I know nothing about Male Phantom Pregnancies (or Mpreg as I believe the interweb likes to call ’em). Therefore this will be a somewhat disjointed thinkpiece based on what I have discovered doing a bit of research. First I asked an wimmin. This is what an wimmin said on the subject:
Men + children in the modern era
The involvement of men can pretty much be reduced these days to zero. You don’t need one to get pregnant in the first place (hello sperm banks) and you don’t need one to bring up the kid / teach it to play conkers / put up its shelves etc. Some men are clearly desperate to get in on the womancentric / wimmincentric act so when their other half is enduring genuine pregnancy related symptoms associated with carrying a 6lb person around inside you, they feign assorted symptoms in a last futile bid to assert their involvement and importance (not impotence of course – which they are clearly demonstrating by doing this).
Pathetic.
Whilst useful I felt it did not quite cover the bizarreness of the phenomena. I asked an nother wimmin and she told me to google Male Phantom Pregnancies + Harry Potter. I did, and if you feel lucky, this is what you get!
Still,I felt this was not enough. I considered going to the world of cinema to discover what it could teach me on the subject. First I considered Junior, the Arnold Schwarzenegger “comedy” of 1994. However I soon discarded this as this was not a phantom pregnancy: Arnie really does give birth to Danny DeVito (or something equally implausible). I then considered John Hurt in Alien: whilst his “baby” was a frightening creature it could not be described as a phantom.
So I considered it logically. A male phantom pregnancy usually takes place when the man’s partner is pregnant. He feels sympathetic pains as if he is carrying a child. Clearly this because he is. The wife carries the BODY of the child, whilst the man carries the SPIRIT. Usually the man has no side effects, as the spirit is quiet and takes up much less space than the body: however in rare cases, when the man is particularly “sensitive” he may feel the spirit being unsettled in him. It makes complete sense as a theory, with the added bonus of the spirit baby really being a phantom.
Alternatively Mpreg could just be trapped wind.