There is an attraction in the colossal, and a singular delight to which ordinary theories of art are scarcely applicable.
Gustave Eiffel
Good day, class. Thank you for settling down quickly. We have a lot to discuss, so let’s not waste any time. Welcome to Macrophilia 101. Yes, you in the front, what is your question? No, this is definitely not Macroeconomics; that’s down the hall. You don’t need to apologize; it was an honest mistake.
Anybody else? No? Good.
Now, as I was saying, this is Macrophilia 101: Introduction to Macrophilia, and I am your professor,
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. I’m not surprised to see that most in the audience are guys, but ladies are always a welcome sight here, even though, in my dream world, you would not attend this college. No, I didn’t say not attend
any college; I don’t think women are inferior to men. On the contrary, I wish you gals were so physically
superior to men that you couldn’t fit your heads, much less your entire bodies, through the doors of these puny buildings. Personally, I like to imagine your knees rising above the trees outside the window—and remember that we’re in a third-story classroom. By now, I’m sure some of you unfamiliar with macrophilia are asking
why I (and, as it turns out, many others) desire such a seemingly odd thing, and answering that question—explaining why, as Gustave Eiffel’s quote on the chalkboard states, there is an attraction in the colossal, focusing especially on colossal women—is part of what I hope to do today. So, without further ado, let’s begin.
Yes, this is a sexual education class, but it isn’t the stuff your mommy and daddy learned when they were in elementary school. All of you saw the GC (graphic content) rating when you signed up for this course, so I’m assuming you know we’re into much more advanced subjects than what penises and vaginas are. If those words still make you giggle, then consider following your colleague to Macroeconomics. Also, if you are a religious fundamentalist or some other person whose myopic view of the world won’t allow you to understand so-called “unnatural” concepts, then I think it’s best for you to leave now. If you wish to tell me about how my thoughts are perverted and unhealthy, then don’t waste your time and energy—or mine, for that matter. If you are curious, have an open mind, and want to delve deeper into the human psyche, however, then I think this will be a very enlightening experience for you. I have encountered several other discussions of macrophilia in the obscure depths of the Internet, so few people—if any—who have read them were not already familiar with the concept. As a respected author on Writing.Com, I am writing this article not just for my own interests but also to bring about a greater understanding and awareness of macrophilia in mainstream society. Even though I live with these feelings every day, I can’t say I have it all figured out, so these are just my views; I don’t speak for the entire community. Pondering how so many people in all areas of the world—I’ve talked to macrophiles from such varied places as England, Italy, and even
Iran—independently discover such an incredibly obscure and, on the surface, bizarre fascination, I can’t help but think there is more at work here than any of us can imagine. Considering that, if you’re a macrophile, then I’ll be glad if my own thoughts make you understand yours even slightly better.
To the untrained eye, there appears to be no hint of the existence of macrophilia in popular culture, but its presence is far more pervasive than those who are unaware of it realize. Anyone who has so much as skimmed the listing of Interactive Stories on Writing.Com has probably noted the overwhelming number of them that feature titles and brief descriptions with “vore,” “shrink,” “giantess,” and similar words, but giants are also a common theme in mainstream literature, cinema, and television, even if that fascination is non-sexual and/or subconscious. I will be referring to some examples of these huge beings—though you can spend many hours checking out the material in the Mainstream Media Database at Giantess.Net, found by clicking
here and then clicking on the link that appears—as well as highlighting some of the giants of the macrophile community. (Sorry; that was just a bit of macrophile humor there.)
Last but certainly not least, I will use my novel,
Quorilax, which can be found
here , to aid in my discussion. I’m proud of the story and certainly like to talk about it, though I discuss it here because it deals with themes common to many macrophile stories, some of which I reference as well within the body of the essay, but my own work is in the majority, seeing as how I’m intimately familiar with it and it has played an integral role in helping me to discover the deeper meanings behind my macrophilia. Although I will be using excerpts from all four quarters of the story, you will not have to worry about too much in the way of spoilers. If even after reading this essay you decide that
Quorilax is not your thing, then I’ve compiled a list of some of my favorite macrophile tales and other essays and articles on the subject at the end of this piece.
Unlike my twelfth-grade History teacher, who felt the best way to learn about the twentieth-century United States was to start with the Vietnam War and work backwards to the Spanish-American War, I opt for the traditional approach to storytelling: progressing from beginning to end. The tale of my experience with macrophilia will be no different.
When I was very young, barely into elementary school and maybe even before, I noticed something rather curious. Whenever I viewed a gigantic being of some sort on the television, in a movie, or anywhere else, I would become sexually aroused. One of my very first memories of this was the movie
King Kong. As soon as I saw the enormous ape clutch Fay Wray in his hand, I was instantly mesmerized. I was too young to have much understanding of these feelings; I just felt them and didn’t ask questions. Like many young boys, I was and still am fascinated with dinosaurs, being completely awestruck by the power of these grand, majestic juggernauts.
There are some creatures that interest boys more than dinosaurs, however, and those beings are known as girls. I have always been somewhat mature for my age, so even during the period in which cooties are the most contagious, I had thoughts of the fairer sex on my mind, experiencing my first kiss on the lips in second grade. I was generally the tallest boy in my classes during elementary school, but at this point, girls were taller than boys, so there were often two or three females in each grade who rose past me. Once again, I found their height strangely alluring.
It was in the winter of my seventh-grade year—February of 1996, when I was twelve years old—that the real breakthrough came: the
Gulliver’s Travels miniseries on NBC. During the first part of the story, Gulliver found himself washed ashore in Lilliput, which was inhabited by people exactly like him aside from the fact that they were only several inches tall. I enjoyed this chapter in his saga, but the best was yet to come. When he arrived in the land of Brobdingnag, he was thrust into the opposite position. An enormous farmer captured Gulliver and brought him back to his house. Giant men sire giant daughters, and his was Glumdalclitch, an eleven-year-old girl who towered dozens of feet above the ones I knew in elementary school. I would have found her attractive as a human of normal proportions; however, since she had been transformed into a titan through the magic of television, she was downright captivating. Whenever she was on the screen—particularly at the same time as Gulliver, when I could see just how much she dwarfed him and therefore would have dwarfed me—I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
The voyage to Brobdingnag only accounted for a quarter of the length of
Gulliver’s Travels, so I was pried away from Glum all too soon. I wanted to see more of her, though, so I went to search the Internet, whose mainstream use was a pretty recent phenomenon at that point in time. Still, it was not long before I discovered her identity and found pictures from her role in Gulliver’s Travels. Whenever my parents weren’t home, I would go online and peruse the gallery of stills. There was nothing pornographic about the pictures; since they were from the show, they were completely wholesome. I still felt embarrassed about my desires, however, so I wanted to keep them as closely guarded as possible; thus, I learned very quickly how to erase my tracks on the Internet.
Soon, seeing Glum alone was not enough. I wanted to see more, so I attempted to probe into the deepest recesses of the Internet, trying to find more pictures of giant girls and women. After many hard hours of searching, I eventually came upon the key word: giantess, sometimes abbreviated as GTS. Although the word “giant” is used in many more contexts than simply giant people, consequently not always leading to the desired outcome, the word “giantess” refers specifically to a female of gargantuan proportions. After noticing many sites devoted specifically to this subject, I started to recognize that I was not alone in my enthrallment with them. This notion was confirmed when, one day, I stumbled upon the term for a person like me:
macrophile.
It was disarmingly simple, yet until one finds this word, one would never expect their thoughts to be shared by others and merit a term to describe them. “Macro” means large and “phile” means lover; therefore, macrophiles are lovers of largeness. This doesn’t refer to girth, as macrophiles generally gravitate toward a body figure of healthy weight, but the height of at least one of the parties involved is wildly out of proportion with his or her environment. A giant could weigh thousands of times more than the people around her, but that’s because she is many magnitudes taller. A macrophile enjoys the thought of being the smaller party in this relationship, and a microphile, conversely, would fantasize about being on the larger end of the spectrum, but the term “macrophile” is often used to encompass both tastes, whereas the same can’t be said for “microphile,” in the same way that a giant could be male or female but a giantess can only be female. Although the specific attributes and preferences of members of the macrophile community are incredibly diverse, I have seen several distinct patterns emerge among its members, which I will briefly discuss after I list them:
Most macrophiles are male
Most macrophiles fantasize about giantesses
Most macrophiles have fantasies that involve violence and domination
Some macrophiles are podophiles (aroused by feet, often crushing people or objects)
Some macrophiles are vorarephiles (aroused by creatures, including people, being eaten alive)
Some macrophiles are anthropomorphiles (aroused by anthropomorphic animals)
Earth has no giants, much to macrophiles’ dismay. While I’m more attracted than the average person to real women taller than I am, true macrophilia hinges on being at the absolute whim and mercy of the larger party, requiring the size disparity to be more than a couple inches, even more than a foot or two, and no woman who has ever lived has been that much taller than I. The most popular relative scale, in my experiences, is one that makes the smaller person handheld; that is, the giant can fit the lower body and most of the torso of the comparatively tiny person in one of her fists, usually meaning that she’s between about 50 and 150 feet tall or, if she’s normal size, then the smaller person is several inches in height, though she can still pick a person up with one hand when there is less difference. When we’re being spoiled by the presence of these women as tall as office towers, it’s easy to forget that even ten feet tall is really, really big. A “petite” 5’0” tall, 100-pound girl, for example, would tip the scales at 800 pounds if her height just doubled and she maintained her proportions, possibly prompting us to change the phrase “800-pound gorilla in the room” to “800-pound girl in the room.” From her new perspective, a 200-pound man would feel like 25 pounds, easily scooped up in her arms.
There are a few ways for an unaltered picture to give the illusion that someone is a giant. The simplest is point of view (POV), in which the angle of the shot and the position from which it’s taken create the illusion that everything is many times taller. It’s like the view you’d have lying flat on your back, except if you glimpse such a picture when you’re
not lying on your back, you feel as if you’re craning your neck to look up. The television series
Land of the Giants used this method quite often, the camera usually filming the “Giant” characters from around their feet, as “Little People” like us would view them, but also sometimes filming our fellow Littles from dozens of feet above, giving us a “Giant’s-eye view.” In a setting where our two races of such different scales were otherwise identical, a simple camera angle let us know at a glance who towered and who cowered without the special effects expense of constant side-by-side comparisons.
Another trick is forced perspective, which essentially involves playing with depth perception. For example, we’ve all probably seen pictures of tourists who appear to be holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa. We know, of course, that these are not really giants in our midst but normal-sized people taking advantage of the fact that objects appear smaller the farther away they are. An ad campaign for the Jeep Patriot gave some people the power to make this illusion of a size difference into reality. In one of the spots, a woman is camping with some men who decide to sneak out of the tent and take an early morning canoe trip without her. She wakes up and drives after them, eventually stopping at a place where there is a wolf on the opposite side of the river. At that distance, the wolf seems smaller than her hand, and likewise, to the wolf, she would appear bite size. However, when the woman closes one eye, hindering her depth perception, and then brings her fingers to the wolf, it is as if the wolf is right in front of her, because she is able to pluck it up like it’s a mouse. One can only imagine the animal’s view as it writhes helplessly between the digits of the woman who is somehow still on the other side of the river, the same size as always. The wolf’s wild ride ends, however, when she sets it in the boys’ canoe at its normal size, prompting them to abandon ship. Of course, one wonders why she didn’t leave the poor wolf out of her plan for revenge and just lift the canoe itself from the waters, carrying the vessel and its two stupefied sailors back to her voluminous vehicle, where they would remark on its roominess from their perch in a cup holder.
