I keep thinking of an Instagram reel I now can’t find, but a classic of the parenting genre. It’s a mum in a car with her husband and kids, having the realization by voiceover that "everyone in this car has been inside me."
By the time you conceive, gestate, deliver, and breastfeed a baby (or any combination of those things), a small Burning Man will have taken place inside you as sex organs, fetuses, ultrasound wands, gloved fingers, catheters, medical tools, fully formed babies, and tiny mouths with the power of fifty universes convene within the bounds of your earthly playa to gyrate their steampunk headgear against your cervix and vacuum you to the point of dehydration. I remember feeling that I was turning to sand while nursing, I could feel my distant roots grasping in the gravel for moisture. To paraphrase Ernest Becker, you’re a god and at the same time an almond being crushed into latte froth. We take it for granted.
The term "touched out" has generally been around to capture a need for less physical stimulus, but it missed something of the profound existential worry that your body is less than yours. Or maybe that the discomfort and dissonance should have stopped with weaning. Or confusion over how to sort the memory boxes when a long-forgotten hookup floats to the surface during sexytime. Thank lawd then for
, who wrote a very smart, very personal book that offers the experience of feeling TOUCHED THE FUCK OUT a proper philosophical treatment. She acknowledges the way that our ideas about bodily autonomy can hit a wall when it comes to feeling compelled to share your body with children and partners. She is a deft writer (blame her PhD). And her goal is pretty grand, following on from people like Molly Caro May, Angela Garbes, and Amia Srinivasan to argue that when we find a way for women and nonbinary folk to actually desire touch, it can finally—maybe even for the first time—occur on their terms. Weee!I wanted to ask Amanda all kinds of questions about the book and this crazy country slash culture generally, the faultlines of which light up in technicolour after you have a kid. As Amanda put it to me, “You're trying to process your entire early sexual [life] alongside a child pulling on your breast and yanking your nipple out of your bra.” Seeing as I’m not David Marchese and limited to a tidy single page of the Times, I’m running much of this conversation as it happened, with minimal editorial intervention. See how charming and smart Amanda is! Enjoy the pithy way she dissects the entire realm of what has been written off as just “mom rage.” Also, buy or borrow her book from the library if you can!! My camera roll is full of random snaps of pages from when I was reading it—I think it will really rock your world.
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KAFKA’S BABY: We both had kids in and around 2015, and there is something specific about how these micro eras in which you give birth shape your reckoning and your understanding of everything. Are there some things that you see as defining forces for your generation and that you've had to come back and work against or to process?
AMANDA MONTEI: Yeah. In terms of sexual politics growing up in that era, like late ‘90s, early 2000s, I think I'm pretty firmly millennial. I was born in ‘85. So there was not really any sexual education around consent, at least not in a meaningful way. And then I also grew up in a very sexually free household, which didn't actually include much education around consent. It was more like, you're going to have sex and men are going to take advantage of you, and that's kind of how it is, and men suck. So I think that was specific to my personal experience, but also I think pretty generationally specific, because it was that “sex-positivity” era, which at the time was very much about turning yourself into a sexual object for men.
And there wasn't that much nuance to this idea of what sexual positivity might actually be beyond that. So that was certainly a defining element of my experience, and then reckoning with that as Me Too came around as I was becoming a parent.
So you're trying to process your entire early sexual [life] alongside a child pulling on your breast and yanking your nipple out of your bra and—for me at least—being totally alone, not really having much of a support system, certainly not having any governmental institutional societal support while remaining very privileged, just being alone and having one little creature sort of demanding all these things.
And then intensive parenting was really becoming more intense. Attachment parenting was super big online, not to mention just the online discourse around motherhood, really kind of taking shape in the mid 2010s, early 2010s. So I think there was this cocktail of cultural shifts happening. And then of course we hit the pandemic, which was just icing on the cake.
By then most parents, most mothers, understood that there was a problem, but we were still really internalizing it as personal failure. There wasn't quite that mainstream discourse for us to understand how the conditions in which we were parenting were not our fault, were not because we made all these bad life choices, but the pandemic sort of broke that discourse out.
Totally. So at that point, there was a much more shallow understanding of what feling “touched out” meant. Can you explain the way that that term was being used and what the gap was?
I think the gap is still a little bit there, although I've been seeing maybe over the past year people using the word autonomy with it, but it's still not hooked into, or contextualized within, this very specific political moment in which women and pregnant people actually don't have autonomy over their bodies or access to basic reproductive healthcare.
And so that was a moment of recognition for me and relief to have a term. And I think it is that way still for a lot of moms, but it was also like, what the fuck, right?
But at the time, when I first learned about it, it was just very much, this is a thing that happens. This is a thing that happens when you become a parent, specifically when you become a mother, is that you're touched all the time. You're so isolated, no one's helping you out, but it's just a thing that happens.
And so that was a moment of recognition for me and relief to have a term. And I think it is that way still for a lot of moms, but it was also like, what the fuck, right? This is not okay, this is not normal, and why are we talking about it?
