The work of love
A chat with Amanda Montei about the labor of sex, motherhood, and marriage—and the question of what we're 'working so hard to maintain.'
So much has happened—politically, culturally, and personally—over the last year that has made her book feel all the more relevant and prescient. And it gave us that much more to talk about.
I recorded our conversation so that I could share it here (although I’m afraid you’ll miss out on the great conversation with the audience that followed our chat). We talked about everything from divorce memoir backlash to erotic awakenings to hetero-pessimism to sexless marriages—and we signed books! If you order soon, you can probably end up with a signed copy of Touched Out, as well as my book Want Me. While you’re at it, you should probably also grab one of Womb House’s women author hats (I have Ernaux and Amanda has Duras, but why not collect them all).
The thesis of your book is that there is this direct line between the culture of motherhood and rape culture, or the “culture of assault” that we all grow up with. You first recognized these connections during your early experiences with the physical overwhelm of motherhood. Can you explain how this link started to show up for you?
Many of us know that there's some sort of connection between how you grow up as a girl, the culture of assault, and motherhood, but I didn’t really have the language or tools to connect those things. Becoming a mom was so physical. I write in the book about breastfeeding and working at a home daycare. That experience really brought to the fore the physicality, the “body keeps the score” of it all. At the daycare, I felt like a toy, I felt like an object, and that was very familiar—but, also, it was different. It was not exactly the same as how I felt when I was in my 20s.
This was around the time of #MeToo, and all around me there were all these moms who were sort of joking about, you know, “I feel so touched out, I feel like I’m losing my mind.” And that was very curious to me and I wanted to unpack that—as a writer, I had to figure out the language to articulate what was going on in my body.
Your book makes it clear that there is often a lack of informed consent going into both sex and motherhood. There’s a bait-and-switch. We’re sold one thing and get another. In both of these arenas, what is the thing we’re sold, and what do we end up getting?
In terms of motherhood, we grow up with this image of motherhood as the pinnacle of femininity, it is the final destination of the feminine. The mother has always been that structuring force of femininity. I feel like people use that term “ideal mother” a lot, which is interesting, because it’s a very complex figure—like, what is the “ideal mother”? I think it's always shifting. But you’re socialized as a girl to expect that you're going to grow up, you're going to become a mom, and then—ah!—you’re there. Obviously, that was not my experience.
What I was interested in was all these cultural narratives that come with motherhood and the extreme overwhelm of that, the exhaustion of having to process all that.
The sex question is harder though, as far as what we're sold and what we get. A lot of what I write about in the book is the desire for male attention and the desire for pleasure that's always filtered through male desire. So there's this mirage—at least for me, growing up in the Nineties—of, like, “If I give him what he wants, then that will provide pleasure for me.”
I think one of my favorite parts of the book—it feels weird to say it's my favorite part because it's really painful—but you write about a sexual interaction in high school, I think, or college with a boy that you had a crush on. You had this romantic vision of what would happen on the other side, but you end up realizing that it was all set up by his friends. In the book, you make this amazing comparison between that sexual experience and motherhood as a set-up designed by men.
Thank you for remembering that part. It was like this plan set up by these boys who knew I liked this boy. It was a plan for him to lose his virginity. And I had such a Leonardo DiCaprio-level crush on this guy—you and I were just talking about Leonardo DiCaprio.
When are we not?
I just, I wanted this boy so badly, right? And I thought he liked me. And then finding out later that this was a setup—in the book, I talk about how that is very reflective of the experience of motherhood. I thought I wanted this thing because it looked this way, and I did want it, right? But what I didn't know changed my relationship with the notion of consent after the fact. Yes, I had consented to this. I wanted to be a mother, very badly. But once I became one, I was like, well, was that a choice, or was it something else? Or is choice just more complicated than I realized?
Your book refuses to dichotomize motherhood and sexuality. You write about your pre-baby experiences with sex right alongside your experiences with motherhood. What can open up for us when we push back against and explore that dichotomy?
One thing that’s been surprising to me is how much that dichotomy still exists and how uncomfortable people still are putting sexuality and motherhood next to each other. It’s as though even to speak of them in the same breath is like implying some sort of transgression of the incest taboo or something, which is obviously not at all what's happening.
In terms of what opens up when we do consider them together, I think it's just a must. Every woman that I know has been touched by gender-based violence, unwanted sex, confusing sex, and just a complicated relationship with their own sexuality. The idea that then you become a mother and that part of you goes away? I can't reconcile that.
