Speaking as a Bokononist, I honestly feel that PG-13 was the wampeter of a magnificent karass– the axis, that is, of a circle of people who are part of a design beyond our understanding. In my short time on this planet, it was the most concentrated collection of talented, wise, charismatic, skillful, and lovable people that I’ve ever been privileged to observe. Thankfully it can’t be called a granfalloon, a false karass based on the one thing we all had in common– the fetish– because, of course, there were also plenty of unsavory people that none of us wanted anything to do with.

Everyone Else: Normally this comes last on the list, but here they have to be first, because there are far too many wonderful people I knew over the years who I’ve lost touch with but wanted to thank. If you don’t see your name here but you remember me from PG-13, rest assured, I remember you too, and most likely fondly.

Sliptide: Easily my earliest and most fervent fan, and also a boundless well of ideas. I’ve had the privilege of a long friendship with him since the birth of the site, and through all the years he has retained such a preternatural understanding of sweetness and charm that he’s usually the first person I go to to ask if something is cute.

Jack Cain: He was illegal. Seriously, when PG-13 started, he was actually under the age listed in the title. Not that we knew that, of course, we just thought he was a really dumb guy who could barely type. But, far from breeding contempt, our familiarity with Jack built affection, as he went from the dork with the Digimon signature file to one of our most trusted advisors and elders in the community. Sometimes you have to give people a chance to grow into the roles they were born for, and Jack knew it before any of us did.

Jolted: A second wampeter of our mighty karass, Jolted was our most beloved and dedicated fan in the early years of PG-13, and everything we posted, everything I made, I eagerly awaited his reaction. In those early days he didn’t draw or color, but he had such an infectious joy for what we were doing that it made it worth pleasing him just to share it. Then he changed, becoming strongly disenchanted with PG-13 and the way I ran things (and who could blame him?). He was the founder of PG-13′s first legacy site, the late and lamented Baby-Ball Mall, which took a completely different tactic than PG-13: most of its art was produced on commission. This made it hard to compete with, so I simply didn’t bother for quite some time; eventually he lost interest and all the new art, as well as all the new artist friends he’d made, gravitated back to PG-13. Although it felt like a personal slight at the time, the Baby-Ball Mall was one of my favorite sites in our community’s history, and for the first time I felt like I couldn’t coast any more and needed to hustle to catch up. Thanks, J-bun.

Axel Rosered: Axel’s arrival on our site was tantamount to when video games jumped from 8-bit to 16-bit. There was still no actual competition, but somehow all of us artists suddenly found ourselves working a whole lot harder to keep up with the new standards. Some of us never did catch up with where he was from the start. Axel is raw, uncensored talent that cannot be contained by one genre or theme, which is why he mostly works in webcomics these days, but his arrival made us all feel like we were suddenly respectable.

Kaileigh Blue: It’s cheating to say “what can be said,” but what can be said about the one person who was so dedicated to our cause that I started a whole sequel site to share her voice? KB is an inspirational individual to know and be friends with, and though she’s quick to write herself off as a simple attention whore, no one can ever say she fails to earn even a lick of it. Everyone in the community, not just the infamous sluggards like me, would give their four pinky digits to have the merest chunk of her ferocious work ethic. Not just the ‘lone girl’, but the lone ant in a colony of grasshoppers, yet she refuses to be influenced negatively by her peers. Though she may back this up with a public personality that frequently runs hot with attitude and sarcasm, I’m privileged to attest, through experience, that to know her is to love her.

Requiem: Req’s art made its debut on the PG-13 message board. It was flat out the worst pregnancy art we’d ever seen, and everyone knew it– even Req. Yet this was a wonderful thing for the site, because it was the final straw for KB, who took that opportunity to begin her career of kicking lousy artists’ asses and making them want to improve. In the years since then Req has made such quantum leaps in his work that you’d never recognize him as the same artist today, and he’ll always tell you that the reason was because  PG-13, unlike the gazillions of furry art and fetish art sites it had to contend with in its time and since, had a standard of excellence that we expected him and everyone else to live up to.

