Why So Many Moms Are "Touched Out"

An interview with author Amanda Montei about motherhood & misogyny.

I talk a lot in this newsletter about the feelings of isolation and overwhelm that often accompany motherhood. Today, I’m thrilled to be interviewing author

Amanda Montei

, one of the most incisive thinkers and writers on the topic. Her fantastic book Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control, which came out in paperback in September, explores the many insidious ways which motherhood and misogyny intersect. It helped me recognize the validity of my own sometimes painful feelings and put them into a much broader context. Amanda also writes the brilliant feminist Substack

Mad Woman

, which I highly recommend.

For our interview today, Amanda and I talked about what it means to be “touched out,” how feelings of being trapped relate to the desire for physical space, the ways in which mothers are punished for talking honestly and openly about their experiences, and more. I very much encourage you to read the whole book, too, which is beautifully written and deeply thought-provoking.

Amanda, you explore so much in your book. Let's start with: What does it mean to be "touched out," and why do so many mothers feel this way? How do our experiences of being constantly touched by our children relate to the culture of misogyny and sexual assault in which we live, and why are these important connections to make?

Part of what I wanted to explore in the book was what’s underneath a phrase like this, and what a phrase like this might tell us about how we view parenthood and women’s bodies. For the uninitiated, the term “touched out” signals that rip-off-your-skin, hide-in-the-bathroom moment that mothers often testify to online. I first learned the term because it circulated among the mothers I knew after I had my first child in the late 2010s. There’s now a ton of online content about the feeling and lots of popular science writing on it as well. But most of this content only scratches the surface.

Though I felt really validated when I first heard that term, to have some language for what I often felt in early motherhood, it really bothered me that the culture of motherhood seemed to be to just laugh it off. For me, this phrase “touched out” signals a lot more than being constantly touched by our children. It’s a sign of how alone and overwhelmed mothers feel — emotionally and physically. And it speaks to how isolated and gendered our notions of parenthood are.

Mothers who describe feeling “touched out” are at their wits’ end. Their bodies and minds are literally shutting down! Even so, there’s a common narrative around feeling “touched out”: a mother at home alone with a young child (or several) who can’t get a break, doesn’t seem to have any other adults around to help her, doesn’t really have any sense of boundaries or ability to enforce those boundaries; she’s overrun not just by children and their touch, but by the mess and sensory overload of the domestic setting.

And then, there’s a partner, usually a husband, who is also pawing at her at the end of the day when he comes home from his job (outside the home), or he has some other emotional demand that she can’t even imagine meeting because she’s so physically and psychologically spent from modern motherhood.

When you take such a story and place it a little more clearly within its larger context —that is, a culture of misogyny and violence against women, as you mentioned — it becomes more stark how this image of an alienated and unsupported mother (who is also usually a wife expected to service her husband sexually and emotionally!) speaks volumes about who and what we think women’s bodies are for. So for me, the “touched out” mother is really just a symptom of this broader culture of male entitlement to women’s bodies and women’s work.

I’m interested in this relationship between feeling trapped (in our existing lives, in our marriages, etc) and feeling disinterested or uninterested in others' physical touch. If we feel we don't have much autonomy, perhaps it makes sense that we decide to exercise control in one way we (sometimes!) can: by limiting other people's access to our bodies.

Absolutely, yes to all of this. That is so much of what I wanted to explore in the book because I knew as a new mother that so much of what I was feeling had little to nothing to do with my children. I love touch! I love my kids! (Obviously!) And I actually find so many aspects of mothering really pleasurable. Even the physical overwhelm I felt at times, when I really looked inward and asked where it was coming from, I came to understand it had much more to do with the lack of control I felt over my life. I was pushed out of my career by motherhood, but also out of my creative work. I felt alone and unsupported — and often was, in those early years, actually all alone and unsupported.