You write about the purpose of pain in the book and the idea that around childbirth, especially, that the pain either can be transformed into this ecstasy, which is still such a laughable concept to me, or the fact that it is such intense pain means that there is necessarily this incredible narrative transformation happening. And you're going to come out the other side of this insane medical pain as a new form. And obviously that also applies to sexual experience, this idea that maybe you've got to push through it. Actually I remember a nurse commenting when I had the Foley balloon in for an induction—
What is the Foley balloon?
It's the Foley catheter. It's where if they're trying to induce you, they put the balloon up there and inflate it in your cervix and it forcibly opens it. And I remember the nurse told my husband, she’s got one of the highest pain tolerances I've ever seen, and everyone was like, yay, we are up there and we are doing stuff! We're pumping up that tire! And it's like a badge of honour.
Can you get into where you've come to on that notion that we're getting sensory feedback—literally, that hurts or that is unpleasant for me—but not being like, well, it's powerful and transcendent.
I think birth stories especially are this ideological battlefield. No matter what, your experience is being sort of twisted into some narrative, whether it's an empowerment narrative or some sort of oppressive narrative that this is women's natural state to be totally chaotic and crazy and running to the hospital, losing her mind or her natural state is suffering and pain.
Birth stories in general are just this really interesting cultural cipher for everything that we think or want to think about women. And I actually think that that marathon event, the perseverance narrative of motherhood, is still really pervasive. It's really hard to shake because moms want to believe that there's a reason that things are so hard, but there isn't—or there is, but it's not a reason that we'd really want: it's male control.
So I understand the desire to flip the narrative and be like, yeah, we did this. We're so strong, we're so powerful. But also what we're skipping there is that there might be some other third term where we feel supported and things are just not so hard and not all on women.
This idea that there can only be one primary caregiver is a concept that I think that we need to challenge because babies also can't distinguish themselves from a blanket.
One of the tricky things that comes up in the book is we know from developmental psychology that when a baby is born, we have the dyad—they are psychologically entwined with the birthing parent from the beginning for a time. They don't see a boundary between themselves and their primary carer, which complicates things because there is that intensive parenting idea that you cannot love them too much, you cannot give them too much care, and that being your given role, even if you have hit that point where it feels like too much and you feel like you're turning to sand. There is a perfect dissonance there between this idea that it's up to you, it's your body, blah, blah, blah, and at the same time that they have this kind of impersonal need for that touch and that care.
There's a lot to unpack there. Most white Western psych frameworks are built on this idea of the nuclear family with the mother as the primary caregiver. And so that's where we inherit a lot of these ideas. And in the book I talk about attachment theory and how, okay, this is an interesting sort of personality test for what it's like to grow up living in a patriarchy, but it doesn't actually tell us anything new about our experiences. It doesn't actually challenge the status quo. It just reflects back our experiences.
And that that's not to say you throw the baby out with the bathwater. There's value to thinking about what children need and this very interesting sort of pre-identity formation self that babies have where they actually can't distinguish between themselves and their caregiver. But this idea that there can only be one primary caregiver is a concept that I think that we need to challenge because babies also can't distinguish themselves from a blanket.
There's an overemphasis on attachment theory and also just this idea that you're going to fuck your child up if you put them down for a moment or walk away from 'em. And all of that comes from this kind of deep psychoanalytic history that certainly has been kind of torn apart in a lot of ways by feminist thinkers before me. And in terms of more contemporary thought on that, Chelsea Conaboy's work is really important and interesting for just really tracking how other caregivers besides the gestational parent can also provide what children need.
Obviously, I'm not like, you should just leave your child alone and go party with dudes or whatever. But I think it's worth questioning and problematizing these kind of concepts that we've inherited a lot more than we do now.
Yeah, it's funny. I remember my kids as newborns wanting to suck on my husband's finger. Just give them the finger, man, they don't care. They just want to suck on something. It can be you! Exactly. So to take that a step further, I really appreciate that you talk about the way that as a parent and you have a girl and a boy, you can feel the kind of gender expectations arrive with them in trying to understand, is my daughter too much a people pleaser? Is my son expecting too much all the time? And so on.
Can you talk about how your own behavior and the way that you talk to them and explain about your own autonomy—I don't want to be touched right now, or I don't want to be touched like that, or you need to ask or whatever—are behaviors they will learn and use?
Yeah. I think it comes back to what we were talking about earlier, this sort of idea that parents, especially mothers, should just push through when things are feeling like too much. What I came to realize is actually that those are teaching moments where we can start to create a discourse around consent with our kids.
And in the book, what I wanted to be very careful about is to not be prescriptive. This is not a how-to book. It's really an exploration of how complicated that work is. I certainly don't have all the answers, and I'm still figuring it out every day and always will be, I expect. But rather than give parents this sense that they need to kind of do what's uncomfortable, the hope is that we can start to use these moments to really talk about this very complex territory like sharing space with other humans and consent.
