So You're a Whore

He said

I spot it almost immediately. A gem among Target rejects. Sky blue and long-sleeved, it’s got white stripes, a loose fit, and an uncanny similarity to my mom’s wardrobe in the ‘80s. There’s even a little breast pocket, a detail that reminds me as much of my mom and how she dressed back then as her old tinted eyeglasses. I loved those glasses. I cried when she traded them for contacts. Her face as I knew it was just too different so now I was sad. (And, five.)

Now that I’m 41 and need glasses too, I’m thinking of buying a pair just like them to complete the look. 

Not at this yard sale, but somewhere.

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My mom was different from most other moms I knew, in that she worked. This wasn’t a feminist statement; my dad was still in school, they found a nice district for their daughter, and rented an apartment. She did wild things in there. Multi-colored walls, black and white cow spots painted on our kitchen cabinets, pre-algorithmic creative impulses that strike me as quite in right now. One time, she strung chili pepper lights all around the living room, a nod to the fact that we lived in San Antonio maybe, or – just to be silly. Either way: fun. 

Mom did shit like that all the time, sneaking her off-center creative impulses into our home and overall life. You should have seen our Christmas cards. Spectacularly off-the-rails concepts that, next to the staid tastes of the old money community we found ourselves in, did not match. Did not match at all. We received: dignified photos of families with fireplaces and matching Cole Haans. We sent: a photo of my mom dressed as a sex worker, me dressed as an old timey jailbird and my dad in his new lawyer suit. I’m still not sure what the precise joke was, but recipients saved and still talk to me about this Christmas card.

Another year, we all dressed up as Carmen Miranda for the card. Why not?

Merry Christmas!

I’ve always loved a non-traditional mom. Probably because I grew up with one.

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Speaking of which. I have been talking to non-monogamous moms for a few months now. I started this series in the midst of ever-more-terrifying news here in the States about reproductive rights, and I didn’t start it as a response to all that, but it is interesting that more moms are choosing this relationship model against this particular backdrop.

It made me want to tell you about a research paper I wrote 20 years ago, to help me get into grad school. It was about British women gaining more rights at the turn of the 20th century, and the backlash that happened then, too.

There are some interesting parallels.

The deal was: in the late 1800s, British women were getting more access to work and wages, more independence, and more education. At the same time, they were increasingly getting shipped off to mental institutions. Why?

Well. The more intellectual a woman got, the less likely she was to do traditional womanly things, like become a mother. This was the fear in a nutshell, but it came out in doubts about her sanity. (There was also a huge eugenics movement cropping up in England at the same time – no surprise.)

Back then, just as now, there was an ideological tension between women as independent people and women as…well, breeders. I hate to be so coarse about it, hate even more to sound conspiratorial, but these things go together a lot. Woman gets more freedom, there is backlash to that freedom, and the linchpin is her fertility. Reign her in by the womb. 

But it wasn’t like now, with laws that restricted what she could and couldn’t do with her body (this was pre-birth control, after all). It was more attitudinal than that, more pathologizing. Freud wrote that girls were likely to be “lively, gifted, and full of intellectual interests” before they fell ill to…hysteria. (The Greek root word of “hysteria,” by the way, is womb). That was in 1895; in 1886, Richard Krafft-Ebing — who became famous for writing Psychopathia Sexualis, one of the first medical texts on sexuality — wrote that procreation was the sole healthy purpose of sexual desire. Any form of recreational sex was a perversion.

See ladies? Smart = insane, horny = perverted. 

These ideas were swirling at a particular inflection point for female independence in England. And these men weren’t fringe religious types — they were doctors.

I say all this because the messaging has been with us for a while now. Women have been pathologized for a long time if they want to do something other than enter a hetero, monogamous marriage and have lots and lots of babies. It still shapes our collective thinking. Here’s an Instagram comment I read two weeks ago on a Romper post about non-monogamy:

Now, I can think of a few other reasons for declining mental health among today’s youth. Smartphones. Social media. School shootings. Homophobia. Transphobia. This person doesn’t see it that way!

And the truth is they’re not alone, this type of reaction is common. But every so often I come across a more extreme version of this thinking. Not judgy Instagram comments — something darker. Something (or someone) that really spells out the belief that Mom should be a housebound servant-person. 

Here is an example. 

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A few months back, my friend Brittany was in Austin with her sisters for a bachelorette party. One of her sisters is married, with a baby. Let’s call her Sarah.

Sarah and the bachelorette party is at a bar on the east side, and there just so happens to be this group of fun-loving dudes there too. Nice-seeming guys? Friendly, chatty. They join tables with the bachelorette party.

One of the guys gets to chatting with Sarah (whose body is literally still healing from childbirth) and the two of them talk and talk. It’s pleasant and jokey and chill, until suddenly – it’s not. 

Because Sarah mentions she has a baby.

And a husband. 

“Oh?” the guy asks, “and you’re down here in Austin, partying?”

“…yeah??” she giggles, nervously.

“But you’ve got a child and a husband, back home?” he asks.

“Yes…” Sarah says, sensing things are getting weird. 

“Oh, I see.” he says. 

“So,” he concludes, still smiling, “so you’re a whore.”

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That story chilled me, red pill Reddit come to life. Safe to say I live in a comfortable bubble of people who do not think like this, interact with men who take my independence as a given, and because I walk around with privilege I’m probably not as resilient as folks who encounter casual cruelty like this regularly. Definitely not as resilient.

But when I talk to non-monogamous moms, they comfort me in the way my mother comforts me, not because she was non-monogamous, but because I recognize a similar impulse. To do Mom-ing in a less traditional way. 

(Tinted glasses.)

And traditions gets disrupted by options. I can’t remember when she first told me about her IUD for example, but Mom did sing its praises. Because of it, she had the option to have only one child, and a career.

We eventually moved out of that apartment and into a house; later, she and Dad paid for my college. Coming from families shot through with poverty and alcoholism, this was a big deal for them. (And for me.) 

Mom and I both like being mothers, and we both decided to have one child only. It’s a choice I don’t take for granted, and that’s the term that comes up every time I talk to a non-monogamous mom: choice. 

When I hear about guys like the one who so creepily hassled Sarah, it’s clear he would rather she have less choice. Simple as that.

When I read Instagram comments like that one on Romper, it makes me wonder what would happen if that person saw research showing the kids from non-monogamous families do just fine (because it does). Would that change things? Would they be assuaged, more comfortable with moms having more choices?

That’s the question I’m trying to get at, and it’s a big reason I’m interviewing all these non-monogamous moms. My hope is that their stories will humanize them. Not to convince anyone to go be non-monogamous – that’s a personal decision. But because I think moms can both care for their children effectively, and be relational, sexual people. 

It’s not either/or. It’s both/and. And I’d love more room in the culture to grant Mom a fuller range of personhood.