So I think when mothers feel “touched out,” they’re actually testifying to a lot of different feelings — anger, sadness, anxiety, confusion, often, as in my case, clinical depression — but they’re also, as you say, grasping for some kind of control and power because their lives feel out of control and/or they feel powerless. For most mothers who were socialized as girls, this follows decades of living in a culture that likely made them feel similar feelings about their bodies in other scenarios, namely that they were objects for others’ pleasure. In the book, I write a lot about the sexual culture with which I grew up in the 90s and early 2000s — what I learned about consent and pushing through discomfort and distrusting my own voice and desires, and how that all replayed when I became a mother because I didn’t know how to set boundaries or say no— or didn’t feel I was deserving of those things, or doubted that I could or should.

When we ask not to be touched, or when we participate in sexual refusal, which is something that has been in the culture a lot lately, I would argue that usually we are just asking for a moment to parse out all the external voices telling us what to do, how to think, how to behave, how much access to give others to our bodies, and so on. We are trying, in a way, to rest our relationship with touch or pleasure — it can be the very beginning of trying to recover ourselves.

Even so, in new motherhood I believed what many women believe — that there was something wrong with me because I craved space and solitude and a sense of self. I believed the narrative that, as you know, is longstanding in the history of psychology— that motherhood had taken my erotic power and/or given me some kind of sexual or psychological pathology. My research since the book came out, talking with women about sex and marriage and their relationships with their bodies after having children, has shown me that many women (especially straight married women) still live with a sense of obligation and duty to everyone in their lives but themselves.

As I have regained a sense of my own autonomy, I realize that all that time, I wanted. I wanted support, community, art, meaning, movement, sex. I just didn’t want the roles that were handed to me. Or I didn’t know how to ask for what I wanted. And I wanted things women weren’t supposed to want.

And then there are all the ways in which we’re punished for drawing attention to all of this. I loved your Substack post from a few months ago about what you describe as "fear and discomfort surrounding women’s expressions of discontent." You talk about the fact that when women highlight the struggles of marriage or motherhood, we are often told that we're being too sensitive or negative — or that maybe we just made bad choices (picked the wrong husband, etc). This "disciplinary misogyny," as you explain, puts the blame on the individual, rather than on the system. I'm wondering: What can we do when we encounter these kinds of dismissive responses when we talk about our frustrations or our struggles? And how important is it to continue voicing our opinions?

I see a lot of this policing happen in literary criticism and/or in online discourse, which is obviously something I’m uniquely sensitive to as an author and public figure. For me, the only way to combat that is to continue writing. White men have been writing about their discomfort and discontent for centuries. So I just fundamentally reject any perspective that presumes otherwise.

I also think so much of that discursive policing is rooted in positive/negative binary thinking. I don’t subscribe to the idea that anyone is pushing “negative” takes on motherhood. That’s just not what any good writing on motherhood does. And I think it’s a vast oversimplification of the recent literature.

I think most mothers, though, are more likely to encounter this sort of policing in subtle, everyday ways. I have written a lot about how sort of complaining about your children or motherhood in a surface-level way has become more socially acceptable in a lot of circles (usually in a way that normalizes rather than resists the assumption that motherhood/womanhood = suffering), but by and large the dominant cultural narrative — and the one we consume most still in popular culture — is that women are supposed to love and sacrifice themselves for motherhood, to be utterly selfless, and that this is what makes them lovable and good.

You see this in really big ways — in literally every mother character and the way adult children talk about their mothers. And you see it in smaller ways, like in the culture of parental optimization and parenting advice we swim in, which tells us that as parents (but really just mothers), every moment we spend with our kids is something to be mastered and studied or optimized.

Talking about our frustrations and struggles is important, and understanding them in the context of this political moment, which is not at all post-feminist and is definitely hyper-misogynist, is important. I’m happy to die on that hill. But I think even more important is unlearning this idea that we should surrender our own humanity once we have children, or that it will somehow damage our children if we are fully human. I am a better mother the more I pursue my own desires — the more myself I am. That’s not a reason to do it — I am human either way and deserving of my own freedom. But I think too many women don’t believe that’s possible — that they have to be some kind of stock image of a mother to love their children.

In a beautiful piece in Elle, you wrote that parenthood "isn’t just a tool for passing on beliefs about bodies, but for learning about the beliefs we already carry — the kind we lug around, that weigh us down." I love this. Can you explain more about what you mean and what you've discovered about your own beliefs from becoming a mother?

