Most mornings, a few reliable stimuli gently, or not-so-gently, rouse you from your slumber. Maybe one of your neighbors decided that 7:30 a.m. was late enough to wait to start sawing beams for his porch project, or that it was too early to let his bark-frenzied hound back in the house. This morning, however, a tickle or an itch between your legs has irritated you out of your dreams. But before you scratch it away, you realize there’s a small warm mass squirming between your inner thighs. Your heart freezes as your mind envisions a small mouse on the verge of finding somewhere to place his teeth, yet you rally your courage and reach down, plucking gently at what your fingertips find. When you raise your hand, you see a tiny little woman dangling from your pinch. She waves cheerily at you, licking her lips and pointing down at your crotch, wishing to be returned to your most private area. Who is she, where did she come from, what was she doing to you while you were asleep, and what are you going to do with her now?

Before I get into the topic, I’d like to apologize for an unfortunate turn of phrase in the previous episode. A concerned listener wrote in, asking if my comment about tiny women starting their own podcast was really as dismissive as it sounded to them. I want to apologize for the thoughtlessness of how that was phrased, to anyone who felt I couldn’t be bothered with the concerns of another realm of interest or who heard a slight against their interests. I recognize intent doesn’t matter much when someone else has been hurt, but it was not my intent to diminish anyone else’s concerns. The tiny woman was just an example for anyone who doesn’t feel represented, the statement was meant to encourage people to put their voices forth, just as I’ve done here, and I wanted to stress that the technology to do so is cheaper and more powerful than it’s ever been.

And I apologize because I went against my policy of speaking negatively. When I started zHeightgeist, I believe I announced I didn’t want my podcast to merely be an airing of grievances or a litany of what I’m not into. My preferences are understood; there is no need for me to mention what I’m not into. Doing so might sound as though I’m speaking against it or persuading others against it, and that’s absolutely not the case. My goal was to begin to explore the facets of macrophilia. I come at it from my giantess/tiny man preferences, but I wouldn’t want to limit the conversation to that anymore than I’d omit Crush or Vore, because that wouldn’t be a complete apprehension of how it manifests.

With that, let me introduce this show’s topic, New World Order. This is another one of those dicey-yet-spicy interests where some of the appeal is obvious and some is dangerous to talk about. Why? Because it’s flirting with fascism, to be blunt, or aspects of fascism. If you get into macrophilia because you want to lose control, New World order will strip you of control. If you want to be dominated by strong women, the women of NWO will cover your entire body beneath their step. If you enjoy the frisson of oppression, if you get a rush from watching people be victimized or struggling against insurmountable powers, NWO has something for you.

At first glance, New World Order simply means that a new force has taken control of the world. In macrophilia, that’s usually dominant women. In some stories, women have been grown to the size of giantesses, through a mysterious virus, a planned epidemic, the intervention of aliens, etc. In other stories, a contagion or a chemical or a technological rebellion has shrunken men to inches tall, shedding their self-determination and dignity along with their height. Women could conceivably preserve their rights as humans, but the fetish of these stories is that they don’t: men generally write stories about women taking revenge as soon as they have a modicum of power. Maybe that’s because they hate women; maybe it’s because that’s what they do if they had power, so they assume anyone else would too. Or maybe they want to be spanked by powerful women while pretending to hate it. All of these are valid, and hundreds of more possibilities have been explored in artwork and stories.

NWO can also be interpreted in many different ways. A story in which a third-rate military junta suddenly finds the means to grow an army of gigantic women may not resemble another story in which women are endowed with the ability to shrink down men they don’t like (or men they desire to own). Women could grow up as part of a cosmic justice brought about by aliens experimenting on our global population, or a story could center on one woman who takes out her stresses and boredom upon an entire town she’s reduced to the size of a Lego playset. NWO can be very overtly political, playing with fantasies of globalism and structural supremacy, or the writer may have a political agenda as they create a paranoid vision with a foundation of maliciously misinterpreted feminism. I want to use “political” in the sense of governmental structures here, not in terms of philosophy. Because in that sense, all macrophilia is political: we only notice it when someone writes a story that challenges the status quo. If a community is used to stories about gigantic women who are, in practice, nothing more than sex objects for tiny men, and someone shows up writing about smart, feeling women who have life goals beyond a tiny man’s orgasm, the community may attack that writer’s work as “political,” but in fact the politics of conservatism and misogyny were already present, agreed upon, and taken for granted.

When I start talking about an aspect of fetish or fantasy and I notice myself using a duality of gender, like big women and tiny men, I try to pause and flip that. If I fixate on a woman lovingly crushing a tiny man beneath her ass, I make a point of also creating a scenario where a giant man is weighing down a tiny woman beneath his heavy scrotum. If I speculate about the goals and agenda of a tiny man with a giantess, I try also to pause and explore the agenda of the giantess in a land of tiny people. Yet with New World Order, that’s a little more difficult. Through a cursory scan I found a few stories in which large women subjugate and abuse smaller women, but if large men torment smaller men, it’s not apparent in NWO. It really does seem to be predominately gigantic women (at least gigantic to their captives). I’m not very well-read in the breadth of NWO literature, admittedly, but I cannot recall an NWO story in which men were grown up to titanic proportions to subjugate populations of women, or where a disease spread to shrink women around the world to the size of dolls, subjecting them to the whims of their normal-sized male overlords. Stories like this must exist, but I’ve never seen them. What would we call those stories, in order to search for them? What would we call a genre in which men were in control, dominating through brutality and biases of law and economics? What would we call it when women were treated as sexual objects, subhumans incapable of rational thought, or even property to be usurped, imprisoned, and abused?