Point of view and forced perspective have their limits, however, so it’s most common and satisfying to experience visual macrophilia through drawings, computer graphics, or combining elements from different photos to create artificial collages. The altered pictures will either involve tiny people, thereby rendering the person of normal proportions a giant, or they will involve people of greatly magnified dimensions in a world of those who are traditionally sized.
A simple possible explanation for whether we would lean more toward macrophilia or microphilia involves our personality. If we have a passive demeanor, then we will fantasize about placing ourselves at the will of the giant; if we have an assertive attitude, on the other hand, then we will take pleasure in the idea of being able to control others. I saw someone once write that he preferred males to be giants or females to be small, as this enhanced the sex’s masculinity and femininity, respectively. To me, this seems to just enforce the traditional stereotypes of gender roles, since the implication is that being feminine is synonymous with being passive and weak. Females are portrayed as defenseless damsels in distress who do nothing but scream in the hope they’ll be rescued by a mighty male who takes charge of the situation.
However, a wee woman should not automatically be passed off as a helpless weakling; in fact, the truth can be quite the opposite. After all, sometimes the people with the least power—physical, social, or both—are the strongest in character. Just as I will have a special admiration for a person who achieves financial success despite being born into poverty, I would feel extraordinary respect for a person who has the wits and courage to persevere on this world at only inches in height. This isn’t to say I would
disrespect anyone simply for being born wealthy instead of poor or for growing up to be over five feet tall instead of under five inches; indeed, given a choice between the two options in each case, I think all of us would pick the former. However, the simple fact of life is that we don’t get a choice in the hand we’re dealt, so some have to struggle more than others through no fault of their own. I would agree that a woman being tiny can showcase her femininity after all…if by feminine you mean that she stands up for herself and refuses to be taken advantage of by the giants who look down on her, mocking her as “inferior” even though they wouldn’t last a day at her size.
However, throughout the entirety of human history, male has been the physically—and hence socially—dominant sex, and the scenario described above, of an inches-tall lady trying to make her way in a land of giants, is simply an exaggeration of the way things have been and still are in the real world. At least in Western society, gender roles are less prominently segregated today than in the past, but even in our more enlightened era, women still often have to work harder than men to achieve equal power and respect. I don’t need to see a miniature female overcoming her stature disadvantage to be reminded of women’s inner strength; instead, I prefer women to be the giants, giving them the opportunity to be large and in charge for once. This flies in the face of human evolution, shaking up the status quo and creating new and intriguing circumstances, and I’m sure this novelty is a very large factor in why most macrophiles are male.
As I scanned various images across the Internet, I saw a recurring theme surface time and again: many of them depicted violence and domination. The giantesses would often be portrayed as goddesses, who were to be unswervingly worshipped by their subjects. If someone wavered in their undying devotion, and probably even if he didn’t, he would be subject to her wrath, usually distributed in one of two ways. First, she could step on them, crushing them beneath her tremendous weight; and secondly, she could place them in her mouth and consume them. Knowing this, it is no surprise that podophilia and vorarephilia are two of the foremost sub-fetishes under the canopy of macrophilia. If a man were in the presence of a giantess, he would literally be at her feet, which helps to explain why they would be the major focus of many macrophiles. As for the mouth, that fixation is slightly more elusive, but the predatory-prey dynamic that can arise from such scenarios may have something to do with it. I’ll go into slightly more depth about that later.
I was introduced to the wide world of macrophilia through graphic media, and for a long time, this was the only way I attempted to experience it. Soon, however, I began to examine the assorted macrophile “literature” that was available. Take note of the quotation marks around the word “literature,” for you will now come to see that I use the term
very loosely. There was a trivial amount of thought put into the bulk of these stories. I’m not saying that they needed to be worthy of the Nobel Prize; what bothered me were the clichéd scenarios and unrealistic characters.
Imagine, for instance, that you are a teenage male who has found himself shrunken in a girl’s bedroom. Upon noticing this, what would you expect her to do? Scream? Faint? Scream and then faint? Nope. As though the site of a quarter-foot-tall boy is commonplace, she skips right over the initial reaction phase and proceeds to tell you to grovel at her feet like the worthless bug you are, and you “reluctantly” obey after putting up a half-hearted “struggle.” Once she has had her fill of that, she might “make” you suck on her nipples. Eventually, after she tires of you, she “forces” you to pleasure her. You know what I mean. At last, since you serve no other purpose to her any longer, she’ll eat you just for the hell of it.
I don’t believe I’ve seen a story that follows this example precisely, but it’s a mélange of events from many of the first macrophile stories I read. What would a believable character have done in this situation? Well, even if she didn’t faint or scream—which are somewhat clichéd female responses themselves—she would certainly experience an initial shock upon seeing a three-inch-tall human, for there are about as many of them in the world as there are Dodo birds. Once she regained her composure, the first thing she would inquire about would surely be the circumstances of his shrinking. Usually, when such information is included in the story, it will be something along the lines of a chemical or a ray gun a la
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Wouldn’t she call the lab that patented the chemical or manufactured the ray gun to see whether she could help him? Whatever they did, and whether or not the effort was successful, the two would hopefully have some revelations from the experience, which would bring them closer together, inciting the development of some form of relationship…you get the picture.
Then again, it isn’t out of the question that someone could act in the same manner as the girl whom I outlined two paragraphs above. People have classified others as subhuman for other poor reasons, namely ethnicity. What could possibly possess her to treat him in such a sadistic, malicious manner? Perhaps she has been continuously taken advantage of and mistreated by males, possibly even raped and sexually abused, and has in the process classified all males as scum. Now, when she finds one at her mercy, regardless of his innocence, she unleashes the entirety of her resentment upon him, making him suffer all the pain she has experienced and reducing him to nothing, just as she has always been made to feel. Even if this explanation doesn’t satisfy you, the fact of the matter is that
there is an explanation. The central trouble with many of the stories lies in the fact that the characters and their actions seem unbelievably dissimilar to conventional human character, and nothing is done to make you believe. That ruins the illusion for me. I can suspend my disbelief that people are shrinking and growing in the first place, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still want believable characters.
Even if the tiny person weren’t human, one would tend to think that any “intelligent” being would deserve to be treated no differently than we treat our own kind, regardless of size. We haven’t had to deal with this issue thus far, but I would not put it out of the realm of possibility. I think the chances are nearly 100% that life exists elsewhere in the Universe and almost as high that at least one “intelligent” species is among the biodiversity, but whether we will ever meet each other in the vast cosmos is more uncertain. Another uncertainty is the size that creatures on other planets would achieve. Frankly, I think extraterrestrial people that average a height roughly equal to humans would be a rare coincidence, not what we should expect. On Earth alone, organisms range in size from microscopic bacteria to blue whales that can achieve lengths around 100 feet. Even if creatures on another planet come in a similar range of sizes, the people may fall into a different area of that spectrum. If the dinosaurs hadn’t gone extinct 65 million years ago, for example, would giant lizard people now thunder across the globe? Alternatively to that, the size of people on another planet compared to the other animals there could be similar in
relative terms, but the length of the overall spectrum may be stretched or compressed. What really makes size an intriguing trait to me is that if, say, an extraterrestrial species transmitted to us a picture of what they look like before we ever met them in person, we’d know every aspect of their appearance…except how large they are, because we would have no reference for scale. We may not even think about their size, too busy marveling at how they seem “just like us.”
And perhaps we are just like each other on our own isolated worlds, but what happens when the first visiting spacecraft lands on Earth and the people who step out of it are dozens of feet tall? Our new “allies” would probably assume the role of our new masters the moment they spot us gaping up at them from around their feet. Size is probably the only attribute that, all else equal, can mean the difference between whether someone is hailed as a god or reviled as vermin. Their physical dominance, of course, is not part of some supernatural plan, proof that they are a favored race blessed with great size to exert their will over us weaker beings; the disparity would merely be a result of creatures from systems developing separately for millions or even billions of years being extremely imbalanced in power upon coming together, something that’s completely beyond our control. Evolution is not a conscious force, and even if it were, it couldn’t predict that people so much larger than our current size existed elsewhere in the Universe, let alone that we’d ever meet them. Even if
we knew of them well in advance, it’s not as if we could have just “bred” ourselves to a comparable stature to defend ourselves against a possible invasion. The tables could just as easily have been turned, in which case the marooned occupants of a miniature spaceship that crash landed on Earth would struggle to survive among creatures like dogs, cats, raccoons, and spiders, which are largely harmless to humans but would be terrifying, deadly beasts to anyone only inches tall. None of those animals could understand and sympathize with the plight of these pint-size people who were the dominant species on their own planet yet poorly adapted for encounters with the Earth fauna that had achieved such comparatively grand statures without them.
I think others share my fascination with this phenomenon of relativity, because I’ve seen a number of stories featuring the premise of two people corresponding by forms of telecommunication such as phone, email, or even seeing each other via videophone or Web cam, realizing when they finally meet in the flesh that a vast height difference exists between them. How cruel would it be for interplanetary pen pals to think they’d met their soul mate, only to find out, after crossing the stars to meet, just how star crossed they are, because one is the size of a flea to the other? Love feels more intense when it’s forbidden or it has other obstacles to overcome, so when the one standing between you and your beloved is not merely your mother or potential mother-in-law but rather
mother nature, as if the Universe itself had decided you weren’t meant to coexist by putting you in such mismatched bodies, I find that very poignant. I think this greater sense of a relationship “never meant to be” is a major reason I prefer scenarios featuring characters born at different sizes instead of at least one of them changing size.
It’s hard to imagine that beings of such different sizes could be anything alike. After all, what could an enormous elephant and a miniscule mouse have in common when they occupy such different places in the hierarchy of life? In genetic terms, however, mice and elephants are probably more closely related than you’d expect, and another small rodent called the rock hyrax might be the elephant’s closest extant relative of all. Clearly, major changes in size can occur without major changes in a genome, so beings living in bodies of radically disparate scales can be much the same on the inside—not merely in mental and emotional terms, but in the most profound biological sense. It’s impossible to predict whether a lineage will shrink or grow from the size of its ancestor and by how much, though there seems to have been a general trend toward growth in the past, as with the reptilian dinosaurs and, much more recently, mammalian megafauna such as elephant-sized sloths and bear-sized beavers. Could natural history repeat itself, and would humans grow gargantuan as well? It’s a bit surreal to think that, in the distant future, a college student could be mistaken for a modern co-ed if she didn’t stand several times taller and complain about “suffocating” in dorm rooms with as much square footage as a present day family’s home. Then again, our descendants may just as easily descend in height to the point that an entire college campus could be built over an area the size of that same family’s backyard.
