Episode 164: Father Goose's Nursery Crimes

[Navigator]

When I was in 7th grade, I went to my first anime convention. At a panel about how to be a better fanfic writer (that I remember being actually kind of good for my 7th grade self), one of the ladies running the panel said, "mpreg is against my religion".

I held onto that response for the entirety of my fanfic reading/writing life, because jesus tap dancing christ, this shit is way too popular. I'm slightly afraid to listen to this one.

[count_actuala]

Goddamn these ladies are afraid of pregnancy

And now so am I.

[Cat Planet]

And here I thought it would be an episode of more Omegaverse!

Instead it's more of the Pokegirls shit where people get off on complicated fantasy rules rather than sexual scenarios.

[LINDA]

an entire mpreg episode and nary a word of oviposition or dog dicks, puppies and/or litters

I am simultaneously disappointed and relieved

on a more serious (?) note, at least in the fanfic realms I've traveled, mpreg often seems to manifest for the same reasons that young internet-dwelling ladies fall over themselves to draw/write Sam and Dean Winchester boning. It seems to start as sublimating/exploring their own normal but not socially acceptable pubescent feelings by way of men that they like to look with, without involving themselves in the 'this character is me' sense (i.e. female characters). So mpreg sometimes is, I want to explore this aspect of humanity, but not as it relates to me because girls aren't supposed to have these kids of thoughts, and look at these hot guys in this show I like! Or at least that's my running theory of yaoi/slash. Then you throw in the internet's fetish accelerator and echo chamber qualities and soon you're a 30 year old woman rushing to put your kids to bed because the Castiel in your head has eggs to lay and the internet needs to hear about it.

I can't even imagine why men would be into this apart from the well documented determination for the men of the internet to sexualize everything, especially things that are not meant for them.

[EYE OF ZA]

I am legit surprised we had zero jokes about pregnant Schwartzenegger

[Tiny Prancer]

I can't even imagine why men would be into this apart from the well documented determination for the men of the internet to sexualize everything, especially things that are not meant for them.

I remember way back in the day when I would read fandom secrets on LJ there was one secret that was from someone who said he was a man who liked mpreg and felt ashamed of it, and it was specifically because he wished he could give birth and was torn up by the fact he couldn't. That's always kind of haunted me, thinking about that kind of despair he must have felt and the fact that the only thing that catered to that desire he could never fulfill was provided by teen girls squeeing over boys doing the sex.

when it comes to girls obsessing over gay relationships, I always think of something I remember Moto Hagio said (one of the women involved in the Year 24 group who are credited with revolutionizing how manga for girls was written and basically started the entire shounen-ai/yaoi thing as a genre of girl's comics) that the reason her comics were about gay relationships was because she tried to write it as a lesbian relationship and it didn't feel serious enough despite the serious plot the story had, it just felt cutesy. I'm not sure if it was her or someone else who said that they'd tried to write hetero relationships, but they always felt unequal on the part of the woman in the relationship because of cultural roles. A lot of their comics featured a lot of questioning about gender roles, but they felt like they couldn't do it with female characters because they'd never be seen as equal partners in the relationship, and if they wrote women people would automatically assume the women were supposed to be them and that their comics were nothing but trashy self-insert fantasies. Fast forward to now and instead of being about questioning gender roles, it's specifically sexual fantasies for girls that allow them to fantasize about the sexual content without having to identify as sexual because girls aren't supposed to do that because it means they're bad and slutty.

Basically there's a LOT to unpack about this kind of thing.

[Ambious]

I just started, but please tell me there's a Junior reference in there.

I really should start reading threads before I reply to them.

[advancedclass]

Moto Hagio

I think it's significant that Hagio's work, or anything from the Year 24 group, is so rarely published in North America and it seems just as rarely read by the young women who seem like they would be the target demographic.

There's a lot of interesting things to be explored in reproduction without the uterus in a woman (there is no combination of words I can put together here that don't look painfully awkward); there's some science fiction, some speculative fiction, that touches on this. I actually did a lot of research and reading into this sort of thing years ago as part of a paper on single sex societies. There's some interesting works of fiction on the subject from some feminist writers, some responses to the porny sort of MARS NEEDS WOMEN nonsense, some more scientific in their scope.

But even the ones that were about men in a society where women did not exist did not remove women as thoroughly from the process as it seems a lot of these women do. It's weird and creepy and so uncomfortably anti-woman.

And gross. So very gross.

A lot of the time when you encounter this sort of thing it seems to be couched in a lot of stuff about progressiveness and challenging gender rolls that is such obvious bullshit, even if you haven't read real books written by people with points to make or ideas to explore which just happen to involve some of the key components of these women's masturbation material. It's just a different way of doing the sort of dissociative denial we've seen in the episodes about creeps like the plushie fuckers.

