Amanda Montei’s Touched Out is a new kind of expedition across and within a mother’s body. In some ways, the memoir slots easily within a motherhood canon that has developed over the last decade, one that moves away from dispensing advice to reckon instead with art and sexual politics. These books are often characterized by an ambivalence between the conventional desire for family and the cost of that desire.
What sets Montei’s narrative apart is its inversion of physical desire. Her focus is the longing not to be touched, a theme less often explored. She searches for more precise language around moments of daily life in which a mother wants to lock herself in a bathroom and run a hot shower to scrub off handprints perceptible to her alone. When a body feels an aversion to the hands of loved ones — of children, of partners, of men — what is it attempting to withdraw from, exactly? What words capture a disempowerment that is constructed, both subtly and explicitly, years before a woman becomes a mother, or a wife? The term touched out started surfacing in motherhood forums in the mid-2010s, right before #MeToo, and Montei investigates a connection between the two.
This investigation includes a cold, hard look at the history of her own body. She comes of age in the ’90s, with “girl power” blaring on MTV, a message at odds with what she thinks girlhood actually feels like: being caught between what you are supposed to want (or not want) and what you truthfully want. This question around the shape of her own desire continues throughout her twenties, amid the hookup culture of the aughts and a growing awareness of her own alcoholism. In the pursuit of pleasure, confusion often appears as a stand-in for consent. Montei imagines that, one day, marriage and motherhood will provide relief from this confusion.
Fast forward to marriage and motherhood, and then a pandemic: Montei is stuck at home as the bills pile up and the house needs cleaning and her children vie for her attention, their hands down her shirt, on her face, while in bed her husband reaches across the covers for sex. “So much of what I thought I knew about pleasure and sexuality was now unraveling,” she writes. She begins to reflect again on desire, this time with more clarity.
A colleague once asked Montei what could possibly tie the subjects of motherhood and rape culture together. She answered: “Our bodies.” The same systems of power that shape beliefs about who and what women’s bodies are for also shape parenting, and yet how they reinforce one another is often obscured. Montei says: “I think we often lack the language to say exactly how that happens, what those kinds of abuses and forms of oppression look like, and how different degrees and types of violation echo each and reinforce each other — much less how it feels to have this culture of misogyny pressing in on us as we parent.”
Montei also confronts addiction and ambition and pleasure, the tenderness and grit of care work, and the tenuous strings that hold people together in the hardest moments of the domestic sphere in the United States — a domain built on flimsy support.
It’s an examination that mines decades of feminist theory alongside her own story — perhaps less to ask how we got here and more to imagine what current cultural expectations will mean for those who come after. It asks us to demand something better.
— Ashley Nelson Levy for Guernica
Guernica: You found a correlation between the early years of motherhood and the early months of the pandemic, where your body began to reject intimacy, most directly with your children and husband. You felt both intense anger and intense desire. Could you say more about that?
Amanda Montei: Touched out is really a catchall term for that mix of intense anger and desire you describe. It’s a feeling many mothers get, one of total physical and psychic overwhelm, and though there’s very little research on touch aversion in new parenthood, we know that postpartum depression can be correlated with less touch between mother and child. But I think when women use the term, they are often talking about a lot of different feelings. I wanted to not only explore why this happens and how this became a cultural phenomenon for women but also ask, “Why has this kind of breakdown become so normalized?”
What I found is that the institution of motherhood assumes it’s both natural and normal for women to surrender their autonomy when they become parents. We have normalized this belief culturally — it’s just the way things are in the early years, enjoy it while it lasts, that kind of thing — which of course sidesteps more complex conversations about maternal mental health, paid leave, workplace issues, social services, childcare. But we also naturalize this removal of autonomy as something that is simply a condition of femininity and of being a gestational parent. We still hear this struggle all the time among mothers who believe that their male partners can’t provide the same level of care that they — the gestational mother — can. I bought into this myself, and I explore that in the book.
Guernica: You also argue that, as long as care work and housework remain unpaid and unrecognized as work, feminine servility remains naturalized, while cultural narratives of the hustling mother trying to do it all normalize women’s misery. So this normalization affects women without children, as well as mothers. And how we view women in the home is bound up in assumptions about what women owe men in the workplace, or in bed.
Montei: Absolutely. It all comes back to this idea that either patriarchal culture is the best and only way to arrange a culture or that there are innate limitations and skills men and women have, and therefore there are limits to the kind of equality we can achieve in and out of the home. When I was a young teacher in the early 2010s, my students would often draw on images of hunter-gatherers, almost as a reflex, in an effort to explain away gender inequality. Young people today are much more fluent in gender diversity and how power works, and I think we can thank Black Lives Matter and #MeToo for that.
But it’s clear from the current political climate in the United States and globally that many people still assume women’s bodies are objects — for sexual consumption or maternal work. We expect women to care for everyone around them everywhere they go, whether they are mothers or not, and whether they consent to those roles or not.
