This past December, a Vice article came out titled “The Rise of ‘Giantess’ Kink, 2023’s Most-Searched Fetish.” It isn't the first time the site has covered the topic. Back in 2017 and 2016, there were two other pieces dedicated to it, titled “Inside the Often-Sexless World of Giantess Porn” and “The Men Who Want to Have Sex with Actual Giants,” respectively. Each of these articles has been written from the perspective of someone outside, looking in. A freak show for the well-to-do reader; “freaks exist in this world, and they have deigned to be visible. What can we glean from the data, why do the freaks exist, and why should I care?”
As a trans woman, I am all too familiar with this line of questioning. I will spare myself the heartache of finding contemporary examples, as I am writing this for free and more than likely preaching to the choir. The short of it is: I am such a freak, in both ways. I am a trans woman who produces and consumes “Giantess” content (more on those quotation marks later). I am visible as my gender because I am lucky enough to have community support for a mode of being that feels comfortable and natural to me. I am visible as a fetish creator because I consider what I do to be a form of artistic expression, and it is how I pay my bills. You have no obligation to care on either front, but on both I do humbly request enough grace to be treated as a person. If it isn’t your scene, I don’t blame you for leaving. But there is something of value here to a great many people, and it deserves better than a leering, curiosity piece that concludes by comforting itself about the limited reach of these freaks, whose fetish has “no reality” behind it, as it “only exists online.”
The article cites social media statistics as evidence for this conclusion of the fetish being an internet-centric phenomenon, basing it’s “Most-Searched” claim on statistics provided by amateur porn distributor Clips4Sale, and drawing some unconvincing evidence that the spike in popularity is linked directly to a TikTok trend. It should be noted that the 2017 piece also followed spikes in pornhub search results, to a similar conclusion: that Giantess fetishizers have a “shockingly massive appetite.” While the 2017 piece does offer a crumb more insight to the trends of the genre, it still manages to end on a dismissive note, centering the ravenous consumers over the producers of the content in question. Following search popularity is one way to measure the impact of a trope in a genre, but it is one that misses the forest for the lumberjacks. This most recent article contains no words from sex workers producing this content (or from consumers, for that matter, both of which were considered in the previous articles). Instead, it draws entirely from the presence of TikTok trends and Reddit communities, choosing not to delve any further than recognition of their existence before diving into armchair philosophy about the nature of the kink as a subset of femdom, with an emphasis on the dynamic between an all-powerful female Giantess, and her puny, insignificant counterpart, the tiny man. (I almost wish they had discovered the term “Mant” for this, if only to drive the dichotomy home.)
I do not wish to disparage the writer of this article too heavily. Gig writing is, as far as I am aware, a horrible and dehumanizing grind in the present day, which I have not taken the time to find any statistics on, so I will grant the benefit of doubt here. My generous opinion is that this was written by someone who was tired, worn down, and found a data point that could be extruded into a paycheck with some surface level research and correlations that sounded right. If this were the case, there would be no incentive to delve further into the nuance of this kink. Ultimately, all the article really aims to do is say “look, a data point. This term was more popular than other terms, and this is surprising, given it's something that is physically impossible.” But an opinion with minimal effort placed into it is not a neutral one. In attempting to explain the fetish, the 2023 piece uses trends as a gateway, videos “which were intended to be fun, non-sexualized contributions to the trend” tainted by “comments from men calling the women goddesses”. There is a show of innocence here, of almost indignant revulsion at the idea that some might feel a sexual response to otherwise sanitized content.
At the root of every one of these articles, there is an assumption that “Giantess” porn is made primarily for men. I acknowledge that my own personal (and overwhelmingly queer) bubble probably doesn’t represent the majority of the market value, but I still find the claim aggravatingly dismissive. The 2017 article, while offering more genuine insight into the trends of the kink, still clings to this assumption, citing a wordpress article by Dr. Mark Griffiths with the claim that “The fetish is so strong that arousal is usually triggered by size alone, to the extent that predominately gay men might find themselves turned on by giant women and predominately straight men by giant men.” There is a subtle, but vital semantic choice here. That quote comes from the Vice article, and is a paraphrasing of Griffith’s actual claim, which merely uses the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual,” never specifying the fetishist’s gender in the abstract beyond an initial appraisal that the “overwhelming majority of macrophiles are thought to be heterosexual males,” and even here, he hedges the claim behind a “thought to be.”