Saburo X: A genius. I don’t use that word lightly, either. Saburo blew onto the scene in 2004 in a whirlwind of artistic talent and vision, quickly becoming everyone’s favorite artist, and then proceeded to lead the march in praise of excellence, demonstrate astonishing humility and scruples in the face of that success, and basically kick ass at anything he’s ever lifted a finger in the interest of doing. I want to say that more than anyone else, he’s the successor to the spirit that built PG-13, but somehow that just doesn’t seem like giving him enough credit. He’s our reluctant chosen one, our Barack Obama, our Rodimus Prime; and despite our long friendship, I still feel honored and humbled when he says hi.

Darien Shields: Look over the PG-13 message board archives and you’ll see me and Darien fighting a lot and being rude and sarcastic to one another. This, I feel, is why Ayn Rand’s perfect society could never work: people who are cleverer and more talented than their peers get used to having things their own way, and when you put them in a box with lots of that kind of people, such as a message board for creative perverts, there is inevitably a struggle for dominance that can destroy all the things they might have built on their own. Thankfully Darien and I have a genuine affection for one another under all the snark, which kept us civil enough to make things better and brighter than they could ever be on PG-13 without that connection. Sometimes blades can sharpen one another if you clash them just right, and I have always felt all the sharper for Darien’s influence.

WicTMn: This is where everyone listed before says, who? This individual doesn’t really have a name within the community: I call him Li’l Brudder. He was an early adopter on PG-13, who followed the Jack Cain model of being younger and more obnoxious than the rest of us, and for many of us more forgettable for that reason. Yet he also made drastic steps to improve himself, much like Requiem before, gaining writing skill through experience, becoming a true master of worldbuilding and the Rule of Cool. It may have taken until after the site closed to complete, but he’s a shining example of how a community content consumer can become a producer. I eagerly await the day he reveals himself to the community at large, for it is far overdue.

Steph Cherrywell: The very first day PG-13 went up, I was delighted to get a compliment on the Stuffed message board from its most standout regular artist. I suggested an art trade, and the next day received a lovely picture of Lum as a gift. That was the beginning of a friendship that’s lasted ten years, five of which were spent together in my hometown as Steph and I job-hunted, talked politics and fandom, girlwatched, mall-walked, and most of all made each other laugh so hard we couldn’t breathe. Many of my PG-13 friendships have become real-life friendships since then, e.g. KB and I doing San Diego Comic-Con together in ’09, but Steph is the first one with whom it’s become so much a part of me that sometimes I actually forget how it all started out. There’s always a little hint of relevance in Steph’s comics that reminds me, though, and I’m happy all over again that I started the site, if only because it helped me meet my best friend.

Mistress Fire-Hazard: In her first few mentions on the site, I called her “the real-life Lovin”. And so she was, because our perky pregnant mascot Lovin was based on her in all ways, from her constantly flowing and shifting interests to her boundless affection for my stand-in, the inappropriately-named photographer Akira. We did sometimes disagree on the characters– she would occasionally make suggestions for Lovin that portrayed her as downright slutty, a trait I never felt was in character. More than anything, though, she served as my model for womanhood itself: the character of Wilder from Ninpuchan was a reflection of MFH at her sweetest, while reluctant ally Sara reflected her at her coldest and most cutting. Brigadier Swirl shares MFH’s ethnic makeup (half Irish, half Mexican), and her world was our joint creation, as were so many other things. Creation, wild frenetic unsustained creation, was our bond; whole worlds were born from the driver and passenger seat of her ’97 Corolla. It was so much a part of us that, when finally got my driver’s license at the shamefully late age of 28, I joked that without driving together so much, our marriage would be doomed the day I got my own car.

Busy, busy, busy….

The website was originally hosted at Sexhound, a strange sort of porn-themed version of Geocities with a mascot who resembled Joe Camel crossed with Foofur. (This was in pre-spyware days, which is apparently what Sexhound is known for now.) It’s bizarre to me now to think that I could once conceive of what I was doing as a “porn site”, but at the time there wasn’t really a lot of options– I was used to working with Geocities and other free hosts, whose terms of service basically gave them the right to shut you down if they saw anything shaped like a nipple. Better, I thought, to err on the side of freedom.

