattled and broken trying to find our way as new parents, she enchanted us, and was the closest thing to magic—or art—we had ever known.

So, yes, I would go on to love that second baby. My heart would grow, I guess, in the metaphorical sense. But I would also have to reshape my entire life to make room for the love—and the labor—that my second baby would require. There would be so much loss in making room.

“I am not the enemy,” he would say. But all the men I knew had become the enemy, especially when they could not see what I saw, just as every oblivious man in the street or driving around town had become a stand-in for the men in power I now regularly saw on the news—the ones who assaulted women, raped them, beat them, rose to power anyway.

it felt much clearer to me how ignorant most men are of how it feels to be tasked from girlhood with the work of taking care of everyone—with the labor of speaking happiness into being as evidence of one’s capacity for womanhood,

“The loss of innocence,” Andrea Dworkin writes in Intercourse, “for a man already socialized to exploit—is a real and irreversible corruption of his capacity to love a woman as a human being.”

legal definitions of rape, which include force but not other forms of coercion, fall short of articulating the complex movement of power between bodies,

As a result, many women grow up to expect violation in their sexual lives,

Coming of age in a culture of assault before the revelations of #MeToo, I saw loneliness and a certain level of regret as a given in a woman’s sexual life—a characteristic of longing for love, which would one day be soothed by the arrival of some modern prince.

But when I was young, my intuition was subsumed by male desire. Like many women, I assumed whatever hurt was my fault—the result of something I had said or done, or something I should not have said or should not have done. I didn’t have the language, as a young woman, to hold men accountable, or to name what was happening—

I had no words to name forms of sexual assault that didn’t fit inadequate definitions of the term “rape” or even “assault”—such as the times when I gave up or gave in, because it was easier than fighting, or when I hated what I was doing, but had no tools to reverse course.

But I had grown up in America. The choices were simple. I made excuses for the violence of men, for their active mishandling of and disrespect for my body, and I took back ownership of my body the way I knew how: by desexualizing myself, making myself as ugly as possible

The terms available to us to describe the ongoing sexual violence and betrayal girls and women experience—harassment, unwanted sex, coercion, assault, rape—are not sufficient to explain what it feels like to grow up in a culture that grooms women from a young age for a life of sexual and emotional sacrifice, while simultaneously measuring our experiences against the cruelest traumas imaginable.

I now had to consider how I would prepare my children for a culture in which the issues of routine violence against women, the politics of sex, and the gendered division of labor are far from settled, a responsibility that felt heavier in my relationship to my daughter. My greatest fear for her has always been that I might have to hold her someday while she cries, telling me she has been raped or assaulted,

When I gave birth to Hannah, whom the doctors marked girl, I had no idea how complex the work of passing on a sense of bodily autonomy would become, in part because I failed to account for how much the world would intervene.

I struggled with the notion of objectively conveying the world to my child, because all language is morally and symbolically loaded. Observing my child aloud felt like a kind world building, and the power of the work intimidated me. I could say anything to her, and I would make it true.

Parenthood, in other words, isn’t just a tool for passing on our beliefs about bodies, but for learning about them. The ever-shifting nuances I had to embrace as I taught my children about needs and wants, and as they challenged me, made me realize how little I had been taught young about how to give and receive, how to account for power imbalances between friends and loved ones. It all demonstrated so clearly that care requires consent, and consent requires great care.

When Hannah entered grade school in the middle of the pandemic, I began fussing with her hair unconsciously, following her around with hairbrushes in the morning, asking if she wanted to comb out her bed head, seeing she did not, but sometimes still insisting. Eventually I stopped telling her how to present her body to the world.

mothering in America has never been entirely consensual. Choice and agency around reproduction have always been limited along the lines of gender, class, and race, and while fetuses and embryos enjoy a kind of “super” citizenship, pregnant people, under the law, are legally regarded as partial subjects.

Raising a girl in a world that wants to control her body has been a mind fuck, but the work is no less complex with children of any other gender. By the time Elliott was born, I had accepted the ways in which I did and did not gender my love for my daughter.

But my worry about having a girl years later was much bigger than any trepidation I felt around the prospects of teenage angst, and even greater than the hurt and anger that still pass between my mother and me, our relationship a cipher for our resentments toward a culture that demands so much of women and gives them so little. Valenti writes, “This is closer to the truth: having a girl means passing this thing on to her, this violence and violations without end.”

Once he was born, I even felt for a time less pressure. He would be endowed with many layers of privilege; the kind I had as a white person and also the kind his father had, as a man.

When he began to walk, I was harder on him when he bumped into other kids carelessly, just as I had always been with the boys at the daycare. I knew his right to take up space would always be greater than my daughter’s,

Parenting a son with patriarchy in mind meant I had to be extra attentive to the ways in which my best efforts at making him a good person would be thwarted by a culture of masculinity that would teach him to take take take.

Hannah reads to herself now—chapter books about fantasy and relationships, bratty girls and brave boys. I let her read whatever she wants. I cannot keep the world out, but I can sit with her and talk.

the mess of American parenthood that would come to a head during the pandemic: an absence of meaningful postpartum care, the rising cost of childcare, the lack of a social safety net, women’s unequal workforce participation.

It hadn’t yet occurred to me that many of the mothers I met at parks and playdates were also dissatisfied with their lives—that we could have formed some collective struggle.

Bringing men into caregiving is perhaps the most radical step we can take toward gender justice.

Motherhood is the ultimate recursive elegy. We are always mourning what could have been, how we might have written the story differently, or better, had we only known better, done better, been treated better, had more options, had known.

Natality, Arendt argues, or the simple fact that people are born and emerge from nothing, is the template that makes change possible. Nations are birthed; democracies are, too.