(Untitled)

[wolfy_writing]

Why is "MPREG, EEEW! What's wrong with you people for liking it?  You all want to turn gay men into girls, don't you?" still acceptable, when "What's wrong with you people for liking incest?  You all want to screw your brothers, don't you?" or "What's wrong with you people for writing underage fic?  You all get off at the thought of children being

Comments

[wolfy_writing]

I definitely wouldn't have been so pissed off is she had gone with "My problems with bad mpreg" or "Things that can make mpreg suck", or even "Why I avoid mpreg; it frequently has these problems, and I can't be bothered to look for the good stuff".

It's like the difference between going off about bad slash, and going off about slash.

[kahvi]

My main problem with it was the whole "men are not emotional" thing. Again, it could be the way it was phrased; I'm sure there are stories where men are made to look like parodies of stereotypical women, as it were... but yeah.

[rhube]

Yeah. If it were an objection to bad mpreg, but still implied that making them emotional had to do with making them like women, I would have been annoyed.

[doro_chan]

One of these days I'll translate my essay on mpreg. Because it's not about mpreg but about what purpose mpreg might have in a story (people only ever get angry about one of the three possibilities I came up with) and why people have so many problems with mpreg. Seriously, the amount of hatred directed to mpreg is kind of ridiculous.

Personally, I like good mpreg. It has so many possibilities. The generalization just makes people ignore these.

[wolfy_writing]

I think there are interesting possibilities with mpreg. Most of the time, when I read it, it's either comedy or horror, not the subset of mpreg that's all "He's pregnant so they can have babies, because adoption doesn't exist, and no one's going to think too hard about it, and being pregnant means he's going to be the Very Feminine Mommy forever!" (Which does exist, and does suck, but is far from being All Mpreg Ever.)

The hatred's over the top. Especially when they make a point of announcing that they're good with nearly any potential squick, and still have to be all, "But mpreg? That's just sick and wrong!"

[doro_chan]

Yes, nobody ever complains about mpreg being used as comedy or as a way to critize gender norms in our current society. It's all about gay men wanting to have a family and doing so by mpreg. Which, I agree, is often written badly. But nobody ever considers that the trope can give gay men an opportunity to be equal to heterosexual couples in fiction. Nor do the haters consider that being pregnant does not make the pregnant man a woman (I've been told that womb=woman ...).

And the hate ... seriously, it's just pregnant men. Not glorified rape, incest, child abuse etc.

[wolfy_writing]

I've noticed that "Turning him into a woman" thing comes up a lot (wasn't there someone just recently insisting that anyone who bore children was therefore a woman?). Which 1) makes me wonder if they've heard of gender identity, and 2) makes me uncomfortable in the same way a lot of the uses of "You're turning him into a woman!" do. People, even people who know better when they think about it, tend to repeat the idea that turning someone into a bad stereotype of femininity is the same as turning them into a woman, and making a character a woman is some horrible degrading thing. I know OOC's bad, but "You're turning him into a woman!" OOC tends to get deeper outrage than most kinds

[akashathekitty]

You know, I skimmed that rant and its comments and I wondered why nobody really called them on it, but I hadn't the time to be the one to do it right then and there.

But sounds like that's changed since then. *shakes head*

I admit that I haven't really read MPreg because I only read slash very sporadically on the side. Whenever people mention it, I actually think of Sims and getting males abducted by aliens to make them pregnant with those adorable little green babies and then I want to play Sims and...eh...off-topic. What I'm getting at is that it doesn't squick me at all and it strikes me as such a relatively innocent kink/whatnot that I don't get why it's hated on so much.

[wolfy_writing]

Yeah. I don't mind people not being into it (people can not be into whatever they want), but it just seems to be the one kink it's socially acceptable for practically everyone on the com to hate on, and I don't get why it's supposed to be some special horror. Seriously, if the whole "Anything can be well written", "Your kink is okay even if it's not my kink", "Don't assume you know the writer by reading the fic" attitude of the com was applied with anything close to consistency, mpreg would not be The One Thing You Can All Hate on, or acceptable to treat as Proof They Really Want To Be Writing Het.

Little green babies! Cute!

[akashathekitty]

Here's my grown alien-spawn sim and her own green baby (he has Mum's genes): Behold the cuteness! Being bullied by his twin brother! :D (Of course, that's not really what they look like in the game, I downloaded another skin and did an alien override for prettier features, because, yeah, I like my sims pretty) ♥

Anyhoo, sorry about that. XD

To me, MPreg is something that wouldn't turn me off a story, but, as with absolutely everything, it just needs to be executed (I wrote 'persecuted'! XD) well. It's like reading a fic where Hermione becomes pregnant and suddenly abandons all of her ideals in order to be Super Mommy and she has nothing on her mind but baby stuff and whines if the other characters don't see its importance. It...doesn't usually work that way. True, a baby can take a lot of your time and, yeah, sure, I've found that you can go out to buy yourself a pair of trousers and come home with bags filled with baby clothes and toys and no trousers, but...you're still a person. You still have your hopes and dreams and goals. If

[wolfy_writing]

Aw, cute!

And yeah, quality matters. It's pretty crap when a guy loses all of his personality traits to become a Pregnant Woman Stereotype the moment he gets knocked up. The thing is, like you said, it's pretty crappy when a woman loses all of her personality traits to become a Pregnant Woman Stereotype. Getting overly-focused on "You're turning men into women!" just makes it look more acceptable to warp female characters like that. Which leads to ever more "I only want to read about men, because all of the female characters I've found suck." Bleh.

[theo_harrison]

I hate-hate-hate that there's a kink that's it's considered okay to shit on. I couldn't face going on that rant until there were plenty of comments, because I knew the first thirty or forty would be WORD and MPREG SUCKS.

[wolfy_writing]

I know.

And I'm up for a degree of consideration of potential real-world harm, but you're going to worry about that, apply it consistently. Yeah, some mpreg can reinforce the idea that gay people need to fit imitation-heterosexual roles, but that's true for slash in general. Some rapefic certainly seems to reinforce nasty stereotypes, like Orgasms Instantly Make It Not Rape, or If She Didn't Want It, She'd Fight Harder. Hell, plenty of high school AUs have some pretty unhealthy messages themselves! (Following Fashion Trends Is Really Important, It Matters A Lot What Clique You're In, You Must Hook Up With Your High School Crush Now, etc.). But with those genres, we're not supposed to blame all fic like that for the failings of someAnd if I went "That's so gross! I don't have any idea why anyone would like it!" at, I don't know, watersports fans or something, I'd get "So? No one's asking you to join in/read fic about it!" But "Mpreg is so gross! I don't see why anyone would like it!" gets people lining up to dish out the Word

[doro_chan]

I think there are an awful lot of mpreg fans (there are tons of stories, after all). Most of them just don't tend to reflect what they do. In my experience they tend to be younger, and don't hang out in places where they discuss it.

Also: It gets kind of annoying every time you have to defend yourself on ffrants. You don't even get supported by people who don't share the kink. This time, I only lurked because I didn't want to go up against the increasing amount of Words.

[jennjenn724]

Wow, I totally missed the wank. I love mpreg in one of my fandoms, in particular, and think that it can be done well, though it is often one of those things that isn't done well