I don't know when or where I first heard of something called "mpreg," although I know it was online. I didn't know what it was, and oh, how I long for those innocent days of yesteryear.

"What do you mean?" I bleated to the friend who explained it was fan fiction written about male pregnancy.

She patted my hand. "It's stories about men from television shows, books, and movies who get pregnant." She looked at me, as if wondering whether to go on. "They have the babies out of their butts." (She didn't actually say "butt.")

After I soaked my brain in bleach for a few hours, I called her just to make sure it wasn't a hallucinatory nightmare. No, apparently it's real.

Now, I did go to journalism school and I sincerely try to investigate all my stories. I actually watched reality TV once. I'm brave like a war correspondent. And yet ... I couldn't bring myself to read even one mpreg story.

Instead, I emailed a fan fiction author who, under the pen name “vamphile,” writes fan fiction set in the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Queer as Folk worlds, and asked what she thought of mpreg.

"Oh, that," she snorted contemptuously. "Yes, you see, the author is in love with some guy in her fandom, say Brian Kinney, and so she writes her ultimate fantasy, pregnancy. The fact that this requires assbabies, medical impossibilities, turning Brian into something he's not, turning Justin into, essentially, a woman, makes not a bit of difference to her. You see, being pregnant is no fun and the guy of her dreams being there would make it fun and thus, she would write the ultimate in fantasy, she would make pregnancy sexy."

I rubbed my aching head.

"Or sometimes," she expounded, "It's not Justin who gets pregnant, but Brian. This is a somewhat different phenomenon. This is to get back at their husbands. Wouldn't it be funny if HE were pregnant? And so, her husband Brian Kinney gets pregnant and is thus punished for his misogynistic ways by being forced to suffer stretch marks and swollen ankles and the indignity that is pregnancy. They give him hormonal mood swings and the inability to wear Prada. He waddles around and finally learns to love his unborn child (usually during the obligatory sonogram scene). He then realizes that this is what he's been missing all his life, the ability to love."

After I stopped weeping, I went to Wikipedia, which said this:

Male pregnancy is not infrequently seen in fan fiction; such stories may be denoted as "mpreg", a term coined by two writers under the pseudonyms of Taleya Joinson and Texas Ranger, who created and maintained what is believed to be the first fan fiction archive dedicated to stories of this genre in 1998. The pregnancies may be the result of advanced medical technology (e.g., experiments on Mulder from The X-Files); mystical pregnancies; or are unexplained.

So then I asked a friend who is way into Harry Potter, and she said oh yes, poor little Harry's knocked up, or been knocked up by, just about everyone in the Potterverse. "He's a wizard," she added helpfully but unnecessarily since I do not live under a rock. "It's magic."

I asked a gay man who also writes fan fiction what he thought of mpreg. He flinched. "It's beyond wrong," he said. But then he wouldn't say more, just mumbled something about having to go have his brain steamed.

So I went and found another gay man, also a writer, although he said he only wrote fan fiction once. "Well, normally," he said, as if there was anything normal about this, "I read them with a smirk on my face, while crossing my legs. And count myself fortunate that it's not possible in real life. As far as what I think of women writing about that subject, I think it's okay, if a little absurd."

A little? Honestly, I’m all about the freedom of lesbian and gay people to create families, and having our families be respected by society and really, everything to do with families. And I totally support the rights of authors and would never do anything to suppress or silence any form of creative expression. And I’m not saying writing mpreg is up there with posting instructions on how to sabotage a nuclear power plant or even yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater.

But if I were Harry Potter, I’d do something about mpreg, and it wouldn’t involve Snape having my baby.