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This week, Amanda Montei, author of Touched Out, shares an essay criticizing societal discomfort with maternal sexuality, advocating for more complex and sexualized literary representations of mothers. Below, you will also find a list of magazines that embrace writing about sexuality and its many representations.

One might think that at this point in history the proximity of sex and motherhood would no longer feel dangerous. Surely people understand that mothers have sex and have had sex previously or that having children might change one’s relationship to sex, or at the very least the relationship to one’s body? Surely people know that sexuality and intimacy are shaped by cultural and political ideas about gender, and that the way we think about parenting and family are as well?

Not so, I’ve found, after writing two books that explore, among other things, not just mothers, but the sexual lives of mothers. In my first book, I wrote about my mother from the perspective of myself, as a child, watching her try to navigate what it meant to be a woman in both personal relationships and professional settings. As a girl, I watched as my mother’s experience of sexuality limited her ability to love and be loved, to find a pleasure all her own, and to fulfill the role of the good mother. I wrote, too, about the discomfort I felt in the presence of my mother’s sexuality.

In my second book, Touched Out, just released, I explore how I learned who and what my body was for through my early sexual experiences. I also write about how, years later, when I became a mother, I had to teach myself to navigate the residue of pain and confusion those experiences left in my body. I illustrate theoretically how the architecture of rape culture is reflected in the institution of motherhood because both are misogynist paradigms that seek to control and exploit women. And I write personally about how this comes up in the body in moments of disorientation and frustration as we parent.

On the one hand, mothers are considered, by default, to be nonsexual creatures. Motherhood is supposed to be the opposite of sex, even though many women have sex to become mothers. But a mother, the patriarchal logic goes, has already achieved the only reason for sex—she has had children! What use do mothers even have for sex?

On the other hand, mothers are supposed to quickly “get their bodies back” to save their marriages, while at the same time nodding along to the cultural norm that says a mother’s body belongs to her children. As I write in Touched Out, this reveals that a woman’s body is supposed to be reserved for marriage and motherhood—that is, for men and children, not for herself.

We have a cultural fear of maternal sexuality and maternal intensity more generally. Mothers who love too much or not enough are considered dangerous because they threaten the line between sex and motherhood, another reason we fear mothers who have sex. We can see how this shows up in our cultural narratives—the popularity of true crime or film that feature mothers whose excessive devotion leads them to violence, for instance.

But how do these cultural beliefs show up in our writing? It remains radical to simply depict mothers having sex, pursuing their own pleasure. As the author Rebecca Woolf has written, it comes as a surprise to many that mothers are in fact people. We are still, as writers, faced with this basic task—of depicting maternal characters as human beings who are not only flawed, but also idiosyncratic, with unique features and behaviors, with kinks and desires.

For the writer representing a mother on the page, the challenge is first and foremost to render her something other than just A Mother, which is an image inherently sapped of individuality (even though her faults are sure to be written off as purely individual failings of character). Allowing a character who is a mother to have a sexual life, or a sexual identity, is one way to acknowledge she has an identity outside the Madonna role.

But mother characters need not be whores to not be Madonnas. Whenever I teach workshops on writing mothers, we inevitably discuss the importance of breaking out of both cliché and duality. Motherhood is riddled with platitudes and with binary thinking. A major hurdle in writing mothers, then, whether in memoir or fiction, is to assure that the mother on the page is more than a set of dueling oversimplifications.

How to write not a mother who is neither simply good nor bad, when it often seems these are the only images we really have of women who are also parents?

The question, of course, is a trap. It implies, again, that to a mother is to write A Mother, not a character who belongs first and foremost to herself—not a human, not an individuals, just a stock image. I sometimes have my students make lists of all the qualities that make a good mother and all the qualities that make a bad mother and then prohibit them from giving their characters any of these qualities. This is just one way to challenge writers to think about what else this person might be made of.

A Mother, after all, is an idea. A set of beliefs and tropes. A set of moral judgements and cultural expectations around which she is consistently bending her identity. This is interesting, to see a character work to meet the standards placed upon her—a Woman vs. Society tale—but can only take us so far as writers. Who else is she? Who is the person here? How can we give this character a body?

Exploring sexuality—by which I mean not just writing sex scenes, but getting to know our characters’ relationships with intimacy, boundaries, touch, giving, taking, pleasure, and meticulously rendering their cravings— is one way to offer a character rich inner life, something A Mother is not allowed to have.

If you want to learn more from Amanda, join her on Sunday, October 29th for her workshop with Write or Die, Exploring Sexuality & Motherhood in Writing. In this 3 hour class, generate new questions about the intersections between motherhood/parenthood and sexuality, as well as develop new terrain for exploration in your work!

Amanda is also available for one-on-one mentorship, where mentees will feel nurtured and supported as they recover their creativity or dive deeper into their practice, get feedback on their writing or advice on fledgling ideas, and finish an essay or progress on a book. Amanda’s next round of this Care for Writers mentorship begins on November 5th.

This is one of our paid lists this week. Signing up for our paid subscription gets you access to this, plus all of our Curated Favorites, Long Lists, and Lit Mag Rankings. If you’re a Chill Subs user, it also lets you claim access to all of the premium tools and filters on our website. These paid subscriptions allow us to do the work we do and offer scholarships to anyone who needs it. Our next free list comes out Monday (Oct. 30th)

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