Sexhound had a very peculiar user interface, in that going to their site sent you first to a splash page of ads, while a small popup window provided you with the real link to the site you were visiting. What was interesting about this was that it did not work. My Mac was able to handle it without trouble, but everyone else seemed to be able to visit the site maybe three times before Sexhound caught on that they were losing precious advertising eyeballs to actual content, oh horror, and stopped providing an URL that worked. The original url was anime.sexhound.net/pg13. (And no, you won’t see the “we’ve moved” message if you go there; Sexhound dried up along with its advertising clientele, as all porn sites must.)

It should be noted that this was before the message board had been added to the site. PG-13 was only just barely ‘interactive’ in its earliest incarnation, in that one could conceivably e-mail me about it and expect an answer. Everyone who complained did so in a personal message, and so it felt like a request from trusted friends that I do something about it.

I considered my options; to stay at Sexhound, I would have to keep the entire site under 25 megabytes, abandon all my current friends, cater to an audience of exclusively porn-soliciting Mac users, and continue looking at splash pages of the most horrible flounder-faced grocery-sack-breasted desperate-for-modeling-work women every time I wished to check on my own page. There was no doubt about it, Sexhound was a mistake. Only one option was left: A different mistake!

pg13.web1000.com was the second URL. Web1000 too is gone by now, its URL now only redirecting to– all together now! – a porn site. This is hardly a surprise to anyone who was around during PG-13′s Second Dark Age. Web1000 was much faster and had a higher storage limit than Sexhound, but it was ad-supported on every page. If you spent as much time reading my website as I did, you may still have the sound of that disgusting Flash banner ad memorized. “Looking for hot, hard porn? My friends and I have this great new website, ****.com. I love showing off on the Internet, and when I get cum all over my tits and pussy, I love knowing that you’re watching.” Jesus, people are trying to read a harmless Pokemon parody here, you cretins!

We moved to Dreamhost in February of 2001. At the time it cost thirty dollars a month to support the site without excess data transmission fees: today I have ten times that much data alloted per month, at a rate of ten dollars. God bless Moore’s Law.

I realized two things about my site through this debacle. One, PG-13 could not be supported by advertising of any sort. The site had to be supported by its own fans, chief among them the site’s biggest fan, me. Two, the idea of PG-13 as being primarily geared toward titillation was not only laughable, but had gone from a necessary evil to an utterly repugnant notion. If my own feelings about the fetish were something more complex than “Shwing”, then other people had to feel the same way. That was when PG-13 acquired its rather obtuse subtitle “The Maieusiophilic Otaku’s Mecca”, for it had finally found itself; a site not just for pregnancy fetishists, but pregnancy fandom.

One of my first friends, and to this day also dearest, that I made at PG-13 was Steph Sakurai, who later became my roommate, and bestie for many years afterward. One day at the mall, Steph inadvertently summed up the whole theme of PG-13 in a casual but stirring declaration: “You know, whenever I see a pretty ninpu like that out and around, I just wanna… marry her!”

It’s not about the sex, procreational or recreational. it’s not about the increased libido or breast size or improved orgasms. It’s not even necessarily about physical pleasure at all. it’s about holding hair back during morning sickness, 3 AM trips to the Circle K for chocolate milk, holding hands in the maternity ward. It’s unconditional love for the women who deserve it the most, at the time when they need it most. PG-13 had found its happy thought and learned to fly.

That was the ‘storyline’ of Pregnant Princess. The initial conceit was to run the whole site ‘in character’, with Princess Annabelle treating every piece of artwork as if it were a photo she were hosting of one of her friends from the outside world, every story a selection from her personal library, every picture of Annabelle a self-portrait. What fun, I thought! What a unique way to run a site, and avoid the drama and strife that seems to follow all the other ones I read daily! Couldn’t go wrong, could it!

We might well be celebrating the eleventh anniversary of Pregnant Princess, if it weren’t for a regular at Cheviot’s Place who later had a website of his own. He calls himself Pumpkinbelly; apparently entirely too many people interpreted that to mean that he was a pregnant woman himself, often jumping to the conclusion that Pumpkinbelly must be a slutty pregnant woman who loved having random people’s babies, and all you had to do was ask… or worse, you didn’t have to ask.

If a suggestive name alone garnered that much negative attention, then I shuddered to think what element I’d be attracting by actually identifying myself as Annabelle and talking about counting baby kicks all day. Pregnant Princess was put down, its small number of illustrations shelved, and I spent a few months preparing for “the site” as it was now namelessly referred to.