Guernica: Often in literature about motherhood, a parallel is drawn between the birth of a child and the sudden recognition of our mortality. For you, motherhood shed light on your past — more specifically, on memories of your early sexual experiences, which you saw anew. Can you talk more about this connection?
Montei: Well, birth is a kind of death of the self, but the way motherhood destroys the self is something else entirely — a cultural demand placed upon women to leave behind their freedom and former sense of identity. For me, the truth was more that motherhood provided a sudden recognition of my body and its history. I had to face that history in ways I didn’t always want to. When I got sober, I had to do more of that again.
In the book, I wanted to articulate intellectually and emotionally this process of coming to understand one’s body and what it had been through, including the experience of coming to see certain early sexual experiences as violations. I ran up against some limits in writing about these experiences because I didn’t always feel I had the right language to discuss certain violations of consent: Was this rape? Attempted rape? Just a boy using me? How much did the difference even matter? In part, these questions — which were craft questions but also politically loaded semantic ones — came up because women are taught to distrust themselves. But they also came up because we don’t really have a robust vocabulary for talking about different forms of sexual violence and gendered violation.
I also wanted to show in the book how parents can have these incredibly complicated reckonings in the very isolated, alienated — not normal or natural! — caregiving environments we parent in today, and how that can cause us to turn against those we love. It was really important to me to show how functional that displacement of feeling is for male power. I’m very resistant to the “my kids are terrors” trope. It only feeds into the broader story we tell about motherhood, which is that it’s just a natural and normal state of suffering to which women are destined.
Guernica: I recently read a New York Times article about a new pill the FDA has approved for postpartum depression. A doctor quoted in the article mentions how new mothers are “a patient population that just so often falls through the cracks.” It’s critical that we do more to monitor women’s health in the weeks and months following childbirth. But there is little discussion around how our culture fails to support mothers more generally — the lack of universal childcare or healthcare, or the new legal barriers to receiving abortions.
Montei: I think this is a very tricky subject to talk about because, on the one hand, there is still tons of stigmatization for mothers or new parents who need any sort of help or have any negative feelings in new parenthood, especially if they need medication. Again, the idea is that, well, you asked for it, you made this choice to become a parent, so if you are struggling, you’ve failed as an individual, rather than that policymakers have not only failed but intentionally exploited and abandoned birthing bodies as practice and as a means for securing, advancing, and maintaining male power.
There is also a totally inadequate postpartum care system in the US, so innovations like this pill make me feel like, well, at least someone is interested in maternal mental health. The only thing I remember from my six-week postpartum checkup was a discussion of birth control and sex. There must have been a few cursory questions about my feelings, but my increasing depression and anxiety and obsessive behaviors all felt like elephants in the room that no one really wanted to talk about.
On the other hand, knowing how medical institutions also fail and exploit women’s suffering, and knowing, for example, that my grandmother was heavily medicated by her doctor when she was struggling with her own domestic isolation, I feel immediately skeptical of this sort of privatized pharmaceutical response to the foundational pain of patriarchal male control. I trust women with their medical decisions, but I also want to continually affirm that postpartum depression is a pretty reasonable response to the conditions in which we parent.
Guernica: The last section of your book is called “Beginning Again.” In it, you quote from an Adrienne Rich poem that describes a longing for the sensuality of early motherhood, to feel it once more, and again. Throughout the book, I still felt hope and gratitude from its pages. What kind of emotional note were you hoping to invoke, or complicate?
Montei: I’m so glad you felt that. I did think a lot about where I wanted to land with this book, because it’s as much a recovery story as it is a piece of feminist theory and a “motherhood book.” Each of these genres also has its own narrative conventions, and I didn’t want to end with some totalizing argument or false solution, or pretend that my own individual healing was the answer to the issues I explore in the book. So in the last chapter, I explore the really complex territory of knowing that a thing — like starting over or rebirthing one’s self — has been corrupted by capitalism, but also that there is still another truth there, another possibility. Feminism and motherhood and perhaps all radical perspectives are continually troubled by this rub: innovation and novelty have been co-co-opted by the market. Many of us feel this intense desire to burn it all down, create some new beginning, or return to a time before everything got so messed up.
So much of the book is about this impossible desire, this longing to be untouched. But throughout there are also, as you say, many moments of love, learning, and acceptance. I wanted to strike a balance between acknowledging that we cannot actually undo the sore spots that creep into our relationships with our kids and ourselves. We have to live in this world, and so do our children, for better and for worse.
But we also have to imagine something different, something more caring. Watching the kids these days gives me so much hope. I know there are dangers in this kind of futural politics, in placing so much in their hands. But I think this is what caring for children teaches us — to live in that liminal space of horror and hope, and to try every day to lean just a little further into the latter.