I learn so much from my children, and from mothering. In the book, I write about how I came to think of parenting as a kind of storytelling, a process of representing and really making the world for them. That’s so much of what we do as parents — tell the story of the world to our children. And there’s a lot of power in that — political power, and also just power over our children, who are incredibly vulnerable to our opinions and ideas and narratives.

But I also write in the book about how easily this can slip into a culture of control, and how as a writer, that power really felt heavy for me at times. I think I understand now that really, we’re writing a story together. I learn from them; they learn from me. We challenge each other.

Can you talk a bit about how you teach your children about consent and body autonomy — both in terms of how you talk about it, and in how you model it?

When my kids were little, I did a lot of consent-based parenting basics like telling them when I was going to pick them up, or talking to them about body boundaries. Since I have two kids, we have lots of opportunities to practice, because siblings argue and hug and are basically constantly learning how to respect and care for each other.

But as my kids have gotten older, conversations about consent and bodily autonomy became more expansive and complex. You can’t teach your children about consent and autonomy without talking to them frankly about bigger issues like queer and trans rights, disability, racism, and patriarchy. My kids understand that certain people have more privilege in this world, and that our family is, to use a term that comes up in Miranda July’s All Fours, nonconforming.

We don’t just do what others do without thinking critically about it. We don’t believe that there are two types of people, boys and girls, who all like and want the same things. We don’t believe a family can only look one way.

In terms of how I model it, there’s a scene in Touched Out when I describe my daughter pretending to be a mom lugging around a bunch of overloaded bags, sighing in exhaustion. I’ve spent many years since refusing to conform to that stock maternal image.

How else did writing this book change you — if at all — as a parent? Is there anything you do differently now?

Writing this book allowed me to see some of the ways I participated in my own oppression. I think that’s something we have trouble talking about, as a culture, and maybe especially in recent years, because there has been so much great writing and attention on the systemic and cultural influences on motherhood, and many really vital critiques of individualism and empowerment culture. But as I write in the book, choice and agency are not something you have or don’t have — some of us have much more autonomy than others.

That’s especially true today, as some of our most basic rights are returned to the state level. But it’s always been true in America. We don’t all have the same experience of motherhood, and we don’t all have the same freedoms. Sometimes, as we saw in the recent election, we might even think we benefit from the institutions that oppress us, or remain attached to those institutions because we want to conform, or be viewed as “normal.”

For me, unpacking how all of this shows up in my own life has meant leaving a marriage that was loving, but turned painful.

Do you think the complaints so many women have about motherhood today have more to do with marriage, then?

Yes! So much online content today is rooted in complaints about marriage and domestic inequality, and yet much of that content is produced by women who remain married anyway. I think this says a lot about the social, political, and economic privileges married people are given in this country — and about the cultural primacy of heterosexual marriage. I think it also says a lot about how women remain oppressed within their own homes, often by men they love (or did love, or think they love). That’s a pretty hard thing to look at. I know it was hard for me. But clearly, we are all having a hard time looking at the state of sex and relationships right now!

Right now, we’re seeing a lot of questions bubbling around the state of gender relations in this country. That’s where a lot of my thinking has been lately. I’m currently working on a piece that is about what we talk about when we talk about libido — and the research for the piece has been very illuminating in terms of highlighting the many conversations we have yet to have about pleasure and power. In my research, I have found time and time again that many straight married women tend to think there is something wrong with them, or that they are broken, and that this has a lot to do with lingering ideas about marital sexual obligation and the question of whether heterosexual marriage can survive in a truly consensual and equal culture.

I have found that divesting from marriage has really lit all that up — and given me a whole new relationship to my own sexuality and sense of pleasure, even just to my own interior life. My next book will explore some of these complicated questions about how these big political and cultural shifts we are witnessing show up in our intimate lives. It’s all stuff I’m very much still working through though, and I think it’s really complex. On a personal level, I’m also really exploring what motherhood and family can look like when they aren't hampered by the heavy labor of marriage.