In the middle of my disappointment, a new site appeared to assuage my sadness– PGN Network, helmed by my equally talented and equally industrious comrade-in-arms, TPD (The Pregnant Drawer). PGN was a great site, but came with a few layout problems; it had more site redesigns and name changes in ten months than PG-13 had in ten years. There might never have been a PG-13 if I had been satisfied with PGN, but I was a whiny little kid who wanted to have things his own way, and was determined not to let this stand in my way.

PGN made one major contribution to what PG-13 would eventually become: the single-page comic story “Pregamon”, which touched not at all on what its title suggests, was influential by example. Years later I asked TPD what he had in mind if the comic had continued, and he said he didn’t remember. What I’d had in mind, though, was what eventually became Ninpuchan, the site’s continuing story series.

Watching curiously as all of this took place was The Girl. She didn’t have an Internet handle at the time, and wouldn’t have one for several months after the site was first debuted. Yet that seemed unfair, because we were each other’s world. Despite frequent arguments that always boiled down to “I couldn’t find you,” we were one of the most affectionate couples that many people in our social circle had ever seen. Wherever we went, riding in in the same car, sleeping in the same bed, we would spend hour after happy hour weaving new creations together: ideas for comics, for novels, for movie scripts and cartoon storyboards, introducing each other to our dearest inspirations and taking them in new and different directions. Though we had no children, it felt like we had millions, each with recognizable parts of both of us visible in their faces. We did everything together– why stop now?

She asked for a picture of herself in a kimono. I drew it, and then drew another one pregnant just for myself; she liked the pregnant one better. That was often the case; the very first time I drew a pregnant version of her, she said she hoped she would be as beautiful and content when she was pregnant for real. My warmest feelings for her always showed on the paper in those scenes–but this one was special.

“What would my name be in Japanese?” she asked.

“The same,” I said. “Although it could be mispronounced ‘Lovin’ in some accents.” She laughed. “Quite appropriately, too,” I added.

And there she was, our mascot, our character hook. There was no need to pretend to be a girl when there was a real one who was eager to be our mascot, pregnant in real life or not. Excitement was in the air! New pictures flew from my pen, the best pictures of girls I’d ever drawn– I once described my art style as the worst possible cross between Dragon Ball Z and Life In Hell, but these images were light years ahead of what I’d drawn in high school, or my previous site, or anywhere else.

Both of us had left college. I’d just gotten a job at a movie theater, wanting some life experience– that date was fast arriving, but I was too jazzed about this new path my art was taking to slow down. I found a free internet service provider that didn’t care if I uploaded non-G-rated material, and after a brief amount of waffling whether to call it “PG-13″ or “PG-Thirteen”, thundercats were go.

Content was prepped. Ties were straightened. Jupiter was aligned with Pluto. On 6-29-00, PG-13 was born, with five pictures and the first chapter of Ninpuchan. Links were posted on Cheviot’s Place and the Stuffed message board; I don’t believe we were ever linked on Wren-Spot.

We had a site. Now all we needed was a family.

That was the ‘storyline’ of Pregnant Princess. The initial conceit was to run the whole site ‘in character’, with Princess Annabelle treating every piece of artwork as if it were a photo she were hosting of one of her friends from the outside world, every story a selection from her personal library, every picture of Annabelle a self-portrait. What fun, I thought! What a unique way to run a site, and avoid the drama and strife that seems to follow all the other ones I read daily! Couldn’t go wrong, could it!

We might well be celebrating the eleventh anniversary of Pregnant Princess, if it weren’t for a regular at Cheviot’s Place who later had a website of his own. He calls himself Pumpkinbelly; apparently entirely too many people interpreted that to mean that he was a pregnant woman himself, often jumping to the conclusion that Pumpkinbelly must be a slutty pregnant woman who loved having random people’s babies, and all you had to do was ask… or worse, you didn’t have to ask.

If a suggestive name alone garnered that much negative attention, then I shuddered to think what element I’d be attracting by actually identifying myself as Annabelle and talking about counting baby kicks all day. Pregnant Princess was put down, its small number of illustrations shelved, and I spent a few months preparing for “the site” as it was now namelessly referred to.