It’s common for me to watch a show featuring enormous and miniscule beings and wonder whether someone involved in its creation was a macrophile. One case where this seems particularly likely is the series
The Twilight Zone, which, in addition to its famous episode teaching us that beauty is in the eye of beholder, includes at least four episodes that I know of featuring giant—or is it tiny?—people, demonstrating that what is big and what is small are equally a matter of perspective. Say that we’re watching over a girl’s shoulder as she grinds a bug into her kitchen floor. Most of us will think nothing of that, but if we’re with a young mother as she witnesses her husband flattened beneath the foot of a giantess, we’ll be horrified. However, these two scenarios I posited are, in fact, the same scenario seen from two different altitudes. We naturally identify with the person at our level, but the “bugs” on that young lady’s floor may be Earthlings, meaning we’re looking down from hundreds of feet in the air, and the person we considered a “girl next door” actually has a pinky toe the size of the house next door. Or perhaps the “giantess” is someone we’d consider “petite,” but the man trying to find a crumb of food to feed his growing family is an alien only millimeters high. This trick is the closest you can get to true empathy, and it goes to show that you should be careful what you step on—and how you judge those who aren’t. There’s not much that can make you see the world from a different perspective better than, quite literally, seeing it from a different physical perspective.
It’s this relativity that
The Twilight Zone exploited to shock us, tricking us into thinking that Earthlings are giants in one episode when it’s quite the opposite (“The Invaders”), that Earthlings are tiny in another episode when it’s quite the opposite (“The Fear”), and in a third episode show that Earthlings can be giant and tiny all at once (“The Little People”). In the fourth episode I have in mind (“Stopover in a Quiet Town”), we turn out to be tiny, but the “Twilight Zone” moment comes when that is revealed at the end of the episode. In some cases, a plot depends on Earthlings being indistinguishable from the aliens, except in terms of size. But what about an episode like “Stopover,” in which a striking resemblance isn’t required? The aliens could have been hideous behemoths, but instead, we see an Earthling couple plucked up by a very humanoid young girl, whose thumbnail is as long as they are tall, and her mother stands behind her with a hand on her shoulder, surveying the little creatures cupped in her daughter’s palm. Even when she leans forward, the woman’s body above her breasts rises out of the frame, so we don’t see her face, lending her the aura of a goddess in the clouds, though it’s safe to assume that if she weren’t of a height that would make her visible on Earthly skylines, she could be similarly mistaken for one of the women in the “skyscrapers” around her. We hope the child’s attitude toward the Earthlings is merely a result of being too young to know better, and that her mother will step in as the moral authority to tell her that these people are practically tiny versions of themselves, not toys to handle as she pleases, but our only hopes for a savior are dashed when the mammoth mama tells her daughter she can resume playing with her new pets after lunch.
I’m sure part of the reason for their resemblance to us is that it was much easier to just use the actresses as they were, clothed in Sunday dresses instead of cheesy costumes, but I think there’s more to it than that. I’d venture to say that the more a giant looks like someone we’d see in our own society, the more we identify with them and believe they should empathize with us, and the greater sense of injustice we would feel at being treated as something less. So when the Earthling couple is stumbling around in the palm of a giggling child with curly brown hair and a cherub face, it’s very easy to be angered at their insensitivity to our struggles, to wonder how they can see us beings who look exactly like them—even if that takes a magnifying glass to realize—and not think,
What if that were me? This also works the opposite way, making it simple for us to imagine ourselves as the giants we’re so quick to judge and forcing us to take a look at how we’ve acted, and would act, toward comparatively helpless beings, whose viewpoint we can now understand. The fact that the “superior” people in this episode are two females, including a “little” girl, further highlights the dramatic shift in power. Their position of authority, especially over a man, could be seen as a symbol of female empowerment in the era of women’s liberation. I think it’s more than coincidence that the 1960s (and late 1950s) saw an explosion of giant women in media, from
Attack of the 50-Foot Woman to
Village of the Giants to BF Goodrich’s Miss Radial Age.
In the
Gulliver’s Travels miniseries, I see some notable departures from the book in relation to female Brobdingnagians. One is that Glum’s age is raised from nine to eleven, and the actress was actually thirteen at the time. Her sexual attraction to Gulliver is evident, especially once she reveals she hopes to bear offspring by him. “If we’re married, we’ll have children, won’t we?” she asks, as if she’d already planned her life as Mrs. Gulliver and accepted all the times she would have to tell their daughter, “Honey, your father is not a doll.” In addition to Gulliver already being married, the other reason he rejects the idea is that Glum is too young for them to be together—he doesn’t seem to mind that she’s thousands of time his size! As for the matter of Glum’s age, an adult involving himself with a girl that age in our society would be charged with statutory rape, but girls reach emotional and sexual maturity at different points, making the “age of consent” somewhat variable and arbitrary to begin with, and if the minor were a giant, the concept loses almost all meaning. One can hardly call an adult a “predator” when his “prey” could kill him with a gentle squeeze of her hand. Similarly, you would never hear a girl—especially one living centuries ago—speaking as directly as Glum did to Gulliver if not for the tremendous difference in scale, but her overwhelming size advantage understandably imbues her with an extreme sense of confidence. A change in respective sizes completely alters the dynamic of a relationship. Titanic teens are, from a little person’s perspective, just as powerful and majestic as their adult counterparts, which is the reason I believe it’s not uncommon to see them as the subjects of macrophilia.
Another difference I noticed in the miniseries is that a queen replaces a king as the prominent Brobdingnagian royalty, and with the entourage of ladies-in-waiting following her everywhere, Gulliver is constantly surrounded by towering women but few such men, while in Lilliput it seems the opposite. Just as we scorn the tiny Lilliputians for going to war over a matter as “small” as which end of an egg to crack, laughing at them like they’re stupid little animals fighting completely meaningless and insignificant battles at the feet of us “superior” beings, Swift intended for the Brobdingnagians’ physical dominance to mirror their moral supremacy over Gulliver’s petty society. Think about how the message would be totally lost if our lands had become theaters in a war between the Brobdingnagians and another nation of giants. It wouldn’t matter how trivial the reason for fighting; I doubt any of us would be laughing once horses hundreds of hands high began thundering across England, devouring forests like blades of grass when they weren’t smashing houses and squashing citizens beneath their mighty hooves—a less humiliating fate than drowning in urine or suffocating beneath a mound of feces when the stately steeds’ excretions fell from the sky, to be sure. In the miniseries, it is not a king but the queen of Brobdingnag who calls us “the most pernicious race of odious little vermin that ever nature suffered to crawl upon the face of the Earth”—which wouldn’t have nearly the same effect if it weren’t uttered by someone who could have killed Gulliver with a swat of her hand or a stomp of her foot, like he was a mosquito or roach—and perhaps this change is a subtle implication that a matriarchal society would surpass the male-dominated one we know. I’ve always wondered how the world would change if men collectively shrunk to a few inches—or even a few feet—in height, prompting women to take charge. To say that all women would join hands and start singing Kumbaya is unrealistic, but I do think the incidence of war and crime, especially violent crime, would drop precipitously. After all, women do go to prison, but males outnumber females in the incarcerated population by an egregious ratio, around 25 to 1, which, considering the availability of weapons, can’t be passed off as a result of weaker women being less physically able to commit crimes. Beyond that, I have to wonder whether some women’s behavior is influenced by living in “a man’s world,” where they feel the need to be more aggressive, whether physically or socially, to compete and earn respect. In a world where women wear the pants—and the skirts, for that matter—I do think, as a general rule, they would prove to be more diplomatic leaders and more merciful toward their significantly weaker male counterparts, demonstrating that women are the fairer sex in more than just appearance.
I’ve even wondered whether Jonathan Swift himself was a macrophile.
Gulliver’s Travels is one of the greatest books in history, yet even within these legendary pages, particularly in “Part II: A Voyage to Brobdingnag,” one will find several ribald descriptions, but none of them compare to the following, which is found in Book V:
The handsomest among these Maids of Honour, a pleasant frolicksome Girl of sixteen, would sometimes set me astride upon one of her Nipples; with many other Tricks, wherein the Reader will excuse me for not being over particular.
Honestly, if Jonathan Swift saw fit to have Gulliver relate being set “astride upon one of her Nipples,” it seems as though the only potential actions for which he would reserve mention are contact with the primary sexual organs: vaginal insertion or oral sex.
Of course, there was no chance that anyone living in his proper society would ever reveal such personal information publically. Had it not been for the Internet, I and many other unknowing macrophiles would probably never have undergone our voyage of self-discovery, so it is unlikely anyone at that time even realized the widespread nature of their feelings. The inspiration behind Charles Baudelaire’s poem “The Giantess,” however, seems much less ambiguous. It was originally written in French, so there are various translations into English.
Here is one of them:
In times when Nature, filled with fervor limitless,
Conceived and brought to birth many a monstrous child,
I fain had dwelt anigh to some young giantess,
Even as lies a cat, voluptuous and mild,
At a queen's feet. Full happily I would have seen
Her soul and body burgeoning in dreadful games;
Divining if her heart behind the matutine
Mists of her eyes concealed a sun of somber flames.
I would have roamed her mighty rondures at mine ease;
Crawled on the thighward slope of her enormous knees;
Or when at whiles, by summer-swollen suns oppressed,
She laid along the field her weary hugeness down,
I would have slumbered in the shadow of one breast
As at a mountain's foot a still and peaceful town.
God, this is turning me on! Let’s get back on track—quickly.
In stories revolving around size differences, violence and domination could easily result. Violence and domination, or at least the threat of them, can and often should be part of a story. After all, the hero needs to go through some sort of harrowing ordeal, whether by the elements, giant animals, or giant people, before we can cheer as he returns to the embrace of his love’s waiting arms—er…fingers. However, few if any people are just “born evil,” and even if someone is born evil, villains who are just evil without any indication of something that led them down that path usually aren’t very satisfying, so if someone is knowingly responsible for the suffering of a tiny person, there should be motivation for the mistreatment. If people of the same stature who would live together as equals under normal circumstances, especially supposed friends, suddenly find their sizes altered, I simply can’t fathom all the larger ones starting to mistreat their smaller counterparts without any hesitation or reservations—if not for any noble reasons, then at least because they can’t be sure they’ll stay that size forever. After all, if you suddenly grew, you could suddenly return to normal too, and then the people you’d terrorized without fear of repercussion wouldn’t be so helpless anymore. While even this may not deter some, they’d be the exception, not the norm. The most interesting stories, in my view, involve a balance of hospitable and hostile giants. Of course, this often isn’t the case, and repeatedly seeing stories filled with indiscriminately violent females who nonchalantly say, “Oh, look, I’m a giantess; you all go squish now,” is tiring. The woman is portrayed as little more than mountainous breasts and a cavernous vagina, and in the case of podophiles and vorarephiles, thunderous feet and a gaping maw, respectively. Unnecessary aspects of the female sex, such as personality, are excluded. (If you had a sarcasm detector, it would have just overloaded and exploded.)
