Maggie McMuffin, a 32-year-old bisexual femme based in New York, first realized she might have a breeding kink when she did a roleplay scene with a campmate at Burning Man. “We set up a scene where I was a princess and they were the dragon who held me captive,” she said. “[It] combined so many of my kinks: monster fucking, fairy-tale roleplay, consensual nonconsent, creampies. In the middle of the event, with them in a dragon mask and me fully blissed out, they broke character to ask, ‘Hey, how would you feel about this being an impregnation scene?’ They dirty talked about me, like, giving birth to these monster babies and throwing away my chances at a prince in order to keep fucking this dragon and I was like, Well! I guess I’m into this now!”
Amid the overturning of Roe v. Wade and other regressive policy proposals centered on restricting reproductive rights, having a breeding kink may seem odd. But for practitioners, breeding addresses ideas of ownership and autonomy in a way that is playful, hot, and sometimes even a relief. So what exactly is breeding?
Kinksters have different definitions of the act. “I define ‘breeding’ as either the possibility, risk, or the intentional impregnation of the submissive partner,” said N, a 27-year-old feminine bisexual trans man from the Midwest, who is a self-professed breeding kinkster. For McMuffin breeding is “a more focused impregnation fantasy that is more in line with livestock than propagating the family line.” Johnny Guns, a 29-year-old Chicago-born nonbinary trans person, now living in Texas, offered an expanded definition. “In barest bones I define ‘breeding’ as multiple rounds of unprotected sex, where at least one participating party is purposefully trying to get the other pregnant either in a fantasy or scene, with or without the other party’s awareness of the purpose, where a resulting pregnancy or the danger of a pregnancy is as much the erotic engine and focus as it is the goal.”
The increased awareness of breeding as a kink exists largely due to the internet and its proliferation of porn and fanfiction. Many kinksters also see breeding’s recent rise in popularity as a response to regressive actions restricting reproductive rights; fear can be eroticized and played with for catharsis. “In a shitty way, it’s the fear of losing access to abortion and the attempt to decimate the reproductive freedom we do have,” Guns said. “It’s natural to want to purge a fear or control it by making it sexy, at a basic level, and relinquishing control can bring a sense of immense relief.”
“We’re still fighting for reproductive rights and there are women undergoing forced pregnancy,” McMuffin said. “To say nothing of the history of people of color being treated as livestock throughout America’s history. That last one… It definitely feels like this is one of those fetishes a lot of white people will dabble in without considering why it’s more of a hypothetical fantasy only thing for us. Same way that white women keep shouting, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale is going to be real!’ Like bitch, it’s been real! Just not for us!”
The focused eroticism of the act of insemination is the central theme for breeding enthusiasts, but this doesn’t mean that breeding is only a fetish for people who have sex in ways that might result in pregnancy. “I had thought of it as something that was always kind of about the straights,” said Al Washington, a 45-year-old straight man from New York who describes himself as being into creampies (ejaculating into a partner’s vagina without a condom — a related but not totally overlapping fetish) and has friends who are into breeding. “I’ve noticed queer people getting in on the game. Humans have pretty similar wiring and just because the wiring doesn’t ask you to have sex with the opposite gender, what would stimulate you probably wouldn’t be that different.”
People of all different genders and sexualities and with different genitals can be into breeding, because for many devotees, the fantasy of breeding is more powerful than any biological possibility of getting someone pregnant. In fact, the appeal is often psychological, not physiological. “Whether the receptive partner can or cannot get pregnant is irrelevant,” said H, a 35-year-old erotic visual artist living in Massachusetts. “I think it’s equally hot when two cis gay men fuck and refer to it as breeding the ‘bottom.’ It’s the fantasy aspect of it. I think what I find hot, as with any fetish, really, is the power dynamic. Independently of the gender and sexuality of people involved in sex that involves ‘breeding,’ there is this assumed idea that one partner is dominant, that they are sowing their seed, while the other is receptive — literally, a receptacle for the other’s desires, progeny, and the primal need to survive through continuing the line. It really plugs into my fascination with sex and death. We all die, but we fuck, literally, to live.”
Some people encountered breeding first through digital spaces. N first discovered he was into breeding through fanfiction. “I initially only sought out [the story] because there was a trans interpretation of a character in it, and the breeding kink featured it front and center and it sort of felt like being walloped over the head. I did not expect that to be so hot.” H described a more gradual interest in the kink. “I’ve been watching porn for as long as I’ve been masturbating, and I guess eventually I picked up on the fact that I’d gravitate towards creampie and breeding kink stuff, and from there it kind of blossomed in my brain that I’m really into it,” he said. Several people interviewed for this piece referenced the Omegaverse as being a related erotic fanfiction community through which they first discovered their interest in breeding.