In the middle of my disappointment, a new site appeared to assuage my sadness– PGN Network, helmed by my equally talented and equally industrious comrade-in-arms, TBD (The Pregnant Drawer). PGN was a great site, but came with a few layout problems; it had more site redesigns and name changes in ten months than PG-13 had in ten years. There might never have been a PG-13 if I had been satisfied with PGN, but I was a whiny little kid who wanted to have things his own way, and was determined not to let this stand in my way.

PGN made one major contribution to what PG-13 would eventually become: the single-page comic story “Pregamon”, which touched not at all on what its title suggests, was influential by example. Years later I asked TPD what he had in mind if the comic had continued, and he said he didn’t remember. What I’d had in mind, though, was what eventually became Ninpuchan, the site’s continuing story series.

Watching curiously as all of this took place was The Girl. She didn’t have an Internet handle at the time, and wouldn’t have one for several months after the site was first debuted. Yet that seemed unfair, because we were each other’s world. Despite frequent arguments that always boiled down to “I couldn’t find you,” we were one of the most affectionate couples that many people in our social circle had ever seen. Wherever we went, riding in in the same car, sleeping in the same bed, we would spend hour after happy hour weaving new creations together: ideas for comics, for novels, for movie scripts and cartoon storyboards, introducing each other to our dearest inspirations and taking them in new and different directions. Though we had no children, it felt like we had millions, each with recognizable parts of both of us visible in their faces. We did everything together– why stop now?

She asked for a picture of herself in a kimono. I drew it, and then drew another one pregnant just for myself; she liked the pregnant one better. That was often the case; the very first time I drew a pregnant version of her, she said she hoped she would be as beautiful and content when she was pregnant for real. My warmest feelings for her always showed on the paper in those scenes–but this one was special.

“What would my name be in Japanese?” she asked.

“The same,” I said. “Although it could be mispronounced ‘Lovin’ in some accents.” She laughed. “Quite appropriately, too,” I added.

And there she was, our mascot, our character hook. There was no need to pretend to be a girl when there was a real one who was eager to be our mascot, pregnant in real life or not. Excitement was in the air! New pictures flew from my pen, the best pictures of girls I’d ever drawn– I once described my art style as the worst possible cross between Dragon Ball Z and Life In Hell, but these images were light years ahead of what I’d drawn in high school, or my previous site, or anywhere else.

Both of us had left college. I’d just gotten a job at a movie theater, wanting some life experience– that date was fast arriving, but I was too jazzed about this new path my art was taking to slow down. I found a free internet service provider that didn’t care if I uploaded non-G-rated material, and after a brief amount of waffling whether to call it “PG-13″ or “PG-Thirteen”, thundercats were go.

Content was prepped. Ties were straightened. Jupiter was aligned with Pluto. On 6-29-00, PG-13 was born, with five pictures and the first chapter of Ninpuchan. Links were posted on Cheviot’s Place and the Stuffed message board; I don’t believe we were ever linked on Wren-Spot.

We had a site. Now all we needed was a family.

I was twenty years old in 2000. I was dating a woman the same age, and same limited level of competence, and we both agreed that having kids wasn’t an option at the moment (although she occasionally accused me of wanting her to get pregnant anyway). Still, she was open to my ideas; I would draw pregnant characters and she’d be amused, I’d draw her pregnant and she’d be even more amused, we’d roleplay as our own characters over the phone and there’d always be something relevant to my interests. Apart from a few early spots of confusion about what I was attracted to (the belly, dammit, not the actual fetus), it didn’t take her long to realize that this wasn’t just a prank or a kink to keep to the bedroom, it was a part of my personality that needed to be expressed.

In 2000 there were four major websites to visit regarding this fetish. Cheviot’s Place was of course the name brand, and the only one that’s still around; I still think of it as top of the heap to this day, though sites that exceed it in activity have come and gone. Then there was Wren-Spot, now long gone, a central location for expansion fetishes of all kinds, which had lots and lots and lots of breast expansion and one precious page of pregnancy-themed stories and art. Third was the long-lamented Stuffed! (later Stuffed Online), which was described at Wren-Spot as “not really weight gain, more of a binge-eating site”. Although not technically pregnancy, it was certainly a shared subfetish for many if not most of us, and in fact most of my early audience was drawn from there. The fourth was, like Stuffed, not specifically pregnancy themed, but possibly the most beloved of the four to our core audience: Alumineko’s Balloon-Bomb, the Engrish-rich Japanese site whose adorable mascot Miss China got more pregnant, or maybe more inflated (we couldn’t tell), with every 100,000 hits.

