Nomination for Entry to the Feminist Canon No. 1
Book review: Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control by Amanda Montei
Welcome to My So-Called Feminist Life. This month I’m exploring masculinity as it relates to feminism. So often we think of “feminist texts” as those by Gloria Steinem or Betty Friedan or Simone de Beauvoir, in other words: old books! But feminism as an ideology is still very much alive. Brilliant thinkers and writers are putting out soon-to-be classics all the time. So each month, I’ll highlight one such contemporary book that I’ve read recently as a nomination for entry into the feminist canon. I know this all sounds very capital-S serious, but take this all with a grain of salt? As I am in no way in charge of the “feminist canon.” Nor is, really, anyone.
As always: I do encourage you to feel free to share your own thoughts on the texts or topics in the comments. Conversation (that remains respectful) is encouraged. Thanks for joining me on this journey.
Love,
Maggie
Nomination for Entry to the Feminist Canon No. 1
Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control by Amanda Montei
Perhaps it seems strange to include a review for a book about motherhood during a time when I’m writing about masculinity. But the most powerful part of this book to me was the way that Amanda Montei doesn’t frame the problem of motherhood, the problems of being touched out, the problems of consent and assault that have become a nearly inherent part of girl and woman-hood, as problems for women to solve. Not a problem for us to “empower” ourselves out of.
Instead, she shows how the states of being a girl, becoming a woman, and possibly a mother, in a society that places masculinity above all else is not just one issue but a complex web of problems stemming from misogyny and the patriarchy. A truly feminist world then, depends on shaking down our current conceptions of masculinity. But perhaps not alone. She writes of the dilemma of modern parenting:
“My generational identification as a millennial and my whiteness in some ways led me to believe I could do things differently than the women who came before me. I thought I could do motherhood right or better or more feminist somehow. It’s laughable to me now, almost a decade into parenthood, even as I believe that many parents of a certain age are breaking patterns that no longer serve us. But the idea that we can each tape up the culture of misogyny on our own, alone at home, by being good —that if we parent better or harder, our children won’t face the struggles we have —is another myth mothers are continually sold. Fix the home, fix how you do things, fix yourselves, ladies, and you’ll get free, we are told.”
As Montei tells her own story, of becoming a mother, of reckoning with her own girlhood, of wrestling with the traps of a capitalist society, she provides example after disarming example of the ways in which our bodies, our lives, our decision-making capabilities, our expectations, are defined by gender before we even recognize any of it is happening.
She writes strikingly of the way that she, after becoming a mother in 2015, suffering from the all-too familiar feelings of being “touched out” by her children, her husband, her responsibilities to her home and family, was suddenly reminded of the ways the men of her past never asked for her consent, either. She was never taught to be asked. Those boys and men were never taught to ask.
Instead, the cultural narrative goes: mothers, this hardship is just inherent. We’re not allowed to be upset or to set boundaries or to ask for help because we’re conditioned from birth to be the ones that are here to give what men need from us, what our children need from us, what the economy needs from us. The system doesn’t care for us. We are the ones who have been conditioned to care for everyone else.
“Even so, the accusation that mothers should have known better before having children is a common retort to calls for paid leave and affordable childcare,” Montei writes, tying her own inability to afford childcare to support her blooming career as a writer and professor to the greater systemic issues that keep so many women from living full lives. “In 2022, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin remarked that it’s not ‘society’s responsibility to take care of other people’s children,’ emphasizing that ‘people decide to have families and become parents.’ Comments like this suggest that a woman’s decision to have children isn’t encumbered by years of social pressure, gendered expectations, misogyny-laden sexualization, and ordinary human indecision.”
Throughout the narrative, blow after blow arrives for Montei, as it does for so many of us. After being sidelined for years bearing and birthing two children, unable to afford childcare, working in a daycare run by her sister and cobbling together other work, she finally got the kind of job she wanted and had been working toward, as a lecturer at a university. I identified deeply with the feeling that the job, outside of her home, one that offered her an intellectual life and community, sustained her in a whole different way than her role as a mother — was necessary even as she felt guilt for every moment her children were in daycare while she worked. I was broken-hearted for her, and me, and all of us, when she lost this setup again a year later when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Montei, like so many women, fell into the necessity of pandemic lockdown caretaking deeply and angrily, but ultimately found that the untangling of the societal norms that happened during the time actually allowed her to let go of some of the expectations she’d been putting on herself, or perhaps more accurately, had put on her. That in a way, the community care that the pandemic briefly allowed in our hyper-individualistic society gave some of us a different lens with which to view our roles.
“During the pandemic, when I began receiving unemployment and direct payments through the child tax credit, I did what Jon had always encouraged me to do: I let everything else fall apart, and I wrote this book. That financial freedom, though short-lived, allowed me to work and care at the same time —to afford childcare once daycare and school reopened. Contrary to the myth that social services breed entitlement and dependency, a bit of economic autonomy allowed me to do more meaningful work.”
In her writing, Montei straddles the line that I find to be one of the most difficult sometimes in writing about and even just thinking about being a woman in the world: That womanhood and gender are so very important to our beings, but at the same time the experience of being a woman in this world has also been so detrimental. That femininity and masculinity can, and truly must be, redefined for any of us to get out of this trap. That gender matters. And yet it does not. That we can feel anger at men but that this anger actually comes from the deep love we feel for men, and women, and all of us deserving a better system. And that the binary thinking that has us rushing in to teach our daughter’s about consent and how to say no otherwise they will be hurt, and assuming our son’s are going to be violent and do the hurting because of their very nature as men, needs to be reckoned with.
If this sounds messy, it’s because the work of being a feminist mother in a misogynist world is a mess. Montei writes of parenting her son differently than parenting her daughter. “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. But by the time he turned two, I felt like I had been conned into reproducing the exact gender roles I was trying to avoid. I had positioned my daughter as a victim of the patriarchy, my son as an aggressor. I had left no room for anything in between.” Montei’s work lives in this in-between space.
In Touched Out, Montei has laid out how deeply gendered structures impact us all, and how much we still have to consider, how many routes we haven’t yet attempted when it comes to untangling masculinity, girlhood, motherhood, marriage, work, and life from the patriarchal world many of us are attempting to dismantle. “When I tell my kids stories about inequality, about the world burning around us, I sometimes rush in with abstract gestures of resolution. But my imposition of logic and optimism often come too soon, as I fail to allow them, and me, to sit with the hard questions on which we stumble … I am trying not to do that here. Manipulating temporality like this —acting as though the ending has already been written — is a bad habit I am trying to break.” Parent or not, mother or not, woman or not, we could all learn from Montei’s nuanced and careful work about raising ourselves and the future generations more carefully.
Thanks for reading! My So-Called Feminist Life is a weekly newsletter wrestling with feminism in today’s world. I encourage conversation in the comments if you wish to share your own thoughts, feelings, memories, opinions. If you’d like to support this project financially, you can become a paid subscriber.
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I love this book so much.
Thank you so much Maggie. This is really generous. I’m so glad we got to meet.