So how can we know the overall demographic of a community like this? It is a kink that is unattainable, and thus more difficult to express to friends and partners that might not share it. There is a fear of rejection, that something might be internally wrong with someone who engages with sex in ways their partners have no hope of fully fulfilling. Add to that a layer of people who are excluded by the dominant narrative: women who dream of being smaller, men who want to be giants, any combination of roles that don’t rigidly align to the Giantess/Tiny Man Dichotomy, and you have a recipe for underrepresentation and repression. Even if the majority of fetishists are straight men (an assumption I still have my doubts about,) it’s worth considering how heavily that narrative is enforced by sheer inaccessibility and narrative framing from thinkpieces like these.
Before we delve further, there are some terms we need to clarify, another semantic change between the Vice articles and their sources. In Griffith’s article, the word Giantess is only ever used as a shorthand for a giant woman within the context of macrophilia, the attraction to giants. That is to say, the Giantess is an archetype – a trope – not a genre (or a fetish) in and of herself. It is a search term, meant to help people find a porn category in the same way a person with a preference for fat women might look up “bbw” or a person who likes public play might search “exhibitionism.” Much like “bbw,” or “ebony,” it is an aesthetically defined term, codifying a certain type of body (albeit one that only exists in fantasy, in this case). Like “exhibitionism” or “bondage,” “Giantess” implies the macrophilia fetish because of the scenario required to involve a giant female body. It is a term that covers both a body anda scenario, making it an extremely convenient word to dump into a search box if you happen to sit in the middle of that particular venn diagram of interests.
My primary source for macro/microphilic content is twitter, namely a nebulously contained branch of it referred to as #sizetwitter, similar to other unofficial social media clusters such as the literarily leaning BookTok. When this most recent Vice article was published, many of my peers found it unsatisfying. Misinformed at best, directly insulting at worst. We are a community where “you like that, little man?” is a punchline, a cliche of the type of porn that restricts itself to the narrative where a giant woman exists solely for the pleasure of the tiny male gaze. Within this cloud of experiences, there are a multitude of identifying terms for the types of content people make or engage with. Giantess is among those of course, but other terms aim to be more inclusive in their definitions, while being less rigid and academic than anything with the suffix -philia. These include size kink, g/t, macro/micro, and more: all terms that lack the searchable specificity of “giantess,” but trade visibility for something more general, with room for giant men, tiny women, and other variations and subversions of roles. In adopting “Giantess” as the name of the kink and describing it as a type of femdom consumed by male audiences, it erases any trace it can of female pleasure, leaning on regressive notions that men are aggressors, and that women are either victims or enablers of their appetites.
I find this narrative insulting. It is one that strips women of agency or pleasure. When these articles do discuss actual porn instead of tiktok trends, they highlight experiences of non-giantess sex workers taking requests for custom content, call it “sexless” in their headlines. The only article that acknowledges female pleasure in this exchange is the 2016 piece (yes, “The Men Who Want to Have Sex with Actual Giants” has more interest in women than any piece written on the site thereafter). The deceptively titled article is framed through the experience of Katelyn Brooks, a prominent fetish model who recently passed down ownership of the image sharing website giantessbooru (now rebranding to sizechangebooru, a change that I hope comes with other serious changes to how it treats the art it hosts, but that’s a story for another time).
It is perhaps the most honest of the articles in attempting to understand the fetish, citing the same Griffiths’ essay on macrophilia as the 2017 piece, and with more direct quoting rather than paraphrasing. In it, Katelyn and two of her followers, referred to as Mark and Semeraz, share their stories of sexual awakenings regarding the kink. Katelyn envisions herself a trailblazer, emphasizing how when she first engaged with the fetish, her sexuality was doubted by her male peers as “the only girl who had come out of the closet with the giantess fetish.” This framing depicts her as an anomaly, the one girl in a fetish community who actually wanted to be there, who eventually worked herself up to a point of ubiquity, with a website devoted to the worship of her that she runs as a full-time job. Despite pointing out that she is bisexual, no female followers of hers are interviewed, reinforcing her role as the archetype for pleasure in the macrophile woman. She fits all the boxes the later articles use to define the fetish, (save that she actually takes pleasure in it). A woman who prefers to be over 100 feet tall, who enjoys complete domination and control over her subject.