(Soon there was also PGN, later known as Manga Bellies and a few other names. More on that later.)

I’d already had a website. It’s long gone now, fallen to the same process of people going their own way as every other website does– no website lasts forever, unless it either has paid content, or a webmaster with a pathological drive to update that I sadly don’t possess. (See date of last Relevant Content post.) What’s relevant about that website is that my friends and I would write stories about our shared universe of characters, and illustrate them, and write poems and song parodies, and basically do everything except comics, which were beyond our ability at high school age. My friends were young and naive, just like me, but they weren’t blind– they saw how often a certain recurring theme crept into my work. Sometimes lovingly detailed, sometimes intentionally tossed in as quick author appeal, but it was hard to ignore the fact that I kept making references to characters getting or wanting to be pregnant. They were polite about it, but my self-consciousness grew until I felt that I needed to start getting this stuff out of my head elsewhere, or else it would infect everything I do and ruin it.

I would have begun right there and then– if there had been a place to do so! Cheviot’s Place had always been more of a site for compulsive collectors, men who forage the internet constantly and hoard vast multiterabyte hard drives of thousands and thousands of pictures of pregnant pornography, some featuring women photographed carrying children who might at this very moment be seeing a doctor about their triglycerides. Wren-Spot was a little better, but pregnancy was such a low priority on its list that it seemed like anything written for it would take forever to appear, if it ever did. At the time Stuffed! was my favorite site, updated frequently with a lot of content from a lot of different points of view, but it felt selfish to try to cram in a fetish that the site wasn’t about. (Many others didn’t share my view, the site eventually evaporated due to furry drama over the inclusion of male subjects.) And of course Alumineko’s site would be impossible to share anything with; I once spent a few futile hours trying to translate one of his stories with Babelfish, and all I learned was that “Japanese Parsley” was apparently slang for the pudenda.

Cheviot’s was too pornographic, Wren’s content was too irrelevant, Stuffed was too furry, and Al-Cat was too foreign. The only thing to do was start my own.

So I started a website, on paper; I laid out the thumbnails for how I wanted it to look, deciding on a three-column format to keep things simple. In the days of Geocities, one only needed to know simple tags like ‘table’ and ‘blink’ to make a professional-looking website, or at least professional-looking when you’re just out of high school. I took all the pregnancy-themed stories I’d been tossing back and forth with my girlfriend, my favorite cartoon characters that I most wanted to see pregnant, and started drawing. At the time they were the best drawings I’d ever made. (Some would say I never really progressed past that milestone, either.) After much planning, debate, and discussion, my all new website was ready.

This website was called, of course, Pregnant Princess.

More on that next time.

I can tell you why we should!

Top 10 reasons to get pregnant.

10.  To have a baby.

9. Halloween gets easier.

8. To get a sweet parking space.

7. To win a pregnant bikini contest.

6. To rope in a man.

5. To delay “Aunt Flo’s” visits

4. Eating for two.

3. To win phat lewt.

2. To stop caring about how you look. (People will just be surprised you got out of the house.)

1. Knowing hundreds of guys on the internet think you are hot.

So get out there and show the world what you’re made of!

I am Wombyn hear me roar.

Are we sure we know what we’re doing?
It’s a major project with a lot of possible complications,
yet here we are just jumping into it
like kids jumping into a pile of leaves.
These things take so much time and effort.
Excitement can turn into resentment so quickly.
It’s not like getting a puppy– Mom and Dad won’t take care of it when we get bored with it.

(OK, OK, “If” we get bored with it. And I’m certain we will at times.)

This is more than just entertainment, anyway.
It’s a major gamble of time and money.
There’s no guarantees on the result.
It may not be what we hoped for.
In all likelihood it won’t win any prizes.
Are we willing to settle for average? Or below average?

(Yes, I know that this is already above average by virtue of being ours.)

No, I’m not having second thoughts.
I’m not being a jerk, don’t look at me like that.
We’re in this together, you and me.
And it too, don’t forget.
I just wondered if you were thinking the same things.
Wait, of course you are– you thought them long ago, didn’t you.

