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It may be unwarranted, but I’m vain and have a huge ego. PG-13 is actually one of the things I’m pretty modest about, because I’ve always kept one thing in mind: if I hadn’t done it, someone else would have. Heck, someone else DID, and he even beat me to it. It was simply something that the time was right for. This being said, whatever it was I was doing, people must have liked it a whole lot for PG-13 to have gotten any fans at all in its first few months of existence.

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.