On AO3, 0.67% of F/F is tagged "Pregnancy." 2.04% of F/M is tagged "Pregnancy." 1.56% of M/M is tagged "Pregnancy."
I'm working on a bunch of stats about how F/F differs from M/M on AO3 -- not the basic amounts or the biggest ships, which I've looked at before (most recently in 2021); this time I'm looking more at differences in ratings, warnings, and other tags. Here's one interesting things I found along the way: F/F is tagged "Pregnancy" far less often than M/M -- in fact, M/M is tagged "Pregnancy" 2.3 times as often as F/F.
I'm unsurprised that F/M is tagged "Pregnancy" the most often, as that's obviously the combo most likely to lead to pregnancy in the real world. But it's interesting how much more common mpreg appears to be than pregnancy within an F/F pair! In fact, M/M is closer to F/M than to F/F.
Stay tuned for more comparisons!
Edit: I forgot to specify something important about my methods! Since F/F ships are so often background ships on AO3, I tried to exclude the fanworks where the F/F ship was possibly a background ship. (And I did similar for F/M and for M/M.) So in the graph above, the categories above are actually:
- "F/F" = F/F fanworks, excluding fanworks also tagged M/M, F/M, Multi, and Other (I let Gen stay, because Gen doesn't indicate the possible presence of another ship)
- "F/M" = F/M fanworks, excluding F/F, M/M, Multi, and Other
- "M/M" = M/M fanworks, excluding F/F, F/M, Multi, and Other
Reblogging for edit about how I tried to exclude background ships.
This may not make a lot of intuitive sense if you're not familiar with fandom, but if you are, it's completely in line with what people want to see from their fic dynamics. Part of the escapist fantasy of femslash is for two women to have a relationship that's not defined by patriarchal norms of motherhood and parenting. But in any fic where men are involved, the escapist fantasy is often more about imagining a space where men aren't beholden to toxic masculinity, which includes not reacting to pregnancy the way so many men do IRL — with disgust or fear of commitment or feelings of jealousy or insecurity or even anger towards the pregnant partner.
That's one reason why mpreg really fascinates me. In addition to allowing a fictional male character to become an evolved progressive partner, it also allows women to write a man having to go through the same dramatic physical and hormonal changes that women do during pregnancy, and to imagine a space where a man adapts and adjusts to that. And mpreg is also, of course, a hugely fertile space for trans and other non-cis writers to imagine bodily transformations and blurring of gender definitions and roles all within the safety of a fanfic romance trope.