(All this time together and I still underestimate you.)

You’re right.
And I should have known that already,
because you’re always right.
It really is the right time and place.
We have fertile soil, we have potent seeds,
we both want to make it happen.
My reservations are gone.
Let’s do it now– and let’s do it together.
Let’s make something wonderful.

Why is it that people attribute science that has been perfected since 1978 to a miracle.

The first “test tube baby”, Louise Brown, was born July 25th 1978.  The research that helped her come into being had been in the making for over a decade.   Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe, not only pioneered the process, but were there for the delivery. It’s since been made easier with a greater delivery rate.

The second child born to IVF was a boy, Alastair MacDonald.  Being the second he wasn’t highly publicized and has managed to live a life out of the limelight.  He was the result of a single embryo being implanted.   Something that doesn’t happen often now a days.   Flash freezing of  eggs and embryos allows a larger amount to be saved and implanted.   Some women think the more you implant the more of a chance you will have to get one.

While this is true, it also leads to “Miracles.”   Highly publicized cases  are paraded on TV for our amusement.  (Or in my case, hatred. I hate Kate so much.) Earlier cases like the Dilley Sextuplets and the the McCaughey septuplets are now just a memory as the novelty has worn off and Octuplets are now in vogue.

They opt out of selective  reduction usually choosing to “leave it in God’s hands.”  You know like they did with their fertility problem.

Maybe you’re not that old, but I am, and for me, it was pregnancy guidebooks. I’ve always loved them. Here’s the start of a new series in which we pay them loving tribute, while simultaneously mocking them mercilessly.

Who, you might well ask, is Caterine Milinaire? She’s the daughter of a French duchess, a photographer for Vogue in the sixties and seventies, and today is still active as a blog commentator. Googling her name gets you “Cheap Chic,” which was her best-selling book. But to me she’s the lady who wrote Birth, a hilariously dated but still immensely useful and readable pregnancy guide.

I found Birth in a box of old books in our garage. It was published in 1974, so I’m not sure when it was purchased; that was precisely halfway between my older brother’s birth and my own birth, and we’re 12 years apart. I can only guess that it was a gift to my mother from a hopeful friend who wanted another baby to cuddle soon… or a future version of me had planted it there for me to find, knowing that if I didn’t have something to feed my fetish I would just grow up to be a normal competent person.

Whatever; it was a godsend.

In 1974, the hedonistic self-abuse we associate with the Disco Seventies had not yet taken hold, and many people firmly believed in the healing power of sunlight, flaxseed, black cohosh, macrame, and nudity, all of which are prevalent in this book. This is not sexualized nudity, though, so much as simply feeling nude is the right way to be. There are multiple images of families– father, pregnant mother, and first baby– just lazing around in the buff like they were bears. This was considered healthy at the time, and to be fair I can’t really see a good reason for it to have fallen out of favor, but it did, and many of the pictures look kind of silly.

(There’s one picture I wanted to share, of an extraordinarily handsome man and his year-old daughter, but it seemed like it might be asking for trouble; there are those for whom it would provoke an extreme reaction. May Jesus save us from visible baby vulvas.)

The point is, Birth is filled with what we now call pregnancy glamour shots. You can’t swing a cat on Flickr without finding them now, but the only place to find them in 1992 was in books like these– which means that this must have been practically unheard of upon its first publication.

Birth takes a very homepathic, very holistic, very groovy, very Keep On’ Truckin’ approach to having a baby.

Grass can be relaxing, but if smoked as a habit, it can increase a latent paranoia. Strong weed can sap your energy besides attacking your Vitamin C supply. If marijuana gets you high, you should know better than to impose a continuous lethargy on your baby.

And remember what Freewheelin’ Franklin says: Dope will get you through times of no baby better than a baby will get you through times of no dope!

Though pregnancy is very well represented, about a third of the book is given over to personal birth stories, some of which are very unusual. Milinaire’s own home birth experience is there, and friends of hers who had water births, C-sections, birth under hypnosis, birth with no painkiller but the mother’s own singing(!) and a Haitian woman who gave birth by the side of the road(!!!), assisted by a midwife whose fee was two dollars(!!??!). The only kind of birth that is not recognized here, as a matter of fact, is a hospital birth.

