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7 hours ago“Whataboutism.” Firefox flags the word as misspelled, but it’s just a new word and if you search it, you’ll find a lot of articles. It’s a controversial debate tactic in which you attempt to shift the focus from something you want to protect (or yourself) to something the other person wants to protect (or themselves).
A good example of this is when we say “Trump is in the Epstein files” and people on the right say “well so is Bill Clinton.” Except the left really doesn’t want to protect Slick Willy (or any child predator, for that matter) so it’s not a good whataboutism. Normally you would point to something good he’s done, but I can’t come up with any examples.
I once tried to design a system where humanoids lived like this. For a story. In the end it was more trouble than it was worth, so I scrapped the system entirely. But, here’s what I remember:
Females carried eggs, and like humans (our species), they were born with all of them they were ever going to need. However, they did not have a uterus, per se; rather, the vagina was narrower, tapering off to a point at the top where the cervix would be, and could self dilate in heat, and that led to a network of fallopian tubes. Like at least four of them, maybe as many as 8. Every cycle, an egg would release into just one of these tubes, and it would take a week to pass through. The whole time, it would be viable, but it wouldn’t need to be supported by all the things that make up periods. So instead of periods, the females of the species would just get a smelly discharge once a month.
Now for the males: they would have a birth canal, and a prehensile thing like a penis, but longer and narrower that would penetrate the female and pick a path to take. If it encountered an egg, it would take the egg in a sac at the end, protecting it, withdraw from the female, and insert the egg into his womb, where it would be fertilized somehow by seed, which builds up and swims around freely inside the womb, dies and is flushed out, so they both have these fertility periods that need to match up (and are tied to arousal).
So a female of the species could be penetrated, but it was narrow like a urethra, you couldn’t even get a finger inside. And it might even be tied to the urinary tract (that would make sense, especially since we’re trying to make the female more like the male of our species).
The problem with this thought process is, our definitions of male and female typically describe who carries the seed and who carries the egg. If “men had babies,” they wouldn’t be male, they’d be female, because that’s how we define female. So my system, I tried to create one where the female still carries the egg, but the male incubates it as well as seeds it.
CW: Sexual violence — stop here if that would bother you (though, we’re still talking about aliens — your call)
In this system — and this would have been relevant — sexual abuse of females would have been greatly reduced, and sexual abuse of males would have been far more common. Also, amputation of that long, narrow, prehensile organ would have been a thing that was done, and it would not have been lethal, but it would have removed that male’s ability to have babies with a female partner. (I was developing an alternative where a second male could enter the picture, and use his to move the egg from the female to the wounded male and it would still work.) Of course, abusive penetration of the birth canal to damage that would also be a thing.
I also began to explore how homosexuality — female to female, and male to male — would work within this system, but I did not get that far. I had a male and female character in mind. Brother and sister — and their sibling relationship was basically that of any siblings in our species, and at this point neither of them is sexually active, so it’s not a factor. The idea was to show “they’re humanoid aliens but they have values similar to ours.” The male character was always going to be gay, though, and I needed to work out how that would work, both physically and socially. It’s bad enough being a straight cisgendered man trying to write women or gay men in our own species, but I was working with humanoid aliens, so there were more differences. What I was going to be getting at was that these men, these gay men, had things in common with women in our species as well. (I never developed a partner for my character. But my character does get abused in that way and I was planning on his partner assisting in him getting pregnant somehow and overcoming that. And still losing the baby, contributing to his feeling that he isn’t meant to be happy.)
End CW
As for the actual story, I haven’t scrapped it (and I’ve told you nothing about what it’s actually about), but I don’t think I’ll use the overly complex system. I don’t need it anyway. But asking about men getting pregnant? There’s a ton of mpreg content, and ABO (Omegaverse) in the fan fiction world, especially anime, so I thought I’d offer a unique and original take on it.