Science- I learned the term "touched out," which refers to being physically overwhelmed, when I became a mom.
- I started to feel like the conditions of parenting in America reflected a culture of male control.
In 2015, when I became a mother, the term "touched out" was becoming common millennial parlance for the physical overwhelm women felt often in motherhood — the kind that had mothers hiding in bathrooms, pressing hands out around them to create imaginary barriers between body and world, and stomping away from husbands and children.
I learned the phrase "touched out" when my first child was an infant, when I was hunting in online motherhood forums for some recognition of the constant disorientation I felt. Two years later I would struggle with overpowering flashes of not wanting to be touched by my children and my husband, and of feeling like I had no escape, just as many around the world were waking up to the omnipresent nature of sexual violence.
The #MeToo movement brought a steady stream of testimony by women who had been harassed, violated, and assaulted. It felt like a watershed moment. But even in that climate, mothers I knew still spoke of feeling "touched out" as though it were par for the course. 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.
Throughout their lives, women are touched without permission
My aversion to my children's soft hands felt like an indication of a deep unresolvedness in my body. I wanted to rid myself of everything that had been piled on me — to peel my skin off and scrub it clean. Along with the feeling of not wanting to be touched came memories of being used, violated, and seen by men.
When my children hit me in frustration, or when they studied me as I dressed or peed, or when they played with my body like a toy — then when I turned away from them, only to see the hungry eyes of my husband or the news of men ascending to positions of power despite having assaulted women — I had the desperate urge to finally say no, though I didn't know how, nor to whom I might say it.
Motherhood was triggering. "A man is always grabbing at my body," author Lyz Lenz wrote in her book about the rights of pregnant women, "Belabored," quoting a mother of a 3-year-old boy with another on the way.
Male power is all around us, controlling women's bodies and lives
Patriarchal power has always been there — it's woven into the fabric of America's national character — but its shape and tenacity felt suddenly clearer in the years after I gave birth, especially after the 2016 election. The news was increasingly filled with male lawmakers attacking, with renewed vehemence, women's reproductive rights.
The feeling of being pursued remains. Male power feels like it's closing in around us, as new laws and legal battles threaten our bodies and reproductive lives. Roe v. Wade has been overturned. American conservatives are pursuing a national ban on abortion. They are coming next for our birth control, even though pregnancy has been effectively criminalized, with full abortion bans in at least 14 states.
"News story after news story breaks with news about a new law passed about birth control, about healthcare, about abortion," Lenz wrote in her book in 2020. "It's an assault, a power grab." The rapid pace of breaking stories continues.
The news of institutionalized patriarchy rebooting itself for a new era of reproductive control is enough to upset the delicate spaces we share with children. But the basic tenets of rape culture also run through our cultural expectations of mothers, something I began to see more clearly just after the height of #MeToo.
Women are expected to sacrifice autonomy for motherhood
Middle-class, bourgeois standards of parenting have created exponential anxieties for mothers. Today, women who become parents are expected to study and perform ideal motherhood at the cost of all else by consuming online parenting content to meet their children's needs with monkish detachment, and though they are often encouraged to take baths or hide in the shower if they need a break, the message is well received that women should expect to sacrifice their autonomy for motherhood, in addition to their physical and emotional well-being. The expectations of American parenthood are an assault all their own.
And yet, just as we normalize sexual violence against women, we also normalize the impossible standards of American parenting. The image of the haggard mom woefully failing to do it all has become so commonplace in American culture that her beaten-down body and psyche hardly even register as a matter of serious concern.
While there is, no doubt, a certain degree of filth and fury inherent to the work of care, in a capitalist economy in which parenting is done in isolated nuclear family units and which still has no national parental leave policy and no state-supported system of early childhood care, the purportedly inbuilt suffering of motherhood has become a kind of existential truism. But the pain so many women experience over the course of a lifetime is not inevitable — it's just the result of a culture that sees it that way.
Excerpted from "Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control" (Beacon Press, September 12, 2023). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.