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.

If you have a life, you may be unaware that two days ago, the folks at LiveJournal suddenly deleted a bunch of communities and journals that listed interests in things like incest and pedophilia. This was prompted by complaints from a group called "Warriors for Innocence," whose website I'm not going to link to because there have been entirely unconfirmed reports that it tries to put spyware on your computer. See, we love you and your hard drive here at AfterElton.com.

Well, you might ask, ummmm, yeah. What's the problem? Some of the communities that got deleted really were extremely problematic, and while I'm not a lawyer and do not play one in the blogosphere, I'm pretty sure they violated LJ's Terms of Service big time.

The problem, as it turns out, is that a lot of the deleted communities were actually fandom communities that archive homoerotic fanfiction about fictional characters. And some of those characters are, fictionally speaking, brothers, like Faramir and Boromir from Lord of the Rings.