This is not a narrative of empowerment. Even when acknowledging Katelyn’s pleasure, Vice makes her the exception to the rule. As with the later articles, it attempts to reinforce status-quo with its conclusion, questioning whether her job as a sex worker interferes with her finding a real-life (read, normal) relationship, to which she replies “it's one of the best feelings in the world when my labors of love give someone else the feeling of sexual and emotional fulfillment,” followed up by a decontextualized, "I hope to give the same feeling to a special someone someday." The framing here implies a transient nature to her work, and by extension the fetish it centers around. Even when a woman enjoys the way a paraphilia interacts with her life, she is still expected to eventually bring it down to earth, to something more “realistic,” away from the bizarre spectacle of things that only exist on the internet.
And once more, where is queer pleasure, in this narrative? Even a bisexual woman is presented only as an obsession of strange men, and again, this insistence of the “giantess fetish” as a thing interchangeable with macrophilia. Across all of these articles, the pull to the term “giantess” is inescapable. There is a cyclical gravity to it. It rose to prominence as a combination of convenience as a search term and branding for the sex workers it applies to. Other terms are less reliable and less specific, so “giantess” became the de-facto representative for macrophilia in content statistics, so when it breaches the point of popularity where it makes an easy headline, unwitting writers do a few quick searches, find giantess-centric macrophile porn in spaces that weren’t shaped for queer sexuality, and apply the obvious, persistent narrative: there are men who dream of female dominance, and some of them leave weird comments on tiktok trends.
My personal experience with size-based sex work has been one of overcoming shame. I came out as transgender several years before I would have considered talking to anyone I knew about my kinks. To exist as a woman was daunting, but attainable with the amount of social privilege and support that I had. But to exist as a woman with sexual desire? A transgender woman with unorthodox sexual desire? We live in a culture that actively rejects such things, that takes a study of a kink and makes it fit narratives where men exploit women to fulfill their strange desires. I feared I would be seen as such, a boundary transgressing freak who should know better than to let the world see such things. I tried to be unimposing, all these desires and emotional needs bubbling away while I tried to be one of the good ones. It made me distant in my relationships, it left me turning in bed thinking I was broken, that all I could do was hide this brokenness so it would touch as few people as possible. Eventually, it became unbearable. It came out in ways that were messy and more personal than I care to share, but in the aftermath, I grew closer with my romantic partners. My fascination with size differences were not just sexual, but I avoided talking about any interests or ideas that might lead back to it, and slowly those parts of me began to unfurl.
Last year, I took this further, turning to online sex work when a host of other factors made regular employment unsustainable. For the first few months it felt… aimless. Posting the occasional nude, doing my best to avoid the less conventional aspects, struggling to display the proper arousal in content that I assumed would net a wider audience. A few months in, I begrudgingly revamped an old twitter account of mine that hadn’t gained much following. I had fallen out of touch with the platform, especially as it began its rebranding under new leadership. It felt like a ship about to sink but hey, it was the only place with any traction that still allowed for nudity. I still used it to find porn, maybe I’d wind up on someone’s algorithm. I still barely touched it, just crossposting whatever I threw up for free on my fansly or tumblr. Then, on a whim, I started adding the #sizetwitter tag to a few of my low angle shots. I had no following, so I felt less exposed, and in the burst bubble of post-covid sex work, I figured I might have a chance carving out a niche if I marked myself as open to fetish work.
I was not prepared for the response. Suddenly, models and artists I’d been observing in silence began to follow me back, held conversations with me, shared my stuff to wider audiences. What surprised me most was how genuinely warm the reception felt. Messages from other trans women who loved what I was making, heartfelt encouragement from other models, and above all, I was genuinely enjoying what I was making. I’d expected sex work to be a stop-gap until I could find more respectable work. I’d expected to perform for men I wasn’t interested in, who didn’t care about me past my body. Now, I find myself making content I’m excited for, always trying to find ways to bring new techniques to my craft, and exchanging ideas with so many queer people of every gender and size inclination you could think of. I love what I do. I think giant women are hot, and I’m happy to be one. I think tiny women are adorable, and I’m happy to be one with the right people.
I don’t personally vibe with the term “Giantess.” It has baggage for me. At a personal level, it is the term associated with the stuff I never thought I’d see myself in: heterocentric and gender-essentialist, a medium where a cliche “shrinking virus that only affects men” would have to decide to puzzle out what to do with me, relegating me to a box that would never feel quite right. Unfair generalization, maybe. But there’s a community around me that feels genuinely warm and uplifting, where creativity flourishes hand in hand with identity and expression, and no matter how small that subset of size fetishists might be, I think we deserve better than the occasional ogling brought on by a spike in search term popularity. Next time someone checks in on us freaks to see what we’re up to, I hope they’ll look closer at some of those tiny little data points and see us when we wave back at them.