Although placing females in such positions would, at first glance, appear to glorify and exalt them, that is not necessarily the case. Bowing down before someone purely because of her sexual magnificence and the fact that her size intimidates you into submission does
not imply respect; in fact, it is often the complete opposite. The female is much less an independent, autonomous being than a sexual object. She tells the male to fall before her feet and worship her, makes him suck on her nipples, forces him to pleasure her, and eats him not because she is reciprocating the exploitation she has endured at the hands of males her entire life—or any other reason you want to suggest, for that matter—but because the author wants her to do it. I’m hardly suggesting that giantesses can’t be sexually glorious, but they would need more depth than that to make me fall at their feet. The giantess will often classify the male as her slave, but perhaps, if she actually had even a pea-sized brain in that wind tunnel of a head, she would take a closer look and be able to see the truth.
Unsatisfied with the material I had found, I dipped my pan even deeper into the stream of information that is the Internet, attempting to discover some gold amidst the mud. For some time, my prospecting was in vain, but I eventually found something that caught my attention. There were drawings of giant, bipedal,
non-human beings! I’m not talking about apes, either; I’m talking about felines, canines, equines, lagomorphs, lizards, and more! What I found really shocking, however, was the fact that I became just as aroused as if I had been surveying a human giantess…possibly more. This find was not an isolated incident, for I would eventually come across a multitude of such sites, but the first and foremost belonged to Ken “Cougar” Sample. I believe the credit goes to him for manifesting a desire that, unlike my macrophilia, had been locked away in the subconscious vault of my mind for so long.
Not only was I a macrophile, who was positively beguiled at the sight of a human giantess, but I was attracted to “macrofurries”—animal-like giantesses—as well. “Anthropomorphic macrophile” would be the proper term to describe me, I believe, but I have coined my own term for the status: macrofurl. Although I was enchanted by human-sized “furries,” when both my macrophilia and anthropomorphilia were triggered simultaneously, I was utterly hypnotized.
For some bizarre, mysterious reason, anthropomorphilia and macrophilia go together like Canadian bacon and pineapple on a pizza—which means they
do go together, to resolve any confusion. Like podophilia and vorarephilia, anthropomorphilia is one of several branches stemming from the tree of macrophilia, but out of those three limbs, the exact reason for its connection is easily the most obscure.
While I referred to podophilia and vorarephilia as “fetishes” at an earlier point in my discussion, it is significant that I never labeled macrophilia or anthropomorphilia in a similar manner. Although macrophilia has indeed been dubbed a fetish, I dislike that description, as I associate it with an empty obsession, devoid of any meaning. Of course, that makes it sound like I think podophilia and vorarephilia are completely meaningless, and while they don’t arouse me personally—which is to say that they don’t increase my arousal beyond whatever may be achieved from general macrophilia, since their presence in a situation doesn’t necessarily
inhibit my arousal—I know full well that there could be much more behind those feelings than I understand. For example, even in the case of vorarephilia, I think part of the attraction to the idea comes from being completely surrounded by another being, as if to be a part of her. More generally, a desire to be completely encapsulated within another’s body is called endosomatophilia, which extends to entering a body through other orifices like nostrils, anuses, or vaginas, and is less likely to involve suffering. In the case of the mouth, even if a giantess actually swallows and digests a man, turning him into a source of nourishment, then he becomes part of her in the most literal sense, the nutrients in his body going toward keeping her hair shiny, her eyes sparkling, her muscles toned, etc. Every day, some animals die so that others may live, which is something that’s forgotten by most of us who buy meat neatly sliced and wrapped up at the supermarket. “Civilized” humans are a tangent to the circle of life. While most of us still have to work for our food in a sense, most of us don’t work for it directly, so we’re largely disconnected from the natural order and fail to appreciate our place in it.
Food and sex are two of humanity’s most basic drives—perhaps
the two most basic drives—and the line between them is often blurred. Delicious food is sometimes described as “better than sex” or even has a sexual name itself, like “chocolate orgasm”; the slang for performing oral sex on someone is “eating” them; an attractive person may be called a “dish,” and…well, let’s just say that if you haven’t seen
American Pie, you should. Vorarephilia simply goes one step further in combining our love of food with our love of sex.
Why in the world would someone prefer to be prey over predator? In “Dark Romance: The Sensuality of Predator and Prey,” which is linked at the end of this essay, the author, Arilin, whom I’ll later discuss further, describes predation as a sensual act for predator
and prey. Though “sensual” is often synonymous with “sexual,” it’s used in its purest sense here: arousing or exciting the senses. That doesn’t necessarily include sexual arousal; in fact, the same mechanism that triggers the “fight or flight” response inhibits sexual arousal, seeing as how the blood needs to be pumping just about everywhere
besides the genitals. The hunt is the classic struggle of life and death—more immediately for the prey, of course, but the predator can’t lose the battle too many times before it begins to suffer. Both parties are fully alert and engaged in their surroundings in the hope that they’ll emerge victorious.
Though some predators are equal in size to their prey and sometimes even smaller, the majority of predators are larger—much larger—than the animals they hunt. Most humans these days are quite safe from being eaten by wild animals. In modern times, for an animal to pose a serious, consistent threat to humans, it would have to be enormous. Imagine living in constant fear of wolves the size of buses wandering out of the forest and tearing open the roof of your house or owls the size of airplanes swooping out of the night sky and carrying you away in their talons. Even gigantic herbivores would be dangerous, since a deer with antlers the size of trees darting across the highway at the wrong moment could crush your car beneath its hoof like an aluminum can.
Why are there so many “B” movies featuring giant animals or, alternatively, shrunken people encountering normal-sized animals? It may seem strange that we like to witness an oversized lizard storm through a city, but then again, why do we want to watch any other horror movie? Why do we like to be frightened and scared? I think it comes back to the sensuality of the experience: we love to get our heart racing and adrenaline flowing. It seems that when we’ve just looked death in the eye—or at least tricked our mind into thinking we have—we feel the most alive. People who face near-death experiences or receive word they’ll die soon often feel a renewed appreciation for life. They make an effort not to take any day for granted and to savor each moment. The sunsets are more gorgeous, birds’ songs are more melodic, food tastes sweeter, flowers smell more aromatic, and…well, sex feels better. Perhaps predation’s primeval nature explains why it, in particular, arouses our carnal, feral passions. While an anthropomorphic, sexually attractive predator would create a direct link between the hunt and sexual arousal, it’s possible for me to get turned on by giant non-anthropomorphic animals or even inanimate objects. Could this be a result of my mind reasoning that where there’s a purse or bra large enough for me to hide in or under, there’s bound to be a giant woman nearby who owns them? Perhaps, but even giant objects not associated with women reinforce the sense of peril. I don’t fantasize about myself being injured or killed, but the thought of that happening to a character emphasizes the element of danger all the more. That being said, it should be noted that my deriving a thrill from a tiny’s torment in a story doesn’t mean that I’d like that to happen in real life, just as you wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) think that people who watch slasher films want to slice up their neighbors, or that a child who plays with toy army men will grow up to be another Hitler. There’s a line between fantasy and reality, and most macrophiles, like most people in general, recognize that fact. Despite macrophilia’s status as a fantasy, however, I believe it often affects behavior in the real world—
positively, that is. I would, for example, argue that the extensive thought macrophiles give to being small makes us generally more empathetic to weaker animals and people than the average person. Approximately 25% of females experience domestic violence at some point during their lifetime, but a woman shouldn’t expect to be hit by the hand of a man who wishes he were the size of
her hand. I also believe we are less macho and egotistical, happy for the women who love us to achieve greater success and draw more attention than ourselves—a refreshing trait, especially in this age of unprecedented narcissism.
Perhaps, for some, macrophilia has no meaning beyond making them horny for no apparent reason. I, on the other hand, was tired of feeling like a pervert merely searching for a cheap sexual thrill, and that is when I decided to prove to the world that these feelings of mine were nothing to be mocked and derided as a sick, depraved craving. That is when I decided to write
Quorilax.
Dr. Helen Friedman, a clinical psychologist in St. Louis, had the following to say about macrophiles:
They're playing out some old, unresolved psychological issue. Maybe as a child they felt overwhelmed by a dominant mother, or a sadistic mother. Maybe they were abused. This [macrophilia] is not so much a fetish as a disassociation from reality. It's part of an internal world. Healthy sexuality is about personal intimacy. It's about feeling good about yourself in a way that expresses caring, and feeling a connection to another person.
You’d think a shrink would understand a fascination with shrinking a bit better than this. But seriously, is this Freudian nonsense the best a professional psychologist can do? I don’t know how she thinks she can play the “sadistic mother” card like that. My mother is far from sadistic, and from what I’ve heard, the same can be said for the vast majority of macrophiles, most of whom see no need to visit a psychologist. If she didn’t look into the issue beyond the problems of her patients, her conception of us is based on an extremely unrepresentative sample.
Personal intimacy is precisely what my macrophilia is about. I don’t take pleasure in the thought of being mistreated or injured. My fantasies involve being held, caressed, and loved; any “domination” or teasing is playful—mischievous, not malicious. Every person, male or female, young or old, wants to feel a sense of security, and a benevolent giantess can fulfill that need. Some macrophiles have a “bigger is better” mentality: they prefer “mega” giantesses, who could be anywhere above, say, roughly 250 feet tall, with some rising well past the point at which skyscrapers seem as small as blades of grass, and some who are even pictured in space, larger than Earth itself! While those ladies certainly hold their own unique appeal to me, it’s not quite the same as smaller giantesses, and the reason is simple. Once someone has surpassed a certain size, being in her vicinity would actually be
dangerous, regardless of her disposition, as she would be so powerful that even the gentlest touch could inflict injury, or perhaps others would be as small as mites and she would unknowingly trample them as she walked, their chorus of screams hopelessly inaudible to her. Once the size gap becomes too great, interaction and communication become difficult if not impossible. This is probably why “handheld” is such a popular size, since handheld people are small enough to be completely powerless and easily transportable—if not in a hand, then somewhere like a pocket, purse, or the perennially popular cleavage—yet large enough for their bodies to be seen in sexually attractive detail and not injure easily when reasonable precautions are taken. When a man is ant size or less, about the only way a woman can feel him is as a tickle on her skin, whereas in the case of the man who snugly fits in her clenched hand, she can feel his body in much greater detail and notice his heart racing, his muscles squirming, and his penis stiffening.
Besides, you may recall that when I was in elementary school, I found the tall girls particularly attractive. I’m simply drawn to height in general, and there’s certainly no “disassociation with reality” involved with that, since women taller than my 6’0”
do exist, even if a WNBA game is about the only place I can expect to find more than one at a time. I forget the context in which this subject arose, but when I was in twelfth grade, my Spanish teacher asked the males and females in the class whether they would prefer their significant other to be taller, shorter, or of equal height to them. When he asked the girls, every single one of them preferred their mate to be taller. When he asked the boys, all but two said that they would prefer their mate to be shorter—one other male and I claimed that we preferred someone of equal stature.