As mothers, as parents, we are passing on ideas about the body, consent, and how you treat and care for other people, right? So the idea that your memories, your past, wouldn't come into all of that is very strange to me. You can't separate the two. But we want to imagine mothers as these empty vessels that show up to serve men and children.
My book is just one of many that are adding to the archive of maternal subjectivity, that are saying, “This is what it looks like.” It's not that ideal mother image. It's not that thing that maybe we were sold when we were young. It is very complicated terrain.
It’s clear in your book that your realizations around the culture of motherhood were deeply impacted by the events of that time—from the #MeToo movement to the pandemic. Now, a year after the book came out, what are the current events that most dramatically highlight the forces of coercion at play in both sex and motherhood?
I mean, J.D. Vance. Everything that he and his ilk have said, right? All these terrible things about who does the caring. Women, mothers, grandmothers—what women are for. Obviously, we're living in a country in which motherhood is being forced by the state. When I was writing this book, I was trying to name the way in which our choices get ushered around by all these cultural and political ideas, and it was a little abstract, right? And then Dobbs happened, which made it so real. It's not coercion anymore. It's forced motherhood.
Online motherhood advice. I find it to be endlessly irritating and fascinating for the way in which it’s building that domestic ideology and trying to absorb the critiques of it. There’s also Andrew Tate and all this online misogyny.
And there’s a very interesting backlash happening to a lot of recent motherhood books. There's all these think pieces that are coming out about like, “Do liberals hate kids?” Which to me just feels like a direct backlash to all these books about motherhood and parenting that came out as a result of the pandemic. Now, even some books that I love are just much more focused on the child now. And I love children, I love my children, I'm all for children's rights, you know, but I think it's curious timing. It’s like, “I think you’re talking about this motherhood thing too much.”
This year, we’ve seen an outpouring of high-profile quote-unquote “divorce books,” both memoirs and novels that speak to women’s experiences leading up to or in the aftermath of divorce. Leslie Jamison’s Splinters. Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife. Sarah Manguso’s Liars. Miranda July’s All Fours. It’s striking to me that all of these books involve mothers. In what ways are they motherhood books—or even books about the radicalizing effects of motherhood?
All Fours for me is a little bit about motherhood. I want to put myself in the category of Miranda July—it’s like after Touched Out. It’s about rediscovering the erotic. She had no connection to her own body and her own desire. It’s such a great book, I love it. The whole book is about rediscovering that connection, not just to her sexuality and her pleasure, but to this, as you wrote, aliveness, this bigger erotic connection to the world. It’s so much more than a “motherhood” or a “divorce” book.
I think with Lyz Lenz and Leslie Jamison, they're so different from a genre standpoint, but what's interesting that's happening in the discourse around those books is people are saying, “Oh, you know, it's not motherhood that's so hard, it's marriage.” And… it's all connected. It’s that natural continuation of the conversation— maybe what we’ve been complaining about in terms of motherhood has all along been domestic inequality and the ways we’ve been set up to serve heterosexual men. So, I love to see it.
The psychotherapist Esther Perel, author of Mating in Captivity, recently published a podcast interview with Miranda July about All Fours and she spoke a lot about the tension between domesticity and eroticism—our craving for safety and security, on the one hand, and our craving for excitement and novelty, on the other. She has an online course that is designed to guide couples through that tension. I'm curious: What do you think about attempts to problem-solve a defining feature of heteronormative marriage?
This is one where I want to say, Tracy, what do you think? Because Tracy's been doing such interesting writing about hetero-normativity, or hetero-pessimism, which is something we’ve both been thinking a lot about, which is this phenomenon of having pessimistic, cynical, and sometimes performative attitudes around heterosexuality but then staying within it and not actually making change outside of it.
I love Perel. Every time I hear her speak I’m so wooed by her. She often is questioning heterosexuality and thinking about the totally unrealistic demands of monogamous marriage.
I see a lot of other stuff online now—it's sex gummies, it's hormone-replacement stuff. I get these ads that are like, “Take this sex gummy and put your divorce lawyer out of business.” To me, that is capitalism eating sex-positivity—and it’s a hetero-centric and monogamous sex-positivity. That’s something I’m still unpacking. I know you’ve been writing a lot, too, about, like, survival guides for patriarchy.
Right, like, we’re not going to do anything about patriarchy, but we’re going to figure out how to live within it and make do.
