It’s the end of a long day at work. You pack up your belongings, head out the door, and hit the button for the down elevator. As you ride a dozen flights down, you hear a quiet whirring noise, coming from a tiny little man pushing a tiny little vacuum cleaner around the floor. He’s staring up at you, surprised that you noticed him. What’s your next move?
Welcome to the second episode of zHeightgeist. I’m releasing the first two episodes on the same day, to give you a better idea of what the podcast is going to be like. Usually I’ll address a topic pertaining to or adjacent to Size Fantasy, providing you with links for your own research. The end of each episode will feature a short interview, as I’ve asked fans and creators to answer two questions about their interest in Size Fantasy, macrophilia, the giantess fetish… whatever they want to call it.
For this episode, I’ll try to explain the aspects of macrophilia, and at the end you’ll hear from Bantlebroth, a Size writer. Once in a while I’ll narrate one of my stories, though I’m still figuring out how that will fit in. Maybe very short stories with a thin topic, or maybe as extra episodes. We’ll see.
As any penny-ante morning radio show or breathless “look at this weird shit” article will tell you, as though they’ve broken some mystical code, macrophilia etymologically means “lover of large.” (I hope I never have to say that phrase again.) Sometimes it’s paired with microphilia, a love of small things. The problem I find with these terms is that they’re not specific enough. At face value it suggests you love things larger than yourself, or smaller, but I’m not aware of anyone in the Size community who’s aroused by skyscrapers. The way we use it, in the community, it only pertains to people, or humanoids, anthropomorphic animals, or monsters, in the areas where the Furry fetish crosses over.
Oh yes, we know about Furries. Some of my best friends are Furries. My grandfather was a Furry; I’m a quarter-Furry.
But the confusion comes from a point of perspective. If you’re a macrophile, are you a normal-sized person who ogles giantesses, or are you a tiny person who’s looking forward to a sexual escapade with a normal-sized person? If you’re microphilic, are you a normal-sized person with a penchant for miniatures, or are you yourself gigantic and everything around you is tiny? There are people who feel strongly about one definition or another, but to me, it’s all relative. Let’s say we’re having a conversation about weird personal interests, and I told you I was macrophilic. You can only have a vague notion of what I might be into, until I offer up clarifying information.
That’s why I use Size Fantasy, and other people have their own terms for it, too. To me, Size Fantasy encapsulates all forms of size play, transformation, growth and shrink fetishes, and other interests. I shorten it to Size, with a capital S, when talking about the interest and creative works in it, like Size writers or Size artists. I alter it to Size Erotica, when I’m writing something sexy and arousing.
Bear in mind, these are all umbrella terms: macrophilia or Size Fantasy doesn’t necessarily mean a tiny man and a big woman, though that’s my preferred arrangement. The Size community spans the globe and encompasses fans and creators of all nationalities, ethnic heritages, ages, genders, sexual orientations, and abilities and disabilities. And with all these disparate backgrounds and experiences, the Size fetish morphs and reshapes to accommodate all these varied tastes in a new template. Any sexual situation you can imagine, and many you can’t, can be modified by increasing or decreasing the scale of one or more of the participants. This isn’t for everybody, obviously: it really is something you’re born with, and if you weren’t, you probably won’t get it.
As far as I know, there have been no formal studies of the presence or causes of macrophilia. Many of those aforementioned breathless articles, appearing in Vice, Huffington Post, Men’s Health and other places, like to refer to the same few doctors’ quotes, and I’ll examine these in another episode. These doctors, psychologists, and therapists are only weighing in with their outsider opinions. Most of the time, they’ve never spoken to a giantess fetishist. For that matter, Dr Justin Lehmiller who is otherwise an advocate for diversity in sexual health and attractions, ran an informal poll of just over 4000 people, in preparation for his book, Tell Me What You Want. From this he concluded that no women are interested in macrophilia, a notion promptly disabused by a quick visit to PornHub, not to mention a cursory internet search. This runs parallel to the case of the 1995 Carnegie-Mellon study, Sex in America, orchestrated by Marty Rimm, an electrical engineering major at the time. When he polled Americans as to what they were into, his statistical results disagreed with the fact of the kinds of porn people were seeking online. His rather sheepish conclusion was that he just must have interviewed a different group of people.
No formal studies, I say, though there have been some very intelligent people within the community who have bent their considerable brain power to understand what the hell this is about and why the hell we’re into it. Please visit this episode’s show notes to find a link to Mac4Black’s 1996 blog post, “Introduction to Macrophilia” by Samuel Ramses, MD, PhD. Dr Ramses suggests that macrophilia manifests in childhood and is burdened with greater shame than many other fetishes. He also covers the various manifestations of this fantasy, like being licked by a giant, exploring a giant person’s genitalia, being crushed under a giant, or simply watching a giant person destroy a city. Dr Ramses writes on this topic very clinically, even cites a case history of a 30-year-old Caucasian male who developed his fetish from watching Godzilla movies as a kid. But I was unable to find any other reference to “Samuel Ramses” online, so until we can verify his credentials, we can only consider this writing as a very thoughtful examination, if not professional.
There’s also an equally thoughtful, humorous, and exponentially larger essay by someone called Eurokraken on writing.com. In 2010 he posted his treatise, Macrophilia 101, in which he starts with sexual selection in animals, the near-universal fascination of little boys with dinosaurs, and his own encounter with the Gulliver’s Travels miniseries on NBC. This is a great study into a macrophile’s origin story, the diversity of his tastes and other macrophiles’ tastes, so it really is worth a read. He includes links at the bottom of his piece, some of which, inconveniently, you can only find through searching the Internet Archive.