Needless to say, I sympathized with the girls who wanted their mate to be taller, but I didn’t publicly admit that myself, fearing that probing questions would result. As much as humans have evolved culturally, we still can’t shake all of our prehistoric instincts, and a woman’s attraction to the biggest, strongest man she can find, who is most likely to protect her from a saber-toothed tiger while her belly is swollen with his child and she can barely move, makes perfect sense in that light. But I’m at a loss to explain why males almost always seem to want someone who is not just
not taller than they are but noticeably
shorter, as if the more defenseless the woman is against that saber-toothed tiger, the better. Are these men so insecure that a vertically superior female, or even a vertically equal one, threatens them? The world is, of course, a very different place than it was back then, and it doesn’t always make sense to follow our “natural” instincts. Nowadays, a woman has far more to fear from
men than any other species, and, as the incidence of domestic violence sadly attests, she often even has to fear “her” man as well, so seeking a mate who can overpower the most males possible can backfire horribly when she finds herself helpless to defend against his testosterone-driven rage. I think both human sexes would benefit from the much more aggressive one being not just of equal height but far shorter; three quarters as tall is a reasonable, realistic fraction that would accomplish this without creating many if any difficulties for men in other ways. Thus, if the average man weighed 170 pounds, the average woman would probably grow to a weight in the upper 300s if relative muscle mass remained stable. Like our current reality, the smaller sex would likely feel safer in the company of a trusted lover, friend, or family member of the larger sex; the difference is that men would be less likely to need protection from physically superior women than from fellow boys, who may occasionally forget to play nice when there are no girls looking down on them and reminding them who rules without saying a word.
Even women who don’t judge a man by his capacity to protect them can enable this attitude that the male in the relationship should be bigger, such as by encouraging each other not to bruise men’s fragile egos by wearing high heels if it would make them the taller of the pair. Oh, come on! For one thing, if a man is in love with a woman who is taller than he in the first place, he’s probably ambivalent to her height or sees it as a positive trait. And if seeing her a few inches taller really does hurt his self-esteem, he needs to get over it. When people are in healthy relationships, their partners’ happiness should be their happiness and vice versa. Personally, I wouldn’t advise a woman of any height to wear stilettos if they hurt her feet, but if she’s fine with that and standing a bit taller makes her feel more beautiful and confident, her partner should be all for it. People shouldn’t need to see themselves as “better” than their significant other in order to have high self-esteem; on the contrary, the “better” the person standing next to them seems, the better they should feel. After all, it doesn’t take much effort to have a high opinion of oneself, so if someone believes they’re the greatest thing to ever appear on the face of the Earth, that doesn’t mean a lot on its own. But when you believe your
lover is the best thing on Earth, causing you to look into her face and think,
I don’t deserve you, her lips approaching yours make it quite clear that you do.
Even though I would prefer to be the one standing on my tiptoes for such a kiss, I think it’s silly to pass someone over simply because of his or her height. Just because I need to lower my gaze to meet a woman’s doesn’t mean I won’t still look up to her, and as I implied earlier, I think macrophilia is partly rooted in a desire to physically look up to a woman as much as I already look up to her in the metaphorical sense. As much as I’d like my fiancée to be seven inches taller than I am instead of seven inches shorter, I’m not going to hold her size against her, especially knowing that she would prefer the reversal as well. You see, while she’s not a full-fledged microphile, she dreamed of being extremely tall on a realistic level—6’2” to 6’5”, ideally, as conveyed in "
My strongest impossible dream"
—even before she met me.
King Kong and Godzilla are probably the two most famous gigantic monsters in movie history. These two behemoths, however, are very different when it comes to their styles, and I favor Kong’s. Why? Godzilla had a one-track mind set on destroy, but Kong was predominantly a gentle giant who was a victim of humanity. He loved and cared for the object of his affection: Fay Wray in the 1933 original, my fellow Minnesotan Jessica Lange in the 1976 adaptation, and Naomi Watts in the 2005 remake. Although the second in that list has oft been deemed a desecration of a classic, it developed the relationship between beast and beauty to a much greater extent than the 1933 version. King Kong 2005 blew both of its predecessors out of the water in that way—and in its special effects, of course—by establishing the deepest connection yet between Kong and his human.
Gulliver was a leviathan in Lilliput but bite-sized in Brobdingnag, so he knows firsthand that “big” and “small” are completely relative terms:
Undoubtedly Philosophers are in the right when they tell us, that nothing is great or little otherwise than by Comparison. It might have pleased Fortune to let the Lilliputians find some Nation, where the People were as diminutive with respect to them, as they were to me. And who knows but that even this prodigious Race of Mortals [the Brobdingnagians] might be equally overmatched in some distant part of the World, whereof we have yet no Discovery?
If we imagine that these hypothetical “sub-Lilliputians” and “super-Brobdingnagians” existed and that each of the five races in the chain linking them is twelve times larger than the next, a member of the latter group would appear about twenty
miles tall to the former! It boggles my mind to think about this pattern continuing. I consider the movie
Men in Black, in which a small glass sphere dangling from the collar of a cat named Orion contains an entire galaxy, and at the end of the film, we see our own galaxy inside an alien’s marble. Might that alien’s galaxy, and therefore ours as well, be hanging from a girl’s neck as a pendant, its wearer unaware that worlds and civilizations are rising and falling in the pretty bauble rising and falling with her chest as she breathes? Or has she already moved on to another accessory, tossing our world and countless others into a shoebox to be forgotten? Perhaps each universe exists at some quantum level in another universe, undetectable to the latter’s inhabitants. Would the chain end at some point so that there is one colossal Universe that effectively contains all the rest? Or would, through some surreal twist, that “largest” universe be contained within the one we considered the “smallest” such that there is an endless loop and each universe is part of every other one?
I digress, as I tend to do often, but the point is that sizes are described in relation to the world seen from our perspective, but macrophilia calls for changing something tiny into something titanic or vice versa, thereby altering our relationship with it and prompting a reexamination. As it turns out, man’s relationships are exactly what
Quorilax is all about—chief among them are those between man and woman, man and God, and man and nature.
The hero and primary narrator of the story is Orion O’Reilly, a 6’0”, 19-year-old male Human, and the central female is Zarbaxa, a 110’ Quorilaxian, whose age is roughly the equivalent of 16 Earth years. The Quorilaxians are an alien species resembling anthropomorphic felines, and the Quorilaxian/Human height ratio is 20:1. (The fact that the name “Orion” and a feline are as closely related in this story as
Men in Black is a complete coincidence; I explain the significance of Orion’s name later in this essay.) For example, if all Quorilaxians were measured in Human proportions, then Zar would be 5’6”, since 110/20 = 5.5. Similarly, if all Humans were measured in Quorilaxian proportions, Orion would be 120’, since 6*20 = 120.0. From a Quorilaxian perspective, Orion seems 6/20’ tall, or 3.6”. Since Quorilaxians are not only 20 times taller than Humans but 20 times wider and deeper as well, they are 20 x 20 x 20 = 8,000 times heavier, meaning Orion, who is 175 pounds, would be 175 x 8,000 = 1,400,000 pounds on a Quorilaxian scale, but his actual weight feels like 175/8,000 = 0.021875 pounds = 0.35 ounces to a Quorilaxian. Okay, that’s enough numbers; any more of them and I’ll have to give you a math credit for this course.
This isn’t your typical love story. A romantic relationship is supposed to be a partnership of equals, right? How can you call a relationship between a Human and an alien thousands of times bigger than he is a partnership of equals? Zar has the following to say to Orion about that:
“The size of your body does not reflect the magnitude of your soul. Why should I treat you as something less simply because you were born to a mother with a smaller womb? … We rely on nanotechnology, and our bodies depend on countless microorganisms to survive. Life would not be the same without the little things. Size is not a measure of importance.”
It might seem strange to hear such metaphysical talk as the first sentence from a species that worships no gods, but it is of the utmost importance to make the distinction between religion and spirituality.
The key is that, aside from their physical differences, which are vast indeed, Orion and Zar are incredibly similar. They are both disillusioned with their own societies for various reasons, so it is no surprise that they can quickly relate to one another. In the short time we see him on Earth, we can sense Orion’s discontent with his Earthly existence through his desire to escape into another world. Zar, meanwhile, has been aware of Humanity’s existence ever since she was young, just like the rest of her species. Her intelligence has restricted her from having meaningful relationships with most of her Quorilaxian peers, and she is disenchanted with a civilization that she feels has lost its identity and sense of purpose; so, as with Orion, her mind drifts off into thoughts of other worlds.
For once in both of their lives, they have met someone who truly understands and appreciates them. Orion is the first person with whom Zar has, metaphorically, seen eye to eye despite the fact that, if they’re standing on the same surface, he literally sees her eye to ankle. Their relationship is simple, and yet it is, at the same time, extraordinarily complicated. The entirety of these difficulties can be attributed to the physical gulf between Orion and Zar. Though they could sexually stimulate each other to some degree, the inability to act fully upon their desires leads to frustration, particularly for Orion, who, being the smaller party in the relationship, sees himself as lacking:
Of course, Zar, as wonderful as she was, never made me feel inadequate for what was out of my control. I gave her all I could, which wasn’t much, but she wanted nothing more from me. I should have felt so utterly insignificant and meaningless in her presence, yet I mattered more to her than to any Human I ever knew. She made me feel 110 feet tall.
Just as we all want a sense of security, there is an almost universal human need to feel important to others. If we’re of no value to anyone else, then we often feel that our lives are pointless. Orion considers himself worthless to Zar because he feels unable to fully satisfy her physical needs and desires, but she doesn’t care; she loves him anyway, not for what he can do for her but for what he is. Zar is an independent girl who doesn’t need a male to physically support her, and while she needs to provide for Orion as well, one bite of food for her could probably feed him for at least a week—talk about a cheap date! Just because she’s materially self-sufficient, however, doesn’t mean she has nothing to gain from having someone there to fulfill her emotional desires, to love her and tell her she’s meaningful and special to him. Their relationship demonstrates how even though one often feels small and completely insignificant in the grand scheme of things, his or her life can still have profound meaning. As the saying goes, “To the world you might be one person, but to one person you might be the world.” Actually, Orion is considered
less than a person by most Quorilaxians, but the second part of that statement succeeds in describing his importance to Zar.
Sexual relations between Orion and Zar would be possible, but they would occur in an unorthodox manner, involving Orion entering Zar’s vagina and becoming a living dildo. Such a feat is not a new concept, having been accomplished in numerous giantess stories and images, but I think it would be gratuitous in
Quorilax. Even though Orion is so devoted to Zar that he might be willing to put his own safety at risk in order to supply her with a moment of rapture, she would never allow it, not wanting any harm to befall her miniature mate, let alone be the one who caused it in an effort to quench her own sexual appetite. All of this brings about an interesting question: since their respective sizes prevent them from having sex with one another, would it be considered infidelity if either of them engaged in that activity with people of their own stature?
King Kong, a movie about a big black beast and a blond beauty, has racial overtones coursing through its reel—at least, the original version did—and similarly, there are some “black giantess” sites on the Internet. Even though Zar’s fur is predominantly black, that color was not chosen for symbolic reasons. She has pinkish skin beneath her fur, which is white as well as black, and she has blue eyes, which are exclusive to Caucasian humans. Zar was not intended to be a representation of any particular human race, and human race relations are not specifically examined in the story.
