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Apparently ‘male pregnancy porn’ is the new ‘thing’?
05.11.2016
02:09 pm
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Last year the “dad bod” became a full-blown cultural phenomenon, and there’s a company called Film911 that caters to a set of fetishes that’s completely in the same ballpark.

Film911 specializes in “male gay fetish videos,” which mainly presents men engaging in activities that are not traditionally considered “masculine,” like stuffing their faces with food, tickling each other, receiving CPR, and, most intriguingly, giving birth.

This footage is apparently getting a few people off, but it’s not even clear that these videos qualify as porn, because, as Brian Moylan at Vice astutely observes, the scenes generally feature “no nudity, no dongs, no anal, and no money shots”—indeed, no sex at all.

At Film911, the male pregnancy videos fall under the category MPREG, and they feature men behaving in traditionally “feminine” ways that transcend the mere act of giving birth. In the MPREG video embedded below, “Connor” is shown at home, and he’s definitely showing. He’s at the kitchen sink describing his day on the phone to his unseen mate, as he demurely relates that he’s been cleaning up the house and that he can’t wait for his mate to come home so they can be together again. Before long, he’s in an OR experiencing painful contractions.

This is a man who speaks in hushed tones, who would seldom raise his voice or insist on getting his way. And maybe therein lies one of the secrets to the power these MPREG videos hold for some. 
 

A still from one of the “Inflation” videos
 
Predictably, you can also obtain ebooks of MPREG erotica if that’s your thing.

Film911 makes movies in several other genres that have little to do with the familiar porn categories of bondage and creampies. For instance, there’s the “Vore” category, short for vorarephilia, which denotes the sexual desire to be eaten—not in the sexual sense but in the culinary sense.

In the Vore videos, one man will devour another man, only then to regurgitate him so he can ask him how it felt. The descriptions of these videos are quite amusing. “Jonny is hungry for more,” a preview of which is embedded below, comes with the following synopsis: 
 

1. Jonny comes home and Connor at his pizza so he turns and eats Connor.
2. Jonny is working out and needs more protein to get larger so he eats Connor.
3. Connor and Jonny are in bed when Connor decides to eat Jonny. Connor gets sicks and throws his boyfriend back up.
4. Connor is doing laundry when Connor knocks him down, drags him into the bathroom, and chows down.

 
There are also videos dedicated to men stuffing their faces with a table full of food and then moaning about the burrito babies now inhabiting their bellies (those are coded “Stuffing”). Some show men blowing each other up like balloons (“Inflation”). As you can see, imagery of men with distended tummies is one of Film911’s main stocks in trade. None of these genres have a large following as such, but the site still turns a tidy profit.

The founder of Film911 goes by Jay in Vice’s article (last name withheld); he started the company when he realized that “there was no content out there catering to what I’m into. I own a production company, so why don’t I produce content geared toward what I’m into?” He uses friends of friends as well as guys who he finds on Craigslist. One advantage of keeping matters so un-explicit is that he can get attractive and fit straight guys to appear in his movies, in which everyone keeps their clothes on and there’s no genital play.

As Jay says:

“When people told me what they were into, I was like, ‘Wow that’s different.’ There are certain people who tell me their ideas and send me their scripts and feedback all the time. I’m very connected to them and they’ve driven the business in the right direction.”

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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05.11.2016
02:09 pm
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Call the Midwife: Fabric wombs from the 18th century
04.04.2014
05:23 pm
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I’m a sucker for the British period drama Call The Midwife. The show has its corny moments admittedly, but it’s fascinating to watch how pregnant women, midwives and nuns living in the poor East End of London during the 1950s dealt with safe childbirth in the era before epidurals, C-sections or even adequate sanitary conditions.

So when I saw these fabric wombs dated around 1760 I was immediately transfixed and interested. Pioneering midwife Angélique Marguerite Le Boursier du Coudray created the fabric wombs as a teaching tool:

In 1759 the king commissioned her to teach midwifery to rural women to reduce infant mortality. Between 1760 to 1783, she traveled rural France, sharing her knowledge with women. During this time, she is estimated to have directly trained 4,000 students.

Du Coudray invented the first lifesize obstetrical mannequin, called “The Machine.” Various strings and straps serve to simulate the process of childbirth. The head of the infant mannequin has a shaped nose, stitched ears, hair drawn with ink, and an open mouth, with tongue.

While they’re semi-creepy to look at, I’m sure they saved a lot of lives.