The problem with affirmative consent as a cure-all to the misogynistic culture that we live in is that it doesn't acknowledge that it is this very complex dance and that we have to actually really care for other people for consent to happen. It's not just you said ‘yes’ or you said ‘no.’ As I teach my kids, what does their face say? What does the rest of their body say? Why might a friend not want to hug you today and hug you tomorrow?
And all these feelings that are involved, and my kids are still young, so that's just the beginning lesson.
Yeah, yeah.
And as they get older, things are going to get even more complicated. So it's just about looking for those sort of teachable moments. And then also I think it's important to emphasize that fixing a culture of misogyny and fixing rape culture and fixing a society that exploits pregnant people's bodies and terrorizes them through state violence is not a job that any mother can fix on their own by talking to their kids in a certain way and sort of bearing that burden.
It's very similar to the burden that we place on women to protect themselves from sexual assault. That's a lot to ask. That's a big ask. Of course, we want to do that work, but there has to be something else, a more communal, ideally national interest in fixing these issues.
Yeah, slash international.
Exactly.
You mentioned this idea that you can't have consent until there's true love and true respect to the point that there is true desire. So desire is a really interesting piece of the book. I think the chapter on “Refusal” is really brilliant. I feel like this is one area where I still feel like the literature hasn't kind of gotten where it needs to go. A lot of the discourse around marriage and partnership is still premised on this idea that men want sex all the time, and for females, it's responsive. How do you shift what that conversation is for partnerships?
Big question. Again, we're looking at that personality test diagnosis of what's happening culturally. So sure, we can say men have, there's certain shape to their desire, and women have this other shape, but why is that? And so it's like we're missing that piece. Why is that? And what are the issues with that? And why are we not interested in challenging that, questioning that?
I don't know how you shift this massive couples/marital industrial complex in marriage books and sex books, but the first step is to question, okay, why do we not question that and to look at it from a different angle, which is what I'm trying to do here, and I think other writers are starting to do now as well.
Your husband is painted as this really empathetic guy, a guy who doesn't want to take advantage of a woman and so on. I really was thinking of Chris Klein in American Pie, the only nice guy in the whole movie who was like, I want to be gentle, but you still hit this problem. Was your husband a help as a creative partner in figuring out how to present or talk about that kind of guy? There's a line where you say at times, he's just a straw man for every male issue in the world. And I think obviously I can relate to that. Men: it’s all your fault. But did he help intellectually hammer out some of these ideas?
Like the ideas in the book? Yeah. No, I would say that the way that he contributed to this book was through childcare.
Great.
Which was what I needed. But I think that it was important for me and also a challenge to make sure that this book wasn't really about him or exclusively about marriage, while also having to sort of explore a lot of that. But I think that parenting and watching me reckon with a lot of this stuff was also a learning process for him. So yeah, I mean, I think on a personal level, we moved through a lot of that together, but he was my copy editor, my dutiful copy editor as needed.
Good. “Here, type up these notes.”
And it was important for me, and we talked about this to correct that historical imbalance in which women are the editors and tending to house and home, but I exploited him for this book.
Great. I'm glad, hahaha. So I can't remember the exact line. There's a Rachel Cusk line where she's like, childbirth classes are insane. It's like, would you take a class to prepare for death? But you go in and it's, hold the ice cube.
I think one of the most productive things about your book is this idea that parenthood can kick off this kind of huge reckoning, even with behaviors or patterns that you were okay with before. This is the thing that kicks you into a revisiting of your past and what society is and so on. So I'm curious, what would you talk about if you were like, all right, you're becoming parents, here are the things that I would talk about to prepare you.
You are going to completely revisit every trauma—big T, little T—that you've ever had in your life. You are going to reexamine everything that your parents did and didn't do for you. Your relationship is totally going to change. Your relationship to your body is totally going to change. And you're going to also notice some very problematic things about how society is set up.
And none of that, of course, is covered in a traditional childbirth class. It's like, breathe. Let's talk about how I don't think we need to spend as much time talking about how to control your breath.
I think the class like that should talk about sex marital expectations, unprocessed childhood gunk that's going to come up. It would be nice too if every childbirth class came with a little mini course on how capitalism works and how it's going to try to prey on you as a parent.
Get your hands on TOUCHED OUT (Sept. 12, PRH) everywhere and also make the men read it! <3
No reason
“When Viola was pregnant with Bertie, Dorothy had advocated a ‘natural birth’ for the new baby at Adam’s Acre. Viola couldn’t think of anything worse. Sunny had been born in a big busy London teaching hospital, Viola high as a kite on pethidine. At night the babies were taken away to a nursery and the mothers were all given sleeping pills. It was bliss.” –Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins
New thing
Taught the kids to plank on things that are not me
Goodies
I got to give ups to new novels by C Pam Zhang, Sandra Newman, and Teju Cole in Literary Hub’s fall novels roundup. Good stuff!!!
As advertised: “My horny raccoon roommate and me”
“‘Practice tantric exodus,’ he went on. ‘If you ask the road for consent and it gives you a green light and the road says, Yeah, daddy, hit this shit, then you’re going to have a great drive home.’”
Your kids planking!! Best practical tip for getting physical space I’ve come across yet.