Male Pregnancy - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

Thematically, pregnancy can be similar to the issues of parasitism and gender. Some science fiction writers have picked up on these issues, in "cross-gender" themes — e.g., Octavia E. Butler's Bloodchild. Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Left Hand of Darkness contains the sentence "The king was pregnant", and explores a society in which pregnancy can be experienced by anyone, since individuals are not sexually differentiated during most of their life and can become capable of inseminating or gestating at different times. Lois McMaster Bujold's Ethan of Athos features an all-male society in which men use artificial wombs, but experience many of the psychological effects of pregnancy (anticipation, anxiety, etc.). In Marge Piercy's feminist utopian novel Woman on the Edge of Time, neither men nor women get pregnant, leaving that to artificial wombs, but both sexes may lactate and nurse the infant; the specifically female experiences of pregnancy and nursing were opened to men in the cause of gender equality.

The concept of male pregnancy has been the subject of popular films, generally as a comedic device. The 1978 comedy film Rabbit Test stars Billy Crystal as a young man who inexplicably becomes pregnant instead of his female sex partner. The 1990 BBC television comedy drama Frankenstein's Baby features a Dr. Eva Frankenstein helping a male patient to become the world's first pregnant man. The 1994 science fiction comedy/drama Junior stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as a fertility researcher who experiments on himself; the screenplay was inspired by a 1985 article in Omni magazine.

The concept appears frequently as a comedic gag in movie and television programs. In Monty Python's 1979 film, Life of Brian, there is a political satire scene in which a character demands that any man has a "right to have babies if he wants them," which is ridiculed as impossible. In the BBC science fiction comedy series Red Dwarf, the main character Lister, becomes pregnant after having sex with a female version of himself in an alternate universe. In an episode of Sliders, the quartet "slides" into an alternate world in which babies develop during their final months in the father because a worldwide disease has kept women from being able to carry children beyond their first trimester.

The possibility of extraterrestrial life having different reproductive sexuality is the basis for many references. In the Star Trek: Enterprise episode "Unexpected", a human male becomes pregnant with the offspring of a female of another species. In the video game The Sims 2 male characters can be impregnated via cheat codes or alien abduction. In the American Dad episode "Deacon Stan, Jesus Man", the boy Steve becomes impregnated after giving the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the extraterrestrial Roger, then unwittingly passes it on to his girlfriend via a kiss. In the animated series Futurama the extraterrestrial Kif can be impregnated by a touch. In the SciFi Channel miniseries, Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars, the extraterrestrial Rygel becomes impregnated with human John and Aeryn's baby. In the series Alien Nation, when Tectonese main character George Francisco and his wife Susan decide to have a third child, it is revealed that, in order to conceive, a Tectonese couple needs a third party, called a binnaum, to complete impregnation, and that the male carries the baby - encased in a pod - during the final months of gestation.

Virgil Wong, a performance artist, created a hoax site featuring a fictitious male pregnancy, claiming to detail the pregnancy of his friend Lee Mingwei.