Quorilax does explore an issue along those lines, though. As we see interracial relationships become commonplace and homosexual relationships slowly gain more acceptance—or at least tolerance—what would the reaction be to an
interspecies relationship, particularly from the religious establishment? Some closely related species can actually interbreed, but Orion and Zar would be too genetically dissimilar to allow for conception even if they overcame the problem of delivering his sperm to her eggs by using artificial insemination. Is it “natural” to be sexually attracted to a person with whom you can’t reproduce (when neither person is infertile), even if that person is of the opposite sex?
I started writing
Quorilax in October 2001. Up to that point, I had never read another anthropomorphic giant story. Disillusioned with the vast majority of “non-furry” stories, I decided that adding fur, muzzles, tails, and claws wasn’t going to change anything. However, I eventually decided to give some of them a chance, and I was very pleasantly surprised. The two authors whom I will cite in further discussion are known as Arilin and Rogue, who, in my opinion, are the queen and king of macrofurry literature. (Notice that I didn’t put the quotation marks around “literature” this time.) Along with Ken “Cougar” Sample and others, Arilin and Rogue have their pages hosted by Macrophile.Com. Yes, as you might have figured, there is a Macrophile.Com, although its focus probably isn’t what you would expect. It is one of the major hub sites for those interested specifically in macrofurries, which perhaps lends credence to the claim that Rogue is the one who originally coined the term macrophilia to describe what I previously called anthropomorphic macrophilia. Like King Kong and Godzilla, Arilin and Rogue have two
very different styles.
Although some of Arilin’s stories include male giants as well, virtually
all of them feature a giantess, whether it’s a fox, rabbit, raccoon, coyote, cat, mouse, or otherwise. Also, many of the tales are of a relatively gentle nature. When violence does occur, it is generally “justified,” as the targets are individuals such as terrorists or rapists.
As mentioned previously, Zar told Orion that size is irrelevant. In an ideal world, that would be consistently true, but it is a sad fact that all too often in human society, the small and weak are preyed upon by the large and powerful. It’s ironic, since one of the major goals of a society should be to protect and support its most vulnerable members. One example of this involves Zar’s brother, Drabolya. She mentions that he’s half a year older than she, which would make his age equivalent to approximately 17 Earth years. Drab is 95 feet tall, 15 feet shorter than Zar, which, to us humans, is an insignificant difference that hardly makes him seem any less omnipotent, but according to the Quorilaxian/Human height ratio of 20:1, Drab’s height equates to 4’9” among his own people. As you can imagine, a 17-year-old male who is only 4’9”, nine inches shorter than his average-sized younger sister, would be the subject of merciless verbal and physical harassment.
Like Arilin’s work, much macrophile material features characters getting their comeuppance. Those who were once taken advantage of due to their inability to defend themselves are propelled into the position of power, gaining the ability to exact vengeance upon those who have wronged them. Even if a particular member of a marginalized group—minorities, females, teens, etc.—has not personally experienced oppression, it is still often refreshing to see power shift to someone of a demographic that typically doesn’t possess much if any of it. Drab becomes enraged when he hears Orion receiving so much interest from girls who wouldn’t give Drab a passing glance. How could they call Drab a runt yet be smothering Orion with attention when the Human is almost 90 feet shorter than Drab? What he doesn’t realize is that the type of attention being given to Orion is probably even worse than receiving none at all. Still, when Orion is left unguarded, Drab seizes the opportunity to unleash his frustrations on the innocent, defenseless Human. He is overwhelmed and exhilarated by the feeling of finally possessing absolute power over another person.
The conflict between Orion and Drab has similarities to that between Gulliver and the dwarf in
Gulliver’s Travels. In the book, the dwarf was jealous that Gulliver, upon arriving in Brobdingnag, had assumed the distinction of being the smallest man in the kingdom, so he therefore wanted to seek revenge upon Gulliver and reclaim his position. Drab, however, is not a dwarf; he’s simply short. Also, you may have thought at one point or another that “Drab” seems like a strange name. Indeed it is, but the choice was intentional. Recall that the name of Gulliver’s keeper is Glumdalclitch, which shortens to Glum—an odd name in our society, right? So, in yet another nod of recognition to
Gulliver’s Travels, I nicknamed my dwarf-like character “Drab,” which can be a synonym for Glum.
Whether a macrophile wishes a giantess to be benevolent or malevolent, I think we can all agree with the maxim that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. A giantess who intentionally hurts numerous people is clearly exercising a great deal of power, but there are countless ways to convey a woman’s supremacy without resorting to sending her on a mindless rampage. I’ve already said that I prefer gentle giantesses, but even among them, I much prefer ones with modest personalities that make them feel out of place in their all-powerful bodies, as opposed to those who have inflated egos to match their inflated body size. I can relate to possessing a physical presence that doesn’t match the strength of my personality, not to mention that it’s satisfying to see a giantess and her tiny lover mutually develop into confident—yet not narcissistic—people as a result of their relationship. That’s love at its best.
Personally, I think a lady seems even stronger when she damages people and property—or nearly does so—without trying, maybe even without realizing it, but she doesn’t have to cause any mayhem whatsoever to show that “feminine” and “powerful” aren’t antonyms. Simply describing her actions, especially in a way that highlights the difference in perspective or shows how supremely simple it is for her to do something that’s difficult or impossible for us, can be very effective. For example, high-heeled shoes, a quintessential symbol of femininity, clack softly against a hard floor when the woman wearing them is our size, so if we say, “I ran as fast as I could, but she gained on me, each dainty step rending the air like a shotgun blast,” we not only get a sense of how large she is because her “dainty” steps sound like gunfire, but she can also “outrun” a sprinting male by just sashaying after him.
Using animals instead of humans adds new dimensions to a story. From
Aesop’s Fables to
Animal Farm, animals have been a popular allegorical tool for centuries. One reason is that their use often generates a more lighthearted, less serious tone, which can be essential when dealing with heavy subject matter.
Quorilax is about far more than “giant space cats” and the Humans who love them, as you’ve hopefully gathered by this point.
While Arilin’s stories usually feature more “subdued” giantesses, Rogue’s are the complete opposite: his giants are principally male, with a few notable exceptions, and their actions are often tremendously violent. This appears to be exactly the type of macrophile writing I wanted to avoid, but there are two things that set him apart. First, he is an unbelievably talented writer. He is a master of language, and it is a joy to simply read his words. I stand in awe of his abilities, and I would say the same thing even if he didn’t have me pinned beneath his paw. Secondly, the use of anthropomorphic animals in place of humans as the giants brings new facets to the genre of macrophilia.
I stated earlier that for many macrophiles, “The giantesses would often be portrayed as goddesses, who were to be unswervingly worshipped by their subjects.” So, although it is possible to integrate “religion” into material that features human giantesses, I feel that a far more fruitful way to explore the relationship between man and God is through the use of anthropomorphic animals. Please note that the following thoughts are
my personal beliefs. Just as I won’t persecute anyone for their beliefs, I ask that you give me the same courtesy. If you’ve made it this far into the essay, you probably have a relatively open mind to match your relatively long attention span, so I don’t think this will be an issue.
In my opinion, man was not created in the image of God; God was created in the image of man, because man has always believed he
is God—and I don’t just mean God over nature. When I say “man,” I’m also referring to those who have been in power throughout history and therefore possessed full “human” rights. Passages in the Bible have been used to support the inferiority of women and justify their subordination, and the same can be said for racially based slavery. God was created to control the masses and maintain the status quo. Those in power often claimed they were appointed by God, or were even Earthly representations of God, and those who opposed the rules, even if man’s law didn’t dissuade them, were threatened with the divine judgment of God’s law in the afterlife. Although I am an atheist, my point here is not necessarily that there is no God, but that “God” as we know It is a human construct that is often used as a catch-all tool to justify actions and explain beliefs that we can’t otherwise justify or explain.
The following paragraphs are from the beginning of “Apotheosis,” which is quite possibly my favorite of all Rogue’s stories. It’s narrated in the first person, and the main character echoes the sentiments expressed above:
My name is Rayce. I'm a fighter pilot. My mother was probably an otter, back when Earth still had those. My father was a mixture of atoms concocted by human scientists and designed to provide me with the exact characteristics they wanted me to have. That was back when humans were still on top. They thought they could do anything then.
A couple centuries ago my kind could never have existed. Mankind had moved from an era of juggernaut progress and obsessive thirst for new technologies to a long tranquil dream when coexistence was the key. Kinder, gentler, love thy neighbor, stop and smell the roses -- one big happy planet. The kind of genetic experimentation that eventually yielded creatures like myself was taboo, and anyone who even suggested delving into the secrets of the genome was criticized for "playing God."
Then, one day Man woke up from his collective dream and discovered he was God. Technology had given him the ability to create his own miracles, and it wasn't long before he realized that he had the power to create life in his own image. It started out small, birth defects and plastic surgeries and such. But as people grew more comfortable with the newfound ability to manipulate nature they grew more arrogant. Almost overnight the world became a plaything, a vast ball of multicolored clay to be shaped and molded at Humanity's whim. Damn the environment, to Hell with the cute fuzzy animals. We have a manifest destiny to fulfill and they're getting in the way.
That sort of power did not come without trouble, though. Wars that had once been fought over what name to give a church were now fought over who owned the exclusive rights to which technology. For all of his advances, Man had not really changed all that much. All that had changed was his new loftier opinion of himself.
That's where we came in. After all, humans had become far too important to let them dirty their hands with menial jobs like warfare and cleaning the privies, and machines somehow just weren't very satisfying. Then somewhere along the line someone decided to create hybrid subspecies in order to take over the sort of tasks that humans were now too proud to be bothered with. The logic of the plan was simple. For millennia Man had used lower animals to work for him. The next obvious step was to create a better animal that could be put to many tasks. A smarter world required smarter labor, but labor that could still be lorded over and scorned. Humans never did manage to get around their basic need for something to dominate. There were some dissenting voices at first, mostly old people who longed for the old days when everyone wanted to live in harmony with Nature. Nobody listened to them, though, and eventually they all died off. I wish I could have met one of them, but the last were gone before my time.
That just gives you a small taste of what Rogue has to offer.
I think it’s a scathing commentary on religion that the term “worship” has come to be synonymous with mindless obedience. I am speaking of the macrophile material I have previously discussed, of course, but also about much of religion in general. When I was in middle school, there was a girl who gloated to me one day about how she was “saved” and I wasn’t, by which she meant that since she “believed” Jesus Christ was her savior, she would go to Heaven, and since I didn’t, I wouldn’t. It seems some people “believe” in God and Jesus for no more than the simple fact that they fear repercussions in the afterlife if they don’t.
Call me crazy, but if any god gave me the ultimatum, “Worship me or go to Hell,” I don’t think that’s any god with whom I’d want to be affiliated. If any
human told me that, I’d have a few choice words for that person, and I don’t know why it should be any different for a god. Orion discloses his philosophy concerning this matter:
“I can’t understand any of it. Religion just complicates everything. I have enough to worry about as it is; I don’t need to waste my time worshipping something that isn’t there or hear about how I’m going to Hell if I don’t. I don’t care whether God is omnipotent; it doesn’t matter how big or powerful anyone thinks they are. I’m not intimidated by threats. There are far better ways to gain my affection. Love is a greater motivator than fear.”
