January 5, 2012: Finally, over a year after resolving to re-write this essay, I’ve finished—though I’m sure I’ll continue to make edits to it, just as I did with the original. Certain sections have remained largely intact, but a lot was deleted or reorganized, and other parts have been added. Among the key changes I made were breaking the piece into sections, better recognizing that not all macrophiles are giantess fetishists, reducing the references to my own novel to a few instances in the introduction, and not dwelling on religion. If you haven’t read the original version, or you did read it and just don’t remember it well, you can find it here: "Macrophilia 101: Old Version"  [GC], passkey 3215. If you have a lot of spare time on your hands, please feel free to read both and offer your thoughts on how they compare.
There is an attraction in the colossal, and a singular delight to which ordinary theories of art are scarcely applicable.
Gustave Eiffel
Introduction
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, and I am your professor, Davy Kraken  . Okay, now that we’ve gotten to know each other a little bit, I suppose I’ll make a confession: I’m not really a PhD. I don’t even have a graduate degree in psychology, or a graduate degree in anything, for that matter—I have a bachelor’s degree in economics—but if the comments of one professional psychologist are any indication, I don’t believe that a fancy piece of paper would help me provide you any further insight into macrophilia.
While I can see most in the audience are gentlemen, you ladies are always a welcome sight here, even though I would prefer not to see you sitting in this classroom at all. No, I don’t say that because I think women are intellectually inferior to men and you don’t belong in college. I merely wish you gals had to take this class online because you’re too tall to fit through the doorway of this building. I’m sure some of you unfamiliar with macrophilia are asking why I desire such a seemingly odd thing, and answering that question—explaining why there is an attraction in the colossal, as Gustave Eiffel’s quote on the chalkboard states, as well as the related attraction to the anti-colossal, focusing especially on people of such magnitudes—is part of what I hope to do today. So, without further ado, let’s begin.
Now, while those of you remaining here may have signed up for this class, let’s make sure you really know what you signed up for. This is a sexual education course, but it isn’t the stuff your mommy and daddy learned in elementary school. All of you saw the GC (graphic content) rating when you enrolled, 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 taking Macroeconomics like your colleague who just left our company. Remember, I’m an economics major, so I can appreciate enthusiasm for that subject. My intended audience is macrophiles, as well as curious and open-minded non-macrophiles, the latter group probably consisting mostly of Writing.Com members who’ve noticed the peculiar proliferation of Interactive Stories on this site that feature themes like shrinking, giantesses, and “vore.” You can probably figure out what that last one is all about just by thinking of some words in which that sequence of letters appears.
In general terms, sexual selection favors those who can best arouse the senses of a potential mate, but the methods each species uses to accomplish that feat vary tremendously. Humans are very visual creatures, so eye-catching features are usually the most apparent to us, like the tail of a peacock, the rack of a buck, or the “rack” of a woman. Of course, only the last item on that list provides sexual excitement for humans, and mostly just the half of the human population without it on their bodies. Our minds have evolved to usually distinguish men from women quite easily, and most of us enjoy getting closer to people of one sex much more than the other, but when you look more objectively, the physical differences between attractive men and attractive women are incredibly slight. Sure, we have different equipment between our thighs, but it’s not like that’s apparent in a public setting. The only stark difference among the sexes that’s readily visible is females generally possessing a much more prominent chest. Our bodies largely have the same parts and differ mostly in subtle ways, like ladies having a more delicate facial structure or wider hips—and even when it comes to our chests, men technically have breast tissue and will on rare occasions develop breast cancer.
