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A wise woman wearing a pair of gold sequin dungarees once told me that although love is infinite, time and energy are not. To that list, you might add bodies.
Most of us have, at a maximum, two arms, one neck, one mouth, two breasts. Some people have fewer. And yet, the things we are meant to do with those parts of our body can feel unending. Take arms. In the course of barely half an hour, a parent might be expected to rock a baby, pick a crying toddler off the floor, stroke the back of a worried friend, hug a partner, and get karate chopped by a four-year-old. Over the course of a day, your mouth might kiss a small child awake, get stuffed full of banana by a dirty hand, lick milk off a wrist, kiss a lover goodbye, and get grasped by a breastfeeding baby. Your back will be a mode of transport, a climbing frame, an erogenous zone, a weightlifting device. And we haven’t even started on hands.
In her new book Touched Out, Amanda Montei argues that women are taught to ignore the needs and vulnerabilities of their own bodies in order to serve their children. We are told to push through, grit our teeth, accept it. We take weight on our hip, the spit on our collarbones, the slap to our arse. Even though we know that all bodies can reach a point of maximum stimulation—a threshold of use—we are expected to repress those feelings in order to look after our children, our families, our loved ones. Montei points out how this kind of grin-and-bear-it mentality reflects a wider subjugation of women, in work, in sex, in the home. Elsewhere, it bleeds into harassment, intimidation, objectification, and consent.
I came across the term “touched out” while speaking to Lucy-Anne Holmes for a chapter about sex I was writing in my book. Her brilliant memoir, Don’t Hold My Head Down, had made me reassess the idea I’d carried around that my body could take anything that was thrown at it. That I was hungry for it all. Because, actually, it is quite a clunking, awkward gear change to go from breastfeeding your baby in a low-lit, lavender-scented room to, seconds later, having your nipple played with by a horny partner. As Lucy-Anne put it, “Those early stages of childhood, where a child is much more attached to their mother physically, means that you’re really topped up with physical contact. Whereas your partner might not be. They are coming to you for that physical connection but you’re really touched out.”
It’s not that you can’t inhabit both of those roles, all those roles, of course. A woman can be sexual and maternal; she can be playful and disciplined; and she can do it all with her body. But, just sometimes, the transition from one to the other can feel rushed. Or awkward. Or unwanted. And I mean that in both directions. You might not want to interrupt being held and kissed by your partner to pull two fighting children apart. You might not want to call time on a play fight to go and comfort a stressed out friend. You might not want to cut sex short to go and burp a colicky baby.
I hope it is true that human beings have an infinite capacity for love. But we also only have so much blood and so much skin.