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has a similar take:
Maybe if I subscribed to some religion that would fill the holes, replace the missing bits but it would just be a crutch, a lifeline, not true faith that could pass any real kind of trial or test. Besides, I refuse to approach any religion/God on my knees. Not out of arrogance or pride, but because anybody with a sore and a sob story can crawl to God and pledge themselves. What have they to lose? If I come to faith of any kind, it'll been on my feet, with my eyes and my options open. I will have chosen not because of circumstance or need, but because this is the kind of relationship I've made room for in my life. I can see having a relationship with God, appreciating God... but not worshipping. I doubt any good relationships begin with one half of the equation on it's knees.
Like me, Orion is an atheist. Despite his religious status, he recognizes Humans’ “strange, innate need to believe in some force…some power greater.” For Orion, Zar fills this need, and he doesn’t hesitate to reveal it to her:
“I think you’re…a goddess.”
When I said that, she lifted her head, and the ears atop it visibly perked up, each of them nearly my height. She finally looked directly at me, albeit with a puzzled expression. “A goddess?”
The word must not have translated. “Quorilaxians don’t believe in gods?”
“No,” she filled me in.
That explained a lot. “No wonder your species is so advanced: you don’t waste your time on that nonsense. But with all you’ve studied about Humans, I’m surprised you never encountered religion.”
“I know precisely what a goddess is,” she corrected me, “and that is why I am so confused. I am just an ordinary girl. If I had the power of a goddess, do you really think I would have let you suffer like this?”
“No. And that’s exactly why you’re fit to be a goddess more than any so-called ‘real’ god. But I didn’t mean it literally; it’s also a term of great admiration.”
“I would still prefer you not call me that. It makes me feel superior.”
“And you dislike that?” I asked in astonishment.
“Yes,” she replied.
We bask in the glow of the countless stars in the night sky, stand at the shores of the ocean, climb soaring mountains, gaze up at redwood trees, and flock to watch whales. I think you can see my point: everyone is awed by the huge things in life much more than the tiny, which is why, for example, people seem surprised upon learning the
Mona Lisa, widely considered the most famous painting in existence, is only about 30 inches by 21 inches in dimension, so she’s about life size when it seems like she should occupy an entire wall, forcing us to crane and twist our necks to fully take her in. Upon standing in the presence of an entity much larger than oneself, people will say they feel “little,” “insignificant,” “meaningless,” etc., and they seem
happy about it. In light of that, what’s so strange about wanting to be dwarfed by a fellow person, someone with the ability to reflect upon her power and enjoy it, which would lead me to greater enjoyment of my lack of power, as is typical of shared experiences? With all due respect to whales, I’d be much more excited to see a group of 100-foot-long women swimming and splashing alongside my tour boat. Some will surely say, “Yeah, but there’s quite a difference between feeling awe toward a woman as tall as a redwood and actually
getting wood at the sight of her.” And to that I answer, “Why?” Those who can’t understand macrophilia typically cite its “impossibility” factor—the notion that, even if whale-scale ladies walked the Earth and glided through the waters, I couldn’t have sex with them. Oh, where do I begin?
Let me start by asking this: what’s so attractive about a woman’s breasts? I can’t figure it out. Yeah, I
love breasts…I just don’t know why. I and many other men generally find excessive amounts of fat to be unattractive, so why do we go crazy over what are essentially just fat deposits on a woman’s chest? I see no clear evolutionary basis for the male attraction to breasts, and it’s even stranger that their attractiveness usually correlates positively with their size in proportion to the woman. (I say “in proportion” because I’d probably find B- or C-cup breasts on a 5’6” woman more attractive than A-cup breasts on a 100’ woman, even though the latter’s nipples would be about the size of the former’s entire breasts!) Breasts don’t produce more or less milk based on their breadth, so children wouldn’t prosper or suffer because of the size of their mother’s chest. If anything, larger breasts seem like they might have conferred an evolutionary
disadvantage, since they would unnecessarily decrease a female’s agility, swinging wildly as she ran in the days before sports bras. Like a peacock’s tail, perhaps a woman’s plump, prominent chest is a signal to potential mates that she’s a healthy individual who will produce equally fit offspring—which still doesn’t quite explain why love handles usually have a neutral or negative effect, but I’m doing the best I can here. Even if sexual selection is the case, it’s not reasoned consciously. Men think, “Nice rack,” not, “Ah, now there is a woman who will bear me a strong child!” especially since we know that smaller breasts don’t indicate any deficiency in a woman beyond a lack of genes for the development of larger breasts. Many factors contribute to love and sexual attraction, not all of them rational. If logic is the yardstick by which we measure the social acceptability of what’s sexually desirable, then I’d say bust boosters have some work to do. There should be quite a thick book on breasts, whose allure is sacrilege to question, if I can write an essay of this length about my supposedly ridiculous “fetish,” offering cogent reasons for its appeal and even suggesting that increasing height in women is a positive evolutionary step. Actually, a proportionate decrease in men’s height would achieve the same effect and have further advantages. Think about resources like food, for example: if I use the same fraction I did earlier and imagine men were three quarters as tall as women, standing face-to-breast with them (speaking of breasts…), then about 50% of the human population would weigh 42% as much, so, as a species, we’d only need to consume about 71% of the food we do currently. That’s not completely accurate, since smaller beings have higher metabolisms and therefore would require more food relative to their size, but there’s no need to go into any more detail since I think I’ve made my point—and, in the process, already broken my promise not to do any more math.
I can become a woman’s friend without the expectation of receiving “something more” from her in the future, even if I consider her sexually attractive, and that’s not merely because I and possibly she are already in a relationship. Most women, for that matter, make no attempt to hide their beauty from everyone but their significant other. Even for those in happy relationships, there is nothing wrong with the desire to continue to appear pleasing to members of the opposite sex or to appreciate the sight of those besides our mates. In short, just because I find a woman physically appealing doesn’t automatically mean I’ve made it my mission to stick my penis in her.
What if humans were born in two different-sized “castes”—let’s call them macro and micro, the only difference between them being that micros are about as tall as a macro finger is long? How would a micro man know whether a model he’s ogling in a magazine is a macro? Even if a photo features some reference for scale—say, a man looking up from between a woman’s feet while she stands looking down with a mischievous, dominant grin—who’s to say that she’s not, in fact, a micro and he’s not a macro who are merely made to appear as members of the opposite caste through modern graphics technology? After all, if we brought Jonathan Swift into the present day and showed him the
Gulliver’s Travels miniseries, he’d have no concept of special effects and may believe the actors and actresses playing the Brobdingnagians and Lilliputians to really be giant and tiny people from parts of the world unknown in his time. It would be understandable for a man not to want to be in a
relationship with a woman outside his caste because of the difficulties it would entail, but I find it hard to believe that he would no longer even find her physically attractive the moment he knows—or, I should say, is at least given the illusion—that she is not his size.
We don’t even have to imagine a world of macro and micro people to demonstrate just how irrelevant the prospect and feasibility of sexual intercourse are to attraction. Even if a person has never sought out media for the purposes of sexual arousal, I think very few people could say that they’ve never seen someone on television, the Internet, a magazine, etc. that has “caught their attention.” Do the men who drool over the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue do so under the assumption that they’ll find one of the featured models in their bedroom? Sure, there’s a
possibility that’ll happen, but it’s a possibility so remote that I hardly think anyone has room to ridicule me for fantasizing about females with whom traditional sex is out of the question.
In the case of those models, we physically
could have sex, but there are all sorts of guys lusting after them. Meanwhile, the giantesses I imagine are typically overlooked by males their size; they’re ordinary women among “their own kind” but extraordinary to the men they can hold in the palms of their hands. It’s understandable that Zar doesn’t know how to react upon being called a goddess when, to her own species, she’s just a regular girl who doesn’t grace the covers of magazines. Performing typical intercourse with a giantess is impossible, which can admittedly cause some frustration, as it does for Orion, but if romantic compatibility is determined solely by how well the genitals of two beings fit together, then why aren’t people marrying dogs, deer, or other animals that are roughly the size of humans? Besides, it’s not like a man and a giantess can’t engage in any activity of a sexual nature. He can still enter her vagina (carefully), or at least caress what he can from outside it, and there’s plenty more he can do, whether he’s lavishing attention upon a nipple or busy at another erogenous zone. A man admiring a famous female of his size will probably never touch her, let alone in a sexual manner, and in that sense, despite the current absence of giant women from our lives, I would argue that my fantasies are actually
more meaningful.
Orion doesn’t “worship” Zar out of fear but because he
wants to, since he loves and adores her with every fiber of his being. Still, Zar refuses to accept the elevated status Orion bestows upon her. She has felt alienated from everyone else throughout her life, so she is not about to let the first person with whom she has felt a connection break the bond by viewing her as a higher form of life. However, in her modesty, Zar has only strengthened Orion’s veneration of her.
In both
Quorilax and “The Mythtery of Creation,” another story of mine, the “divine” being is depicted as a female non-human, which is completely opposite of the image that Christianity portrays. In a number of species, males are unnecessary for reproduction or serve little to no purpose besides that; it is females that make the world go round. It’s thought that the first human was a black woman, so it’s reasonable to believe it was actually woman—
black woman, at that—who was created in God’s image. The last sentence assumes, of course, that the image of God and humans are one and the same. Honestly, if God exists, I seriously doubt that It would have any form or gender whatsoever. While I can understand the need to assign God attributes possessed by mortal beings for the sake of being able to relate to It, depicting It as a white male human smacks of Western ethnocentrism, phallocentrism, and human-centrism.
As I stated before, I think man created God in his image because man believes he is God. It is true that humans are very unique and special animals on this planet, but after all, that is all we are: animals. I’m not suggesting that we should value the life of an animal of another species as much as or more than one of our own, but there are times at which humanity shows an utter disregard for the natural environment and its inhabitants. We are a relative newcomer to this planet, which was functioning excellently before we came and would function excellently—probably better—upon our departure. The idea of an “animal” or alien as the “Almighty” would cause man to pause for a moment and put his ego in check.
This last point helps to segue into the final relationship in my discussion, which is that between man and nature. Orion O’Reilly’s first name is ironic, for he is humble and modest, while the Orion of Greek mythology was an arrogant, boastful, egotistical hunter who claimed he could defeat any animal that challenged him. The appellation is intentional, since even though Orion doesn’t match that description, he is a symbol of Humanity, which has possessed such a haughty attitude throughout much of history. James Berardinelli reveals the underlying symbolism present in
King Kong:
The ending is, of course, the best-known part of King Kong. The scene with Kong grasping the top of the Empire State Building with one hand while swiping futilely at the attacking bi-planes with the other makes a statement about man's indiscriminate destruction of nature on the path to technological mastery. Kong was king of Skull Island, but, on Manhattan Island, he is a rampaging nuisance to be dealt with. It's not so much beauty that killed the beast, as it is the inexorable march of progress. In the world of man, a mythical beast like Kong has no place.
Humans often fail to appreciate the intrinsic splendor and dignity of nature, valuing animals solely in terms of their utility to us: how well can they entertain us, how much work can they do, or how good will their head look mounted above our fireplace? When Zar shows Orion to her “friends” to share her excitement, he becomes the subject of this mindset:
“He does not do tricks! He is not here to entertain you!” she acted as my voice, communicating what I couldn’t.