Focusing on members of a single sex, the difference between “attractive” and “plain” often amounts to nothing more than a minor difference in the proportion of facial features or body parts to one another, and opinions can differ widely on the relative attractiveness of members of a group. Obviously, a sexually reproducing species needs most of its males and females to find some members of the opposite sex attractive in order for them to want to couple and reproduce, but beyond that, what determines what draws us to someone? If you asked a heterosexual man why he is enamored with women’s chests, he would probably supply an answer along the lines of it being “normal.” And while that may be true, the response doesn’t explain why it has become such a common attractor for men, as much as the same answer fails to shed light on why peahens swoon over the colorful plumage of their males. While women are thought to have evolved pronounced breasts to compensate for humans’ flat faces—babies would have trouble getting their mouths to a nipple right against the mother’s body—breast size doesn’t affect milk production, and there is no apparent advantage to, say, a DD-size chest over B-cups. If anything, it seems like breasts that are larger than necessary would have been disadvantageous to survival, especially in the days before sports bras, when they would have bounced and swung wildly, decreasing a woman’s agility as she tried to flee from predators. However, that may be the whole idea, because the best explanation I’ve seen provided for excessive bodily ornamentation is called the handicap principle, which suggests that what peacocks, women, and other beings intend to communicate with their oversized attachments is, “You can see how my body has been cursed to put so much energy into maintaining all this superfluous weight, yet I’m still alive, so I must be strong. I mean, just imagine what a superior mate I would make if I didn’t have all this nonsense to worry about!”
The point I’m trying to illustrate is that even the most typical sexual attraction has little to do with logic. We don’t consciously reason why our gaze keeps wandering back to one particular person in a crowded room. We may be able to offer general statements, like that person having a beautiful smile or nice eyes, but the same could probably be said of many other people nearby. There’s just…something about this one. Why should macrophiles need to support their attractions more than anyone else? There was a time when I didn’t think in these terms and felt as if I needed to justify macrophilia to the world, but this essay was written after that point. My main aim here is to let other macrophiles know that while they may not be “normal,” which is perfectly okay, they’re not alone in their seemingly bizarre thoughts and fascinations, which can be an awful feeling. That’s not to say I don’t try to provide some answers to the mysteries of macrophilia, particularly for the benefit of those who don’t possess this proclivity, because I think explanations exist, but I hope to spark at least as many questions to get other macrophiles thinking more about these issues so they may better understand themselves, even if they can’t get “outsiders” to understand—or don’t care to.
I plan to begin by pulling out my personal “macro file,” so to speak, and relating my own story of self-discovery—which, I should point out, is a story still being written. I don’t completely understand why I feel the way I do, let alone why others feel the way they do, and probably never will, so the ideas I share here are subject to constant development as I learn more. Because the majority of macrophiles are heterosexual males primarily interested in seeing huge women, often causing macrophilia and “giantess fetish” to be treated synonymously, I feel this particularly prevalent manifestation of macrophilia deserves some attention before I expand my focus to possibilities for why this attraction to major differences in size ultimately transcends major differences like sex, gender orientation, culture, and more. After all, I’ve spoken to macrophiles who are men and women, gay and straight, and hail from across America and such other varied places around the world as England, Italy, even Iran. Somehow, so many diverse individuals who share this obscure interest manage to find each other, usually not knowing others like them exist until they take the initiative to begin searching the Internet. At that point, we discover that it’s a small—and big—world after all.
A Fantastic Voyage
Dr. Helen Friedman, a clinical psychologist in St. Louis, reached the following conclusion 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? To be fair, she probably didn’t look into the issue beyond the problems of a few patients, which is an extremely unrepresentative sample of all macrophiles, and had no reason to do so. I won’t deny that those patients couldn’t have had genuine issues, either. But I also wouldn’t say that anyone who plays video games has a disorder because, for a very small portion of gamers, the activity has become an all-consuming obsession that has distorted their perception of “real life,” hampering their ability to perform their jobs or ruining their social relationships. Any interest a person could possibly have is unhealthy if taken to such extremes. But most macrophiles, in my experience, are like most people in general: fully functioning members of society. If you’re not a macrophile, chances are that one has waited on you in a restaurant, assisted you in a store, or answered the phone when you called a helpline, and you had no idea of their quirk—and it’s not like macrophiles have a sixth sense for identifying their fellow size enthusiasts walking down the street either. Speaking of walking, we come from all walks of life: while I may not really be a college professor, I know at least one macrophile who is.