Now, I was born at home myself, so I can’t fault anyone for wanting a home birth– it was a pretty awesome thing to have happen in the home. All the same, though, this book treats any birth that was not at home or in a place of the mother’s choosing, that was attended by a medical doctor, as a birth to be regretted.

Hospitals are not concerned with the spiritual side, they even hide your insides from you, for them it’s garbage. … It was so boring waiting in this blank room. The induction seemed to spoil the whole natural rhythm of the birth. I felt rather like a hen laying one of a million supermarket eggs.

We arrived at the hospital and, for openers, you have to fill out all sorts of forms while you are doubling over with contractions. They ask you for a $600.00 deposit before you can get any further! It’s insane! They could ask for any amount and you would say yes because you want so much to go and lie down somewhere! Luckily, my mother had a hospital credit card. Can you imagine that? It’s like going to shop for a very expensive toy in a big department store.

And then I got to hold the baby, but only for two minutes and it was taken away and only given to me today. That’s a drag. The baby was taken to the nursery which is located directly across from the abortion rooms at Hillcrest General Hospital in Flushing, Queens. How much more insensitive can hospital planning get?

I’m all for control over one’s own body, but come ON, did all of you have Josef Mengele as your ob-gyn?

And then there’s the poetry.

There are several poems in this book. Some of them are original; two of the birth experiences are in poetry, for example. Others are quoted from other sources, including Buddhic texts and The Talmud. All of them, however, are hilariously pompous and overdramatic. One in particular reminds me of Michael Bay trying to write a poem– lots of boom-kaboom-smoosh-BLAM! and no subtlety to offset it. I’ve reproduced one here, but two of these poems are so awesome that I’ll be making an article about them on their own soon.

The last third of the book is made up of myths and legends about pregnancy and birth from around the globe. Here are my favorites:

1. Pregnant Aztecs would wear an obsidian knife against their bellies to protect the baby from being born with a harelip.
2. Tawaret, the Egyptian goddess of pregnancy, started out as a mythical hippopotamus demon, who was later acquitted of all wrongdoing when they discovered female hippos were gentle and nurturing toward their babies.
3. When a baby is born in the Cebeles Islands, all the household’s pets have their mouths tied shut to make sure they don’t accidentally swallow the baby’s soul.

Ha ha ha! Other cultures are so strange and foreign! I hope I’m never that foolish and illogical, knock on wood!

In closing, Birth is wacky in retrospect, but it’s easy to see how it would be utterly revolutionary for its time. What now strikes us as clichéd patchouli-and-Birkenstocks dogma was truly dangerous speech back then– and this book recommends immersing your child in it before they’re even born. Perhaps this book had a greater influence on me than I had ever realized…

How many people, that you know in real life, have you told about your kink?

In general I don’t volunteer it unless someone else is being open with me; it’s generally my way of placing trust in people. I told my brother when he came out to me as gay; in fact most of my gay friends know. I know what it’s like to be in the closet.

My brother, and a couple of friends at jobs that I don’t have anymore. My best friend’s ex-girlfriend, who said it was really neat as fetishes go.

How hard was it to tell if you did, and if you did tell multiple people?  Does it get any easier?

The hardest was probably my old girlfriend. I told on our third date, and it wasn’t difficult to say so much as took her a while to figure out what I was getting at. At one point she thought I actually wanted to have sex with a pregnant woman’s stomach, woman optional… once I stopped throwing up, I sat her down to show her what I liked.

In general, though, I don’t tell anyone whose reaction wouldn’t be “Wow, really? That’s new… neat!”

Thankfully, I’ve never had to tell anyone that I wouldn’t call a friend. I’ve had teachers pick up stuff I was drawing and go “What’s this?” But it’s not like they’d immediately jump to the conclusion that I’m sexually attracted to what I’m drawing.

Any experiences you want to relate?

Hmm. I did inform a friend when she told me she had actually given up a baby for adoption as a teenager, and she’d stayed with the adoptive couple during the final months, which somehow led to her meeting family friend and personal idol Tim Burton while cranky and bloated.

That has nothing to do with my telling her, other than it being awesome.

Knocked Up: A Look At Pregnancy In Video Games.