I am standing in the produce aisle, minding my own business when I hear a voice.
It comes from a thirty something-ish looking Caucasian man.
"Well, aren't you as cute a button. How far along are you?" he enquires.
"I'm about five months," I said .
"You're just radiant. Are you tired?" he asks.
"Thanks, a little," I said.
He then offers to hold my basket, and walks with me as I reach for a pre-packaged bag of Caesar salad.
He has so many questions for me .
"Is it your first?"
"Does your back hurt?"
"Boy or girl?"
"How long have you wanted kids? "
And then a few others .
Eventually I ask him if he has kids. He says not yet, but he loves pregnant women.
He gushes about how beautiful he finds us .
"You're amazing," he adds.
I say thanks so much. But the convo doesn't end there. There are more questions.
"What do you eat?"
"What day are you due?"
Then eventually the two big ones he must have been working towards all along.
"Are you married?"
"Would you like to go to lunch ?"
I say no to both .
But the journalist in me is too curious to let him get away without a barrage of my own questions.
"You want to take a pregnant woman to lunch?" I ask.
He says yes. And I laugh and say O.K. But I explain that I'm a writer and it's a working lunch, because I want to interview him.
We meet the next day and I finally get down to the crux of the matter.
This man has a pregnancy fetish.
I kid you not. That's what he eventually confessed.
"Of all the women in a room pregnant women just shine the brightest, " Tyson said. His name was Tyson.
"Wow" was all I thought as he gushed about the pregnant breasts and the glow and the "amazingness" of the female body.
He is really into this, I thought. I let him touch my bump and ask questions about cravings, etc...to reward him for being so nice. He seems over joyed, and overall the working lunch was a success. I had the meat for a new story and my bump had just made this man's day.
But his confession led me to further investigate the idea of pregnancy fetishes. I found that this is more prevalent than one might think. Like, it's a real life fetish. Right up there with feet and bondage are the men who are sexually into pregnant women.
I was stunned.
The fetish is called maiesiophilia. In the book, “Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices,” Dr. Anil Aggrawal said Maiesiophilia is "gaining sexual arousal from pregnant women and/or female childbirth.”
Some extend the fetish to include being aroused by actual impregnation and breast feeding.
As I further perused the world wide web, I found chat groups about the topic and realized that while there are thousands of men who are sexually attracted to pregnant women, there are millions whose desire to be protective increase when in the presence of pregnant women.
On the website , parenting.com men talked a lot about how seeing pregnant women increased their respect for the fairer sex.
Maybe its some type of universal "daddy gene", but I have been noticing it more and more since my bump began to grow. Men are nicer, more attentive. They hold more doors, ask more "how are you's?" and offer me "be careful's" as I walk down stairs, etc. Overall, people are just nicer to me. And in some ways (whether it's because they think my bump is hot or not), all the human kindness somewhat makes up for the nausea, breast pain, and my shrinking bladder .
So feel free to bring on the love, people. Us "preggo" ladies love it.