I am fortunate to have experienced a perfectly healthy childhood absent of significant drama at home, raised by both parents in an urban, middle-class family. Ever since the birth of my older brother, who was my sole sibling, only my father held a full-time job, but my mother didn’t hide in the house all day; she was active in the community: helping at my schools, serving as an election judge, and taking part in many other volunteer activities. Despite her role as a homemaker, I never got any sense of gender stereotypes being thrust upon her. For example, she was just as handy with tools, if not more so, than my father. Neither parent acted in a visibly dominant or submissive manner. I didn’t even have an older sister casting me into shadow, or any other strong influence from another female relative, so I feel that family dynamics were a complete non-factor in the development of my macrophilia. Sorry to disappoint you, Dr. Friedman.
Many macrophiles discover at a young age that they’re a bit different, though, and the initial fascinations can often be non-sexual in nature. I was barely into elementary school before I noticed that I seemed inordinately intrigued by gigantic beings that I would see on television, film, or elsewhere. One of my very first memories of this was the movie King Kong. Also, like many boys, I was (and still am) mesmerized by dinosaurs, being completely awestruck by the power of these grand, majestic juggernauts.
Eventually, however, the creatures known as girls start to interest boys more than overgrown simians and lizards. I’ve 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, the average girl stood taller than the average boy, so there were often two or three females in each grade who rose above 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, the tables turned. An enormous farmer finds Gulliver in a field where the wheat soars overhead like trees in a forest, and he brings him back to a house where the rest of the inhabitants were, not surprisingly, to the farmer’s scale: a wife who could have stuffed Gulliver in her cleavage, a dog that could have made a chew toy out of him, and, best yet, a daughter named Glumdalclitch, who was only eleven years old but towered dozens of feet above my middle school classmates and, in her own words, was still “growing very fast.” I would have found the young actress attractive regardless of size; 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 imagine how much she 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’s grasp 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 young women of spectacular size. After many hard hours of searching, I eventually came upon the key word: giantess, sometimes abbreviated as GTS. Although the word “giant,” even as a noun, can be used to describe much more than giant people, the word “giantess” refers specifically to a lady 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 so many others as to merit a term to describe them. “Macro” means large and “phile” means lover; therefore, macrophiles are lovers of largeness. This doesn’t specifically refer to girth, as macrophiles often gravitate toward a body figure of healthy weight; it’s the height of at least one of the parties involved that is out of proportion with his or her environment. So, while a macrophile’s ideal giants could weigh thousands of times more than other people, carrying such weight is healthy on a body frame that is many magnitudes taller. A macrophile enjoys the thought of being the smaller party in this situation, and a microphile, conversely, would fantasize about being on the larger end of the spectrum, but “macrophilia” is often used to encompass both tastes—especially since many of us appreciate both scenarios to some extent—whereas the same can’t be said for “microphile,” in the same way that the word “giant” is gender neutral but “giantess” is not.
Earth has no giants—or at least no person who would satisfy the definition of a giant for the purposes of macrophilia. While I love to see 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 people handheld; that is, the giants can fit the lower body and most of the torso of the comparatively tiny people in one of their fists, usually meaning that the giants are between about 50 and 150 feet tall or, if they’re typical human size, the smaller individuals are several inches in height, though people can still be picked up in one hand when there is less of a disparity than that.
I started visiting various macrophile sites and forums, where people would post, shall we say, visual stimuli. Some of the content was hand drawn, but much of it was photographic. Hundred-foot-tall humans don’t exist, as I just pointed out—not that I needed to—so how is that accomplished? Simple cropping can only go so far. If my 5’5” wife stood on a platform seven inches off the ground, allowing her to see eye-to-eye with my 6’0” frame, and someone took a picture of us from our chests up, anyone who doesn’t know us may be fooled into thinking that we’re the same height; but obviously, if you took a picture of my wife from her ankles up, cutting off everything besides my head next to her feet, I don’t think anyone would be convinced that she’s a dozen times as tall. However, there are a few ways for an unaltered picture to offer such an illusion. 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 the subject 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, with the camera usually filming the “Giant” characters from around their feet, as “Little People”—people our size, I should clarify—would view them while scurrying across the ground, but also sometimes filming our fellow Littles from dozens of feet above, giving us a “Giant’s-eye view.” Since our two races were physically indistinguishable but for the difference in scale—demonstrated by the fact that when some of the Earthlings temporarily grew in a few episodes, the average Giant passing by on the street didn’t recognize them as aliens—a simple camera angle let us know at a glance who towered and who cowered without the special effects expense of constant direct comparisons.