A shorter take on the nature of the giantess fetish was posted by AstroDomina on YouTube in 2016. Her video is called “Giantess Fetish/Macrophilia 101” and she composed it to “educate the public,” as she puts it. AstroDomina is a professional dominatrix, as well as an actress and video producer of fetish material, much of which plays on Size Fantasy. I interviewed her in June 2023 at SizeCon, a convention dedicated to celebrating all things Size; a link to that interview is in the show notes.
She gives a loose overview of the fetish, explaining the roles to someone who may not have encountered this before. She says things like “usually,” “generally,” and “as often as not,” but again, it’s impossible to measure how often the fetish involves giant women and tiny men. Many people interested in macrophilia and microphilia believe their fetish is the predominant one, and AstroDomina’s opinions are likely formed by her experience in femdom. But AstroDomina does a great job illustrating the fetish, swatting a tiny man out of the corner of her screen, then moving the camera to the floor so she appears to loom over it. I think someone who wasn’t “getting” the fetish before might see the appeal at this point.
I can’t get behind the suggestion that women aren’t into this. I personally know several giantesses—that is, women who see themselves as gigantic, or women who have an intense interest in finding, creating, and collecting tiny people. More than this, there are many women who fetishize giant men or who fantasize about themselves as being tiny. Prominently, one of the founders of SizeCon, Jitensha, is such a woman. Her artwork and writing has to do with envisioning herself as only a few inches tall, and her sexual adventures with her giant partner. I’ve met him, and yeah, he’s taller than me. She runs a site called Daddy’s Dollhouse, a haven for like-minded fetishists to chat and share creative content in this vein.
Before zHeightgeist came into being, there were two podcasts that centered on Size Fantasy. These are Size Talk, by JE, and Sizing Up, by JackTheSpeck and the late ColossalMaker. Size Talk covers a wide range of topics, including social justice and consent, as well as conducting interviews with Black Size creators. Because so much of Size Fantasy happens online or in your head, it’s very easy to forget or not even be aware of the diversity of its creators, unless it comes up in a conversation on social media. I value Size Talk for expanding my awareness in this respect.
Sizing Up features many great interviews with artists, models, and actors, and it explores various aspects of the fetish from different perspectives. It’s not just a matter of humanizing these fetish icons: listening to these episodes gives you insight into the many different ways human sexuality expresses itself. Even in a topic as specialized as Size, there’s a lot of room for differentiation, variety, and exploration.
There are also dozens of one-off episodes on other podcasts, some that have to do with sexual health and interest, and some that just look for weird stuff to focus on. I’ll link to the second episode of Dinks Wit Kinks Fetish Podcast, where John Underro and Mr. Shep interview Miss Kaneda, one of the most thrilling Size Fantasy writers on the market. Her material is decidedly on the cruel side, so caveat lector if your first steps into macrophilia take you under her boots. In the interview, she does a great job of representing the breadth of topics and fixations in Size and adjacent fetishes. In the end, she persuades Mr. Shep that he’d make a good giant.
There, that should be a good start, if this is something you want to explore. Like I said, I really believe it’s something you’re born with. I don’t think I’ll convert anyone into giantess fetishism with this podcast, and I don’t desire to. I do hope that there are some people listening who previously believed that they were the only one with these strange tastes, and that they now understand there’s a robust and thriving community of creators and fans who feel and love as they do.
Questionnaire: Bantlebroth
For each episode, I’m posing two questions to creators and fans: What do you do in the Size Community, and what’s your preferred size and the sizes you’re attracted to?
Bantlebroth responded promptly to my solicitation. He categorizes himself as a writer, and he is attracted to the “slow, unending size-shrinking down into the microscopic, macroscopic, atomic, quantum, and beyond.”
My name is Bantlebroth, my pronouns are he and him.
In the Size community I am a writer and I am attracted to slow, unending size shrinking down into the microscopic macroscopic, atomic, quantum and beyond. A prime example of this can be found in the Spirit of Wonder OVA, “The Shrinking of Miss China,” where an adult woman experiences a shrinking ray. She has no control over her scenario, and she shrinks smaller and smaller over the course of a long period of time, until she reaches the size less than a speck of dust.
To explain how I first got into Size fantasies, to address that: in my youth, I experienced Alice in Wonderland syndrome, which is the sensation of personal shrink and or growth of personal size. And quite often I would be lying in bed and feeling myself shrinking down into nothing, while the entire world expanded around me. The location where memory is established is right next to where fetishes are established in the brain, and sometimes there’s an overlap.
In my case, reading an Archie comic that involved a size-shrinking story was the initial stage of my size fetish. Size Fantasy is a secondary kink for me; it’s not the primary fetish within my brain. For me, there is definite arousal, pleasure, and release. But I should note that it’s an impartial observer sensation, and in my fetishes I am not personally involved, nor am I involved in any of the stories that I write with self-insert.
Links
- Mac4Black: Introduction to Macrophilia
- Eurokraken: Macrophilia 101
- Internet Archive
- AstroDomina: Giantess Fetish/Macrophilia 101
- Aborigen’s Interview with AstroDomina
- JitenshaSW: Daddy’s Dollhouse
- Size Talk (podcast)
- Sizing Up (podcast)
- Dinks Wit Kinks (podcast)
zHEIGHTgeist 
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