[crow]

Moto Hagio

I think it's significant that Hagio's work, or anything from the Year 24 group, is so rarely published in North America and it seems just as rarely read by the young women who seem like they would be the target demographic.

There's a lot of interesting things to be explored in reproduction without the uterus in a woman (there is no combination of words I can put together here that don't look painfully awkward); there's some science fiction, some speculative fiction, that touches on this. I actually did a lot of research and reading into this sort of thing years ago as part of a paper on single sex societies. There's some interesting works of fiction on the subject from some feminist writers, some responses to the porny sort of MARS NEEDS WOMEN nonsense, some more scientific in their scope.

But even the ones that were about men in a society where women did not exist did not remove women as thoroughly from the process as it seems a lot of these women do. It's weird and creepy and so uncomfortably anti-woman.

And gross. So very gross.

A lot of the time when you encounter this sort of thing it seems to be couched in a lot of stuff about progressiveness and challenging gender rolls that is such obvious bullshit, even if you haven't read real books written by people with points to make or ideas to explore which just happen to involve some of the key components of these women's masturbation material. It's just a different way of doing the sort of dissociative denial we've seen in the episodes about creeps like the plushie fuckers.

Actually I think these girls want to punish men for not having to deal with the pain of childbirth.  It's strangely vindictive to me

[Ambious]

OMG I'm crying

[LINDA]

Actually I think these girls want to punish men for not having to deal with the pain of childbirth.  It's strangely vindictive to me

I don't doubt there are some who think this way but I've been neck deep in fanfic for YEARS and haven't come across any such sadism. Most of what I see is a fluffy saccharine conflation of love/reproduction starring fandom's favorite white men. You see the same thing in het fic too. People who are romantically involved often have babies, ergo, having babies is romantic. This episode's source material seems like a pretty different community though.

And adding to what advancedclass said, there is an omnipresent misogyny, where even in cases that don't erase women completely still touch on tropes like the pregnant one being rendered a delicate fragile waif needing protection and the non-pregnant one being some kind of territorial protector, especially in omegaverse where the point seems to be to write gender-determined sexual or reproductive roles no matter how different those roles are or how much the author tries to riff on the premise.

I will never forget this horrible harry potter fanfic I read in middle school where either harry or draco became pregnant by the other and then everything became about accommodating the pregnancy, protecting the pregnant one, etc etc and they got their own room in hogwarts, the enemy is after the unborn child!11!1!!1 madame pomfrey's prenatal care is under scrutiny1!1! and I really don't have words for how messed up it was, but I'm still thinking about it more than 10 years later. I feel like sometimes in the great web of factors behind this fetish, there has to be some anxiety on the part of the author about the future where they may eventually start a family.

[Goose Goose Honk At Me Now]

Did anyone else picture the little puppet thing from Men in Black during that story with the tentacle monster babies?

[QueenSyreen]

OH. OH MY GOD. MPREG EPISODE. LONG HAVE I WANTED. LONG HAVE I WAITED. SATAN HAS SMILED UPON ME TODAY. KIND OF LEERED, ACTUALLY. THANK YOU SO MUCH I LOVE EVERY RIDICULIST IN THIS PODCAST.

NOW I'M GOING TO GO LISTEN TO IT.

[LINDA]

I'm listening to this a second time in one day. God help me.

'i want to put the largest thing up my ass I possibly can, but in reverse' the mpreg story

[QueenSyreen]

Beautiful, wonderful episode, the boytitties special part made me feel more ill than I have felt listening to the fplus in... quite a while. Yeesh.

I have found myself in the 'writing mpreg so that my OTP can have a fulfilling and nurturing family life' corner of the internet form time to time, and my reaction is generally 'not this shit again.' I never felt any urge to read it but I assumed it was mostly all about sugary fluff stories in settings that absolutely do not make space for them until the fluff elbows itself in, sets itself up, and decides that we're ~happy~ now in this terrible place, we're ~happy~ pushing large objects our of our urethras, SMILE CAPTAIN AMERICA, YOU'RE HAPPY ABOUT THIS, WE'RE GONNA HAVE A BEAUTIFUL FAMILY

I never stopped to wonder if any grown people outside of the kawaiiverse were actually into this sort of thing or why. I'm glad I never decided to wonder about that.

Also, this was a ridiculous episode for references. Seriously. Space Balls? Kingdom Hearts? Day of the Tentacle? The Sorrows of Young Werther? Is the F Plus going through a hipster phase? 'It's a reference to a 17th century Bildungsroman, you wouldn't have heard of it.'