Another trick is forced perspective, which 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 humans taking advantage of the fact that objects appear smaller the farther away they are. An ad campaign for the Jeep Patriot, however, 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’s as if the wolf is right in front of her, because she’s able to pluck it up between thumb and forefinger like it’s a mouse. One can only imagine what the animal sees as its view changes from surveying the river from atop a rocky cliff to writhing helplessly between this woman’s digits in front of her suddenly massive face. The canine’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, innocent 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 attest to its roominess from their perch in the cup holders next to her leg.
Point of view and forced perspective have their limits, however, so it’s most common and satisfying to visually indulge macrophilic urges through the aforementioned drawings, computer graphics, or combining elements from different photos to create artificial collages.
As I spent some time viewing macrophile multimedia, a few patterns emerged:
 Most macrophiles are male.
Most macrophiles fantasize about giantesses.
Many macrophiles like to imagine scenarios that involve violence and/or domination.
So, a common theme was for a giantess to be portrayed as a goddess to be unswervingly worshipped by male followers, who would be subject to her wrath if they wavered in their undying devotion, and often even when they didn’t. I got some sexual excitement out of these depictions, but…was that all there was to my attractions, to see women using their newfound authority to abuse men? I felt like the appeal ran deeper than that. I thought reading some stories would shed some light on the subject better than any picture could, but I didn’t initially have much luck in that endeavor either, mainly finding poorly written stories of women lording their power over men right from the moment some of the former grew or some of the latter shrank, without any apparent reason, other than that they could.
Unsatisfied with the material I had found, I dipped my pan even deeper into the Internet’s stream of information, 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: 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 giants—as well. Despite the hairiness implied by that word, macrofurries can be leathery, feathery, and more, but people resembling mammalian beings like cats, dogs, and foxes are the most popular. “Anthro” is the word commonly used to refer to human-animal hybrids, and I believe “anthropomorphic macrophile” would be the proper term to describe me, but I like to call myself a “macrofurl.” Although I was enchanted by human-sized anthros, it turns out that anthropomorphilia and macrophilia go together like Canadian bacon and pineapple on a pizza—which means they do go together, to resolve any confusion—so when those two attractions of mine were triggered simultaneously, I became utterly hypnotized. I still couldn’t figure out why, though, and I felt an increasing need to demonstrate to myself that there was something more to these feelings…that they were more than just some eccentricity of which I should be ashamed.
I wanted to see a story that interested me on a macrophilic level yet would simultaneously appeal to a non-macrophile, and if I couldn’t find one to read, then I would have to find one to write. Thus, what would end up becoming my novel Quorilax was born. Judging by the overwhelmingly positive feedback I’ve received on it from macrophiles and non-macrophiles alike, I succeeded beyond my wildest expectations. This tale, inspired by my macrophilia, had enamored people with no idea that such an attraction even existed, and through that realization I gained a great deal of confidence and summoned the courage to write this essay. The only examination of macrophilia to precede mine, as far as I know, was the “Introduction to Macrophilia” at the site Lava Dome Five, which, although it contains some good observations, has a very clinical, detached voice, whereas I planned for mine to come from a far more personal point of view, so I felt like I was venturing into somewhat uncharted territory. In the process of penning Quorilax, I learned a lot about myself; in fact, this essay covers much the same ideas as the story, albeit in a less subtle and probably less entertaining manner. I don’t link here from there, since I’m content to let people enjoy the story without sharing the gritty details of what motivated me to write it if they’re not looking for that information, just as I wouldn’t start discussing even mainstream sexual interests without some provocation. Judging by the fact that you’re still reading this, you must possess some sort of interest in the subject.