And buy stuff.
Why are we problem-solving within this institution? Why are we trying to make this thing that often doesn’t work for people… work?
That’s the question for me, too. What are we working for? What are we working so hard to maintain? And is that something that is of value to us, personally and collectively? Or are we working to maintain something that is good for society—and, if so, what society?
Also, who's doing most of that work? I'd love to know who is primarily signing up for these classes, what gender they are. A lot of the sex researchers I’ve talked to have found that women are primarily doing this sexual labor in their marriages. One expert told me that the idea that men would get involved in this labor didn’t ever come up. The assumption was that the women would be adapting their desires to traditional heterosexual norms.
We’ve also seen this divorce memoir backlash, whether it’s from literary critics or randos on Twitter, where there’s very much this feeling of: Well, these women writing about divorce just chose bad husbands. Or they didn’t do enough to maintain their marriages. But, in reality, many of these books speak to systemic issues. They’re not just talking about their uniquely shitty husbands, they’re talking about inequities around childcare and domestic labor that all the studies tell us are standard and routine in heteronormative marriage.
Are there connections to be drawn between that blaming and the coercions of sex and motherhood that you write about in your book?
Yes. It's the classic victim-blaming narrative. You didn’t make the right choices, you asked for this, we don’t want to hear about it. Again, relocating the social and political problems onto the individual.
It's also interesting because in some of these books, the writers do a lot of work to say, “This is just my perspective.” It feels like they're doing a lot of work to actually not make their husbands look that bad, usually because they have kids and they don’t want to villainize. In All Fours, the husband's kind of a standup guy. He's quiet and just kinda like, “I don’t know what’s going on with you and your sexual awakening.”
As you’re saying that, I’m realizing that Liars is the book that’s gotten the most visible backlash, and the husband is the worst in such a dramatic way.
It’s like the inverse of the idea you wrote about of hetero-exceptionalism, of like, “Oh, not my husband. He’s excused from the patriarchy.” Instead, it’s like, “He’s so exceptionally bad that we don’t need to look at that.”
Right. “Why would you marry such a bad man?”
Yeah, not, “Why is he such a douche?”
And his douchiness is a dialed up version of a very normative experience.
I haven’t finished Liars yet but in some of her press Manguso is also talking about separating motherhood from marriage. A lot of the ways that we talk about how motherhood is so hard—yes, it is the case that, you know, parents are woefully unsupported, materially, in this country, but it also has a lot to do with domestic inequality. I appreciate that she separates that out and says, “What I’m trying to do is mother outside of that.”
We’re in this fascinating moment where the role of sex in women’s lives is being challenged and questioned. There’s the 4B movement in South Korea, a movement to sexually, romantically, and reproductively boycott men, a version of which has since taken off on TikTok in the U.S. There are all these TikTok advice trends around intentional celibacy, decentering men, and being “boy sober,” in part to protect against some of the punishing aspects of heteronormative dating and sex. You also recently reported for the New York Times Magazine about couples who are challenging assumptions around the necessity and importance of sex in marriage.
With all of this, what’s going on?
The New York Times Magazine piece that you're mentioning, I think that piece was about unpacking the obligation of sex in marriage, which led to my thinking about the work that women do to uphold that constant sexual activity in marriage. For that piece, I talked with a lot of different straight married women who felt that they were broken, who were disconnected from their own pleasure, and who were also feeling the pressure to have more sex in marriage.
We're only three decades from marital rape being outlawed nationwide in this country. Those laws are still poorly enforced. I think we're just very overdue for a reckoning with the questions of “What is hetero-monogamous sex?” and “How did the idea of sexual duty transform and what does it look like today?”
I think all those other movements that you mentioned are the younger generation—or people who are dating and not married—kind of trying to think through how power is laced through dating and sex, and how it’s always been rotating around male desire.
If you had to pick three books off the shelves here as reading companions to Touched Out, what would they be?
Tracy’s book. I bet you have some really good Adrienne Rich here. Marguerite Duras’ Practicalities. I spent a lot of time with that one while I was writing Touched Out because I was getting sober and she writes a lot about alcoholism and the link between alcohol and desire for men, and that violent rub between those two things. I was also reading and thinking a lot about bell hooks’ All About Love—this idea of love as an artistic practice, which is different from this “work” that we’ve been talking about.
👉 I went on KQED’s Forum with Alexis Madrigal to talk about the legacy of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. Give a listen.
dream team. loved this. love you both.