Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control

by Amanda Montei

But in the bedroom that night, he didn’t kiss me. He just hovered over me and thrusted, and I focused on the feeling of the rough mattress underneath my back. After he came, I smiled demurely as I dressed, but he never spoke to me again, not even later at the party. It was a plan, I later realized, that had been concocted by his friends, other boys who knew how much I liked him. American motherhood felt like that: like a plan devised by men. Something I wanted, then got, only to find I had been lured in by a group of boys who didn’t care at all how I ended up and who were nowhere on the scene. Sure, I had consented to motherhood. I had asked for it. I had even desperately wanted it—in the same way I had craved the touch of that boy. There was even pleasure involved in putzing around the house with Hannah, and in the laughs I shared with her as we splashed around the water table on our patio—a purchase I had made hoping to keep her busy when it was just the two of us, at home alone. But my housewifery also felt forced, compulsory, staged. And the experience of getting what I wanted was immediately tainted by what I hadn’t known before consenting.