“What is he good for, then?” the cheetah wondered. “What is so special about Humans?”
The greater part of Quorilaxian society seems to value “animals” in much the same way:
The majority of the senators argued that countless Quorilaxian sons, brothers, and fathers died and continued to die for no apparent reason other than to protect animals that would never serve a purpose to them. They could not understand what they hoped to achieve from this agenda.
As exhibited in the selection from “Apotheosis,” it has been common practice throughout history for humans to carefully select animals and breed them in order to produce the most desirable characteristics—to humans, of course—among the species. The Humans on Quorilax face similar treatment, having their sexual partners chosen for them, albeit in a sincere attempt to prevent extinction by making the species as strong and resilient as possible. Orion and Zar both accept this, but not all Humans may be willing to come to terms with what they see as a degrading activity.
Even the stories of Rogue’s that seem to be devoid of any type of plot or conflict carry far more significance than most would immediately comprehend upon reading them. While
King Kong “makes a statement about man's indiscriminate destruction of nature,” many of Rogue’s stories provide nature with the opportunity to strike back against its human oppressors. His tone is highly misanthropic, and humanity is reduced to the point of complete insignificance. In “Grounded,” for example, a young rabbit buck ejaculates onto some “crawlies,” then watches in delighted fascination as they drown in his semen. In “‘Tis the Season,” when a massive she-wolf in heat is unable to find a proper mate, she quells her sexual lust by shoving “mice” into her vagina, pulverizing them into a bloody pulp with the immense force of her orgasm. Of course, one quickly realizes that “crawlies” and “mice” are simply the terms for humans from the perspective of the giant(ess). Both of these acts are committed with all the casual cruelty of a human child burning an ant with a magnifying glass, for that is all humanity is: a bug…a pest…a nuisance…a blight on the Earth…a parasite sucking the life from its host…a plague…a disease to be eradicated. If you’re not in a state of utter shock and revulsion at this point, then there’s something wrong with you, because that’s how you
should feel. It isn’t the intention of these stories to leave you with a warm, fuzzy feeling—they’re meant to provoke. Just as mankind has exploited nature for his own selfish purposes, he is now facing the ultimate exploitation, being used as nothing more than a sex toy. As humanity has raped the earth, it shall be raped as well.
Perhaps you are at a loss over how anyone can compare humans to ants. Well, one
could argue that ants are the most successful species on the planet, as they account for an estimated 10% of the world’s animal biomass. Simply put, that means that if you could place all the world’s animals on a scale, 10% of the weight would be attributed to ants.
Humans and ants have traveled highly divergent paths to attain their status as two of evolution’s greatest success stories. Both species form complex societies, but while human civilization has traditionally been male dominated, females rule the ant world; in fact, almost all ants—queens, workers, and soldiers—are female, as the males exist for the sole purpose of reproduction, after which they die. Animals in the order
hymenoptera, which includes bees and wasps in addition to ants, are eusocial, which translates to “true social,” since they are completely altruistic, each individual being entirely devoted to the protection of her sisters, her mother the queen, and the continuance of the colony or hive. A single ant is unimportant in the grand scheme of things since all work in the colony is a collective, mutually beneficial effort, whereas it is an infinitesimal percentage of people who direct the course of human history. Ants are guided by an instinctual “hive mentality,” while humans possess personal dignity and advanced intelligence. Then again, can you say that humans are never guilty of reverting to hive mentality?
Despite the fact that ants are phenomenal creatures, many people still recognize them as nothing more than gross, disgusting little pests. When Rogue’s giants see “bugs” swarming out of their “hives,” encroaching on and infesting their habitats, would you expect their perspective on the situation to be any different? Perhaps you should thank them for exterminating some of the vermin so they don’t overrun the planet.
Macrophilia is, first and foremost, a sexual desire, and it was never my intention to indicate otherwise. It
was my intention, however, to show that there is far more substance to my longings, and when sex has meaning—when it is used to express the devotion, unity, and trust inherent in surrendering oneself to another—there exists nothing more wonderful. Society conditions children to repress their sexuality, and since macrophilia often manifests itself in early childhood, we hold those emotions inside, thinking we’re alone. I wrote
Quorilax to prove to the world, but more importantly to
myself, that my feelings were nothing to be ashamed of. Judging by the feedback I’ve received, I’ve succeeded beyond my wildest expectations. I never asked to be a macrophile, but I still am one…and I wouldn’t have it any other way, for if this part of me didn’t exist, I would have never written
Quorilax and therefore would have missed out on one of my greatest accomplishments. If macrophilia is a “condition,” then I don’t want to be cured. I’ve only begun to delve into this subject. I spoke mainly of FEMALE/male macrophilia and anthropomorphilia, as I am most familiar with those interests, but there are many more frontiers to be explored. I don’t even begin to profess to know everything
I am very thankful to Writing.Com for allowing me the opportunity to display
Quorilax and let it be appreciated and respected by others, for it is through their comments that I summoned the courage to write this essay. I used to be ashamed, but now I say with pride: I am
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, and I am a macrophile.
Well, that’s all I have to say, everybody. Thank you for being such a wonderful audience. I have office hours now, so if you’d like to ask me questions, share your own experience with macrophilia, or whatever, my door is open. Email me at kraken@writing.com or, if you’re a Writing.Com member, just click the envelope after my name in the paragraph above.
Class dismissed!
A micro sample of further macro readings
Blogs
Hug the Undersquid
Undersquid is a minority in the macrophile community because she’s…well, a she. For reasons I don’t entirely understand, male macrophiles far outnumber female microphiles—or at least the number of females who admit to being microphiles—so it’s always a treat to be reminded that some women have a genuine interest that goes beyond indulging the fantasies of men.
Trinket999’s Looking-Glass World
This blog features vignettes from a parallel world where men stand 3’2” to 4’4”, averaging out to 3’9”, and women soar above them to an average of 6’0”, spanning between 5’2” and 7’2”. Thus, the average man sees eye to navel with the average woman, but the smallest man could pass between the loftiest lady’s legs without ducking, and even the most petite woman could rest her chin atop the tallest man’s head. Even though women have always outsized men in this fantasy realm, I can imagine males and females of our own species appearing at these relative sizes far in the future, and that “realism” is enjoyable.
Essays and Articles
The Biology of B-Movie Monsters
Even if, like most macrophiles, you want to throw the laws of science out the window when it comes to shrinking and growing beings, this is still a fascinating, enlightening read.
Dark Romance: The Sensuality of Predator and Prey
A brilliant piece, but I would expect nothing less from Arilin. The subtitle offers much insight into the content of this essay. This is particularly relevant to anthropomorphic macrophilia but can apply to the general attraction many people have to the idea of dominating or being dominated.
The Jow Philosophy
This describes a human society similar to that of ants or bees, featuring males, infertile female “workers,” and “queens” known as Jows, the last of which perform all reproduction and are so much larger that the smaller members of the species can (and often do) fit in these giant women’s vaginas. The author also points out evidence of macrophilia in our culture and provides a psychological basis for his idea.
Matriarchal Theory
Perhaps women will never be large enough to hold men in the palms of their hands, but will female eventually evolve into the physically dominant human sex? This article answers with a resounding “yes.” It is linked from the previous author’s site but is originally from the February 1955 issue of Scientific American. Progress may not be on pace with the timeline in the illustration, but the logic seems, on the whole, quite sound.
Urge: A Giant Fetish
This article touches on some of the same topics as my own essay but is written by a non-macrophile. It provides another good general overview of macrophilia.
Wikipedia Entry on Macrophilia
This is not what you’ll see if you type “macrophilia” into the Wikipedia search box. I’m not going to dignify that excuse for an article with a link after the Wiki-Nazis reduced it to a 48-word joke due to a lack of “reliable sources” to cite. What I’ve linked is an older version of the article that may actually teach you something.
Stories
Arilin’s Stories
This is Arilin’s main page; fiction is further down the page. “Trompe L’oeil,” “The Last Aspect,” and “Metamorphosis Day” are the best, in my opinion.
Cassadria’s Stories
While each of the stories here have their charms, Neverquest holds the distinction of being my favorite GTS story of all. The title refers to a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that is especially massive for the male players, who stand ankle high to their female counterparts. When a virus affects the game, however, the reality becomes more than virtual for the people logged in.
DX Machina’s GTS-o-Rama
The Change Trilogy starts out like the classic shrunken-boy-meets-girl story but develops into a masterpiece. The thought of a conspiracy to suppress giantess content in the media is very creative, and the allusion to Jonathan Swift’s notorious “pleasant frolicksome Girl of sixteen” is priceless. Of course, I also have a fondness for the story because it begins in my neck of the woods; I live only blocks away from the University of Minnesota!
E10’s Stories
E10 is particularly fond of supplying evolutionary reasons for his giantesses, most notably in “Tentsion,” in which some camping girls find ant-size men—a redundant phrase, it turns out—crawling over the hills and valleys of their bodies, and while casually squishing these “bugs,” the female friends discuss how our species became two. In “War of the Worlds: An Adaptation,” several female Venusians invade Earth, and let’s just say that’s enough of them to cause some serious damage. And in “Land of the Giants,” a group of people travel to another planet to rescue their stranded comrade, discovering this strangely familiar world, which orbits third from its sun, to be inhabited by people of an incredible stature. For shorter and sillier fare supplemented by images, E10’s picture stories are worth a look.
Land of the Giants Fan-Fiction Collection
For those unaware, Land of the Giants was a television series that aired from 1968 to 1970. It followed four men, two women, and a boy and his dog stranded on another world. If you looked at a book of the life found on this planet, you would think our worlds were completely identical, but upon arrival there, you would discover the dimensions of the people, animals, and the rest of their enviroment to be twelve times greater. “The Crush” may appeal most to GTS fans. In that adventure, a lonely teenage Giantess goes to the park to play fetch with her dog, who becomes an unwitting matchmaker when he returns with Barry, the Earth boy, in his mouth. For those looking to live a bit more dangerously, the alternate universe version of “Ghost Town” could prove interesting. Only the second episode aired, “Ghost Town” was one of the most popular, featuring a pre-teen Giantess terrorizing the Earthlings, who were trapped in her grandfather’s model town.
NFalc’s Stories
A Man of His Time and Planar Shift are the gems of this bunch. The former follows a man in the near future, when male humans are the size of insects, and not just compared to the 250-foot-tall women, for a drug has seeped into the environment and caused nearly all other life to expand proportionately to the fairer sex. Men, unnecessary for reproduction because of cloning, are widely believed extinct in the face of their monumental obstacles to survival, but one group of women seeks to prove they still exist. Planar Shift, meanwhile, tells the tale of a man who starts corresponding with a human woman from another world that’s almost identical to Earth, discovering one BIG difference during his surprise visit: she’s hundreds of feet tall.
Rogue’s Stories
Most of Rogue’s stories aren’t for the squeamish. Many of the giants do not communicate with their tiny prey, so Rogue’s stories tend to contain heavy narrative and little dialogue. However, if you’re brave enough to venture into Rogue’s page, you’ll see that even a 90-foot-tall wolf has a soft side.
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