The base, primal nature of the kink is appealing to breeding fans and can be accompanied by feelings of being used or dehumanized — consensually, of course. “If sex is already a warm, wet, animal thing, then breeding is the baser level,” Guns said. “It’s the mechanics of sex, mammalian sex specifically, brought to bear as a function. Sex with a reproductive purpose first. Breeding is taking the ease and safety with which humans can have sex with each other and reducing, or maybe returning it to the same arena where vets stick their arms elbow deep in a horse to make sure a very expensive pony is on the other end of a year. Who doesn’t like being reduced to an unthinking, instinct-obeying animal?”
“I have a lot of fantasies about being used, being useful, and also a major thing for creampies,” said McMuffin, who pointed out that unprotected sex has become more taboo since the advent of AIDS. “A big part of the fantasy is that in everyday life I’ve got an IUD and no desire to have children or be tied down in one spot or person, so being the complete opposite of that for little bits of time is very appealing. I mean, nothing like an intense scene to make you go, ‘I’m so glad I’m not actually living that life!’ It’s cathartic and hot.”
Not everyone experiences the fetishization of impregnation as a fundamentally degrading experience. “And there is an emotional component of hotness too,” said N, “where if I am in a certain mood, [an] intentional impregnation kink can be incredibly loving, and about commitment and permanence.”
Fantasies of breeding and being bred can be affirming to practitioners and their gender identities. “This kink both butted up [against] and edified my masculine identity,” H said, who is a trans man and a breeding top. “I made masculinity mine and accepted that not all masculinity is toxic, and even its ‘traditional’ aspects can be molded and shaped into something affirming and positive within my identity and by how I choose to be the man that I am. The same happened to my sexuality and my particular fetishes. I joke that by being into breeding I am queering heteronormativity, but honestly, I think it’s true. Part of the thrill is taking something that the world thinks was not meant for me and making it mine -— just as I did with my gender.”
“Breeding affirms my sexuality because it allows me to feel less dysphoric about my body, specifically my mass and musculature,” said Jack Lacroix, a 32-year-old agender person living in North Carolina who’s a breeding top. “It’s an intimate thing, and people trusting someone like me makes me feel deeply wanted and validated.” Similarly affirming experiences are possible for bottoms (receptive partners), too. “As I’ve explored this kink more,” said N, “I’ve thought a lot about what motherhood is, what it means to be trans, and honestly it’s been affirming for me to hold the concept of myself as a man and myself as a mother, simultaneously, and have neither one cancel each other out. I don’t think I ever will be pregnant but it has helped so much on my gender journey.”
“I think that things that are on white people’s minds get mainstreamed, but my feeling is that Black people have been doing creampies forever,” said Washington, the straight man from New York, who is Black, when asked about the intersection of breeding kinks and race. “I just see [this kink] as a thing that people pay attention to more because white people are speaking to it.”
“People are super afraid of getting pregnant, and pregnancy freaks them out and makes them uncomfortable,” Guns said. “Getting bred is being treated like a broodmare — a term that comes up a lot when discussing abortion access — and being treated like a broodmare is dehumanizing.” Lacroix, an agender breeding top, cited American values as being inextricable from the existence of the breeding kink, while also contributing to the stigma of the practice. “We live in a puritanical, neo-theocratic fascist society that absolutely loathes sex in every form if it isn’t for the express purpose of turning people into property via childbirth.”
Conversely, Washington suggested that societal changes may be leading to increased interest in the kink. “I think we are in a time where a lot of the models for how we create families or make babies are fundamentally broken. There might be something to people wanting to make a little horny baby with their bro, if that makes sense. People want to do things on their own terms. ‘If I breed or don’t breed it will be on my own terms, it will be the way I want to do it.’”
Regardless of exactly why breeding has caught on more as a kink, it’s clear that this particular fetish is hot for people because it is connected to many different facets of life that impact the psyche: self-image, societal values, taboo, relationships to power, changes to the body, control, fantasy, and fear. Given how ubiquitous these elements are, Johnny Guns said, “breeding is everywhere. It’s the undertone to a lot of things, and it’s not immediately obvious to people who aren’t themselves into it.” ●
