Since I published Touched Out a little over a year ago, I’ve received a steady stream of notes from readers. Most of these notes come from mothers who say the book helped them understand their own desires not just for space, but for autonomy over their own bodies and lives. Though the title of the book suggests it’s a story about moms who don’t want to be touched by their children, what I realized writing the book and aging into motherhood is that nothing could be further from the truth.

Frustrations with children or even with the more physical aspects of maternal care are in most cases diversions. What ground me down in early motherhood was not my children, but the working conditions of American parenting—the isolation, the individualism baked into our models of care, the effects of the gendered division of labor—along with all the other demands on my attention and my body, past and present, especially those I experienced throughout my life in relationships with men.

Worse, it seemed that everywhere I turned in those years, people mocked and normalized women’s demoralizing exhaustion and objectification, the loss of control they felt over their lives, the inequality they experienced in and out their homes, and the common feeling so many women had that their body did not belong to them.

Since the release of the book, a wave of women have woken up to the continuities between such feelings and the current administration’s blatant platform of using and abusing women’s bodies. Many women are now squarely in their oh, this is how the personal is political era.

I wrote last year about women attempting to introduce consent into marriage, and since then, there’s been a wave of great writing reevaluating how male entitlement to women’s bodies shows up not just in motherhood but in marriage. Women are even taking sabbaticals from marital sex to better understand their own desires and relationship to sex.

All of this shows that writing has the power not only to provide a sense of recognition and clarity, and to move to ol’ Overton window, but to cause revolutions in the bedroom, in the kitchen, in workplaces, and in the streets. Scores of women are unpacking how power shows up in their intimate relationships, their homes, their mothering, their desires, their purchasing habits, their relationships with community, their activism, and their caregiving, deconstructing how systems of oppression shape our everyday lives.

But are men just… not?

Last week, I received a rare note from a male reader. Whenever I open these notes, I steel myself for a quick delete and block. But this one turned out to be different.

The reader wrote that they had experienced “severe depression” that “manifested into possible ROCD.” (I had to look this up: ROCD stands for relationship obsessive-compulsive disorder). “A big portion was this topic of sex and her being touched out,” he wrote, regarding his relationship with his wife, who is a kindergarten teacher and mother to the couple’s two young kids. “I thought the way to help was [to] talk about all the things I found attractive about her… about her desires,” but he found this only made things worse between them.

It was at this time, he wrote, that he began reading my work. “It was a revelation,” he said. He realized he was adding to his wife’s distress by “objectifying her and not respecting her autonomy.” He also realized he had undervalued the notion of consent in their relationship and was hyper-focused on sex. He’s now in therapy and working on understanding his own emotional life, while prioritizing caring for his wife like a friend, rather than treating her like a sexual object.

What this reader note illustrated for me is just how many men mistreat the women they love without realizing what they’re doing, no doubt because of their own gendered socialization— but also, more hopefully, the note showed that change is possible when men put in time and effort to understand the women in their lives.

Other women have told me that they gave my book to their husbands and that it started conversations between them about inequality in the home, the nature and expectations of heterosexual marriage, and their own sexual and romantic lives. But my sense has always been that this is an exception to the rule.

Despite the few men who have had feminists books pushed on them by women partners, most men don’t read books written by women, and male authors don’t usually write women well. It stands to reason that even the most progressive and literary men among us are unfamiliar with complex notions of female subjectivity.

It also suggests that a certain strain of feminist prose may be dividing men and women—but not because the ideas contained within such books are inherently divisive. It’s because these books, by and large, are not read, discussed, shared, whispered about, and carried around for weeks by men.

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I suppose one could claim this is an issue of marketing. The most popular titles on motherhood, sex, domestic inequality, parenting, and marriage are not just written by women, but heavily marketed to women. But this reasoning offers an easy pass to male readers (and non-readers) who are clearly demonstrating an unwillingness to engage with feminist thought and, more simply, to extend empathy toward women. It also underlines the cultural and political problem of throwing feminist texts into the gutter of “women’s issues.”

When women first started telling me that they had forced their husbands to read my book or this column, I felt complete surprise, but also discomfort. I was not writing for them. At all. I’ve since thought a lot about that reaction, and about my intended audience. But I ultimately always come back to the narrowness of the question I once asked myself—should my work appeal to men?

The better question to ask, I now know, is: Why don’t women’s accounts of their lives appeal to most men?

Over the weekend, I went to an event for the new re-issue of Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women at my wonderful local feminist bookstore Womb House Books. There was, I think, one cis man in the room, who appeared to have been brought by a woman. The rest of the chairs were filled by women and queer folks.

I could not help but call to mind the recent groundswell—or maybe it’s more like a low hum in a very niche corner of the internet?—of liberal women claiming they no longer feel like they can “choose” “traditional” lives because there’s too much feminist writing today deconstructing motherhood, the family, and marriage.

The truth is, some of us can choose our choice more emphatically and easily than others, and there’s nothing wrong with feeling some discomfort around the disconnect this creates between those who belong to the actually quite diverse and provisional group we call “women” or “feminists.”

In fact, it’s this discomfort that has the power to create the personal and social change we so desperately need. For this reason, whenever a feminist book or film reaches a kind of cult status, whatever the debates may be that circle around it at the time, I see it as an incontrovertible good. It demonstrates the ability literature and culture still have to shake up the status quo and create conversation.

But what do we do with the men who do not even dare taste or touch these conversations and the discomforts and questions they raise, because they cannot bear to pick up the feminist book their girlfriend or wife won’t stop talking about? Or worse, with men who would rather bury themselves in “misogyny slop” than entertain a complex thought about women or feminism?

We know that literature has the power to develop greater empathy for those whose lives are different from our own—to crack open a reader’s world and perhaps even invite them to choose a different choice afterward. Conversely, the discomfort of looking closely at your own life might be too great, and you may instead choose to create an entire argument about how feminism is really to blame for everything bad in the world.

Worse yet, you might decide to not even engage in the first place with the book that is making your wife a little more thorny, less horny, and a lot more non-compliant.

Which is to say, although we are living through a moment in which liberal/moderate and radical feminists are increasingly at odds, and the cracks between them appear to be widening and deepening, it’s clear that most women today are at least wrestling with ideas, and with what those ideas mean for how they live.

It’s less clear (I’m being generous??) whether their male counterparts are doing the same.

Most days, I have little hope that men will ever open up their hearts and minds to the canon of feminist literature and theory en masse, especially in this highly charged choose-your-own reality moment. If they did, however, it just might start to close the ever-widening gender divide. It might even cause a seismic cultural and political shift. The few stories I’ve heard from men who have given reading women a go have only confirmed this.

I guess what I’m saying is that I still think art and writing have the power to save us, but only if we open ourselves up to that possibility. Yes, I’m saying this.

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