 

 

 
Via Retronaut and h/t Jezebel

Posted by Tara McGinley
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04.04.2014
05:23 pm
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3-D printing, T-shirts and cufflinks: The surreal world of sonogram mementos
01.21.2014
10:52 am
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3-D fetus
 
For the record, I like babies. I think self-proclaimed baby-haters are usually just acting out bogus irritation so they can feel important by taking umbrage with someone who can’t fight back. And I’m not one of those self-righteous people who constantly feels the need to declare (a little too forcefully, and generally apropos of nothing), that new parents can be weird. Of course they can be weird—they’re sleep-deprived and incredibly emotional and their lives suddenly revolve around a tiny living creature totally dependant on them. It’s a weird situation, and I think we can all stand to give parental weirdness a little break now and then.

However, I will always find the obsession with sonograms completely weird. That shit is notably, exceptionally, particularly weird. It’s not the sonogram itself, nor the idea that a parent might get excited about it—it’s the conflation of sonogram “photography” with actual baby pictures.  Sonogram pictures are “photography” only in the most literal way, and a sonogram print-out is no more a “baby picture” than a colonoscopy photo is erotica, and yet there is this reverence for that blurry little photo, which almost never presents anything even halfway resembling an actual baby. And then there’s that 3-D ultrasound imaging—more identifiable, I suppose, but far grosser-looking.

But in the spirit of embracing all things that creep me out, I have decided to grace you, dear readers, with a short list of some of my favorite ways people memorialize their ultrasounds, starting with the delightful little hellspawn you see at the top of the screen.

Sonograms themselves are a product of fairly recent technology, meaning we are at the dawn of a new baby-era. But forget 3-D imaging, for $600, you can 3-D print a life-size model your fetus! Their tagline is “Imagine holding your baby before he or she is born,” (No thank you! Before they are born, they belong on the inside!) and they come in a satin-lined box. You know what other kind of box is usually satin-lined? A coffin. Coffins are lined with satin.

I’m not a Luddite by any means, but one does have to wonder if this micro-observational tendency will escalate further as the technology becomes available. Will we someday regularly witness fertilization, perhaps watching sperm swim across a high-definition screen? Will we root for the little guys like they’re pro athletes? Radical feminist Shulamith Firestone envisioned the escalation of “test-tube” babies to the advent of robotic wombs—perhaps we’ll view fetal formation entirely outside the body! Honestly, I’d find that all preferable to dead fetus doll in a coffin, but let’s move on to the lower-tech options.
 
sonogram portrait
 
Custom sonogram portraiture posed sort of an aesthetic quandary for me. Which feels more uncanny—the chintzy, sentimental folk art sonogram painting, or the stylistically mature product of obvious training?
 
sonogram portrait
 
I’m going with the second one, if only because the store-front’s pitch leads with death:

Every life is a miracle to be celebrated and remembered. My Miracle Ultrasound Paintings were inspired by the memory of our niece who’s [sic] life ended just three short days after her birth. We were left with her ultrasound picture, one of our first and most precious memories.

While I make a point to avoid criticizing anyone’s mourning rituals, I would say, of the women I know, very few would be inclined to make a baby-related purchase from a vendor who begins their sales pitch with an anecdote about the death of a baby. Then again, very few of the women I know would invest $100 in custom sonogram portraiture. I’d wager the artist is addressing a very niche target audience.
 
sonogram t-shirt
 
This is simply too literal for my tastes. Much like those leggings that simulate the appearance of human muscles, I’ve just never been a fan of any clothing that brings to mind the removal of skin. I once had a friend who had her fallopian tubes tattooed over their location and it was a semi-distracting reminder of her guts. The difference is, of course, that she got the tattoo specifically to embrace the discomfort surrounding reproduction and our fundamental existence as, to quote Vonnegut, “meat machines.” This T-shirt, on the other hand, is supposed to be “cute.” Ah the subjectivity of beauty!
 
cake topper
 
I would not eat a cake with a sonogram cake topper. The visceral reminder of a fetus generally kills my appetite, and frankly, I question the motives of anyone who gets too hungry around fetal imagery. There’s also a store that prints your sonogram on water bottle labels. Drinking the fluid from a container with a fetus printed on it has got to be some kind of Freudian cannibalism thing, right?
 
cufflinks
 
I saved this one for last, mainly because totally I dig it. I totally dig sonogram cufflinks. They’re functional. They’re subtle and discreet—they don’t scream to the unwilling world, “hey, look at my fetus.” The idea is morbid, but quietly so, and can therefore be executed with some degree of self-awareness. Plus, I can imagine totally going through a Patti Smith-style post-baby menswear phase that would necessitate the use of germane cufflinks. Most importantly though, it’s a disarming object of subversive style, and it can be used to creep out and embarrass your children someday—I mean, why else would you even have kids?

Posted by Amber Frost
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01.21.2014
10:52 am
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