Male pregnancy—”mpreg,” for short—is an internet subculture that’s growing bigger, no pun intended, every day. Reviled as “disturbing” by many and explored more fully by few, mpreg enthusiasts have remained mostly silent about who they are and what they’re about. Until now.
If you’re not familiar with mpreg, the conceit is fairly simple: It’s an online fantasy world of images and stories exploring male pregnancy. And it’s all about men getting impregnated by other men, sometimes by other species and, sometimes—if one is very lucky and also has done something very good in his lifetime—by Harry Styles, or the cast of Teen Wolf, or Dr. Who and Benedict Cumberbatch at the same time. While mpreg itself is not explicitly sexual (and may not be sexual at all for some), descriptions of sex comprise a major part of the art and writing that comes from the mpreg community. And for yet others, the interest lies not in sex but in the process of pregnancy and the act of giving birth.
The last time Jezebel covered mpreg was in connection to knotting, a subset of fiction and images devoted to males having passionate (and sometimes very violent) sex like canines, often resulting in the impregnation of the submissive male. I wrote that post, in the wake of Dash Con, in a slack-jawed, nonplussed sort of way. I wanted to return to this topic because, while it’s easy to write off fiction about Harry Styles anally giving birth as twisted and perverse, to those in mpreg’s growing community, the idea is something special and beautiful.
And after corresponding with Lyric, the administrator of Mpreg Central (the internet’s largest mpreg community), it’s hard to say exactly why mpreg should be considered disgusting or offensive aside from the fact that babies often come out the butt. (Or the penis. That’s quite popular, too). And it’s even harder to call the people who are into it gross, or disturbing, or even “off.”
Lyric is 24 years old and currently pursuing a degree in creative writing. He’s got several dogs that he loves and is obsessed with Orphan Black. He also happens to moderate a community of over 5,500 mpreg enthusiasts and to create mpreg art—digitally manipulating photos of men to make it appear that they are visibly with child. He agreed to communicate with me in order to give mpreg more of a “legitimate spotlight” and, in the best case scenario, to give the subculture (it would be wrong to view mpreg as only sexual) some attention that isn’t overwhelmingly negative.
Lyric, like many who are members of the mpreg community, doesn’t speak about his interests outside of the internet. In an email about why he chooses to keep his interest secret, Lyric wrote this:
A big part of what keeps me from sharing my interests with everyone else is the [discomfort] I believe it would create. A lot of people reading this and discovering for the first time that ‘mpreg’ is actually thing might be really weirded out right now—or, then again, maybe not. I feel like it’s a gamble sharing it with people because I only know the response on the internet has been largely negative.
The response that Lyric mentions can be largely seen in two posts written on BuzzFeed. While the posts themselves are cheery and informative (if, like mine, a little bemused), the response of the commenters is overwhelmingly one of reproach and condemnation, with a few requests to burn the entire internet to the ground and explode the whole world. With that kind of reaction (maybe you need to go outside and breathe for a couple of minutes after imagining a baby coming out of a penis, but I certainly don’t think we need to bring about the end of humanity because some people are into that sort of thing), it’s no wonder that members of the mpreg community are reticent to share outside of their own group, nor is it a surprise that I had to knock on many virtual doors before Lyric agreed to this interview.
Lyric and I communicated via email for several days last week. He was enthusiastic to discuss the ins and outs of the mpreg community and share some of his art, which can be seen below and also on his Tumblr (which is not safe for work).
If you had to explain what mpreg is to someone unfamiliar to the subculture, how would you do it? (For instance, a grandmother who has never heard of it.)
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