Oh, right. That would be world history through present day. When women are in control, that’s the New World Order escapist fetish. When men are, it’s just Monday.

So head on over to Giantess World dot net, and run a search for “New World Order.” You’ll find plenty of fantastic stories told from a plethora of perspectives, including some truly involved and well-developed world-building in extended series. The people who write NWO series are passionate about the subject, and their fans are just as passionate about envisioning it and following the misadventures of those involved. Unfortunately, the way Giantess World structures its internal search and results makes it impossible for me to link to. As a hashtag for artwork on DeviantArt or any of the Booru collections, it’s a little harder to locate. In one isolated image, it’s hard to tell whether you’re looking at three cruel giantesses stomping on a city or if they’re a sample segment of a global revolution. Searching for “new world order” in stories on DeviantArt simply lands you at the front door of spittle-flecked conspiracy theory, nothing Sizey about it.

Lastly, why would someone be into New World Order? Like I said at the start, the appeal of this genre shares many aspects with macrophilia as well as the most common sexual fantasies in the western world. Some people are turned on by power and symbols of power. A muscular woman’s arm, a highly polished jackboot, the scenario of being pinned helplessly beneath a mocking, contemptuous dominatrix represent a cocktail of arousal and fear. Some people may not wish to be oppressed, but nonetheless are aroused and engaged to read about other people falling beneath the feet of indominable women. They enjoy watching tiny people scrape for survival and strive against impossible odds to gain the upper hand, only to have their dreams dashed by poor timing or the unassailable will of the women in charge. That anticipation and frustration is a potent cycle for arousal, as much as edging or gooning are, or any form of erotic sexual denial. Or like I’ve talked about before, like is common in macrophilia, some people crave the thrill of having control and agency taken away from them, particularly by an attractive woman. It’s very appealing to read about tiny men fighting for their liberty, with the threat of death amplifying the thrill of being abused as a sexual object for women, having sex forced upon them—a desirable outcome disguised a punishment or torture. That could be because they find some satisfaction in feeling oppressed and victimized, as though the fantasy validates their beliefs about their real-world existence … plus the bonus of sexual titillation.

New World Order isn’t an uncommon fantasy at all: generally speaking, it’s a popular theme for science-fiction and fantasy. Within macrophilia, it enjoys a certain coherence and consistency that allows it to be named and distinguished from the very similar realm of powerful, cruel giantesses in general.

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Questionnaire

This round, the questions of how’d you get into Size Fantasy and what’s it mean to you are answered by my good friend Taedis. We’ve been roommates at several SizeCons, and I helped them obtain a vintage movie poster for ‘Six Inches Tall,’ the UK name for ‘Attack of the Puppet People.’ We’ve been on a few adventures together in the course of our Size Fantasy careers, is what I’m getting at, and I’m very pleased to highlight them in this podcast. You’ll recall, for example, their story “Even an Ox,” featured in episode seven.

In his words: “At the time of this recording my pronouns are he/him. My preferred size is three-and-three-quarters inches, or 108 feet tall, though I’m comfortable at other scales as well.” He describes himself as a writer and amateur Size historian.

When I was three, Saturday nights were bath nights. My grandmother would scour off a week’s worth of play, and give me a few minutes to splash in the water afterwards. What happened after that is where things get complicated. These aren’t my earliest memories, but they’re close, powerful, etched in my brain harder than what I had for lunch yesterday. I remember the bath being over, my grandmother pulling the white rubber stopper out of the drain, the two or three bubbles that glugged to the surface, the black hole in the porcelain sucking the water down. If I stared long enough, I could see the whirlpool the water formed before it vanished. After a while, the drain got bigger or I got smaller. When you’re three, physics isn’t even a word. All I knew was that I could get sucked down with the rest of the bath.

The easy way to describe what I was feeling is fear. I’ve shorthanded it that way myself, the other times I’ve told the story. And I was scared, but there was something else twisted into the mix. An excitement, a frisson. Worlds collided in that tub: my grandmother’s world, where there were no monsters in the dark, the woods out back weren’t filled with prehistoric creatures, and little kids couldn’t get sucked through plumbing; and the world inside my head, where all of the above were facts. I could have stepped out of the tub at any time, but I stayed there risking my life until the water had all drained and only I remained. The excitement was worth the fear.

Thanks to Mister Rogers, I mostly left that fear behind. The excitement followed me outside the tub: when I played with my Micronauts and Star Wars action figures, I wanted to be their scale, to pilot my hydrocopter, race in my landspeeder. I wanted to hold the stalk of a maple seed and let it helicopter me to the ground. And for each scenario I was tiny, I imagined another where I was the giant. I was Jet Jaguar in my snowsuit, karate-chopping icebergs out of the snowbanks in front of the VFW Hall. I was Colossal Boy stretching his legs in the hills we drove past, horses playing at my heels like buff Siamese cats. All of this was innocent enough … until Shel Silverstein.

I was probably in fourth grade when our teacher read selections of his poems to the class. She ended the lesson with “One Inch Tall,” a poem about being—you guessed it—one inch tall. After the lesson we lined up to use the bathroom before going to lunch. The kid in front of me were talking about the poems we liked. I said something along the lines of “imagine being one inch tall.” His response: “Imagine a girl putting you in her bra-a-a-a!” And that has made all the difference.

Episode Links

• “Booru”: Safebooru | Danbooru | SizeChangeBooru
• Taedis’s blog Fetish Village
• Shel Silverstein, “One Inch Tall“
• Ministry, “New World Order“