Amanda Montei is the author of Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control, which came out in 2023. In this memoir which blends personal recollections with cultural analysis, Montei documents how motherhood triggered a radical personal reckoning. After she gave birth to her first daughter, Montei explains that she began to completely question the assumptions which had guided her life, with regards to her role as a woman within a patriarchal culture. Like Adrienne Rich before her, she realised that she was struggling to meet the impossible expectations heaped upon women by the institution of motherhood: expectations to be constantly available to her children as well as her husband, to put her desires after those of her family, etc. Like Eliane Glaser and Lucy Jones, Montei had fallen prey to the ideology of perfect motherhood which sets women up for failure by holding them to unrealistic standards. Beset by guilt and an overwhelming desire to fight back for her autonomy, she finds herself recoiling from her children’s, as well as her husband’s need for her touch. She is “touched out”, desperate to set up some sort of boundary between her body and those of her loved ones.
I began to wonder about the connection between how women were feeling in motherhood and the larger culture of assault in which we had all grown up.
A. Montei, Touched Out, 6
Montei’s take on contemporary motherhood is infused with the debates which have taken hold of our culture over misogyny, consent, and the commodification of women’s bodies. Looking back to her past, and particularly to her history of substance abuse and nonconsensual sexual encounters, Montei explores the idea that the ideology of perfect motherhood is connected with rape culture, as both suppose that the female body should be available at all times. As she struggles to make some time for herself and for her professional activities while resisting her family’s claims for her presence and her attention, she is reminded of how, as a young adult, she used to cave to the pressure of men’s desire of her body. We struck up a conversation after I read the book, and I was eager to know more about her ideas on what it means to mother in a patriarchal culture.