After I started writing Quorilax, I discovered stories written by a couple of macrofurls who go by the monikers Arilin and Rogue. Along with Cougar and some others, their pages are hosted by Macrophile.Com. 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’ve dubbed macrofurlia. While a number of Arilin’s and Rogue’s stories may not appeal to anyone outside the macrophile community in the way of their subject matter, their writing is of extremely high quality, with clever dialogue and developed characters, and seeing this encouraged me. Of course, for a number of the plots, it made a difference that the giants were furries. After all, it’s hard for me to believe that any human who suddenly grew would immediately and without cause start to terrorize his or her classmates, coworkers, and others he or she had once treated as equals, but if two boys of a naturally gigantic race stumbled upon a human city, as they do in Rogue’s “Bunnies at Play,” it’s not quite as difficult to imagine them flattening people and cars under their skateboard wheels as they roll down our city streets, knocking down our buildings and lining their pockets with living samples of our species to bring back home and frighten their sisters. Well, I should say it’s not so hard to imagine this scenario when we’re not referred to as humans but as “crawlies,” and our grand structures and complex society are viewed much the same way by these immense invaders as a couple of young human boys might view an ant colony, with anthills as something unimpressive to be kicked down and the puny pests to be exterminated casually, even merrily, as they spill out of their destroyed home. Perspective is key here, and that it one of the major themes throughout this essay.
Not all of Arilin’s and Rogue’s stories center on interspecies violence, though; in fact, some of them feature a romantic relationship between a macrofurry and a human, much as Quorilax does. If people of different sizes and different species can fall in love, or at least get along, then what seemed to be stopping humans of different scales from doing the same with each other? I probably just wasn’t looking in the right place for these stories at first, because in the time since I wrote Quorilax, I’ve found many stories not involving anthros that fit this description. I clearly have some preferences as a macrophile, and it’s those preferences upon which I feel I can comment most effectively, but I’ve also put thought into the connection between the many idiosyncrasies I’ve encountered in myself and others and how they all ultimately manifest themselves as a fascination with size disparities, from those of us who like to see giants crushing their physical inferiors without remorse, to those of us who like to see giants with a crush on their smaller counterparts, and everything in between. Before I speak in these more general terms, though, I think it’s worth examining what’s perhaps the most frequent tendency among macrophiles: an attraction to giant women.
It’s a Woman’s World
If you’re a macrophile, chances are high that your preferred giant is female, and in that case, you’re most likely male. But, you could also be a lady who enjoys the thought of being such a giantess. And even a number of women who don’t picture themselves as the larger of two parties prefer to imagine a fellow female as the one dwarfing them. Dr. Friedman likely noticed this lopsided ratio, as she specifically postulates the existence of an abusive, sadistic mother in a macrophile’s childhood, but another possibility for why the doctor didn’t include a father in her theory is because such parenting, or lack thereof, is far more common among men. Ironically, by Ms. Friedman’s logic, that means we should see a macrophile community dominated by fans of gigantic gentlemen, not the other way around. However, I think the fact that she glossed over the far greater probability of an abusive, sadistic parent being male is very much at the heart of the attraction to powerful women for so many.
A certain fellow once said he preferred men to be giants and women to be tiny, and I take absolutely no issue with that. It’s the reasoning he gave that got to me; namely, that such a scenario enhanced a male’s masculinity and a female’s femininity. A seemingly innocuous comment, perhaps, but it has an insidious implication: womanliness is synonymous with weakness. Stereotypical gender roles are in full force, with the female creature as a helpless damsel in distress, waiting to be rescued by a guy who’s ready to “be a man” and take charge of the situation.
All that being said, there’s nothing wrong with a person gravitating toward a role traditionally associated with his or her sex. For me to say that it’s womankind’s job to swoop in and save all of us “dudes in distress” would simply be the opposite extreme of what bothered me about the original comment that the damsel-in-distress scenario enhanced women’s femininity, which extended beyond communicating a personal preference and suggested that good women universally act in a certain manner that’s distinct from the behavior of good men, pigeonholing us into certain roles. The reality is that, just as men and women are physically more alike than we might think at first glance, the spectrum of masculinity and femininity is similarly continuous for personalities, and the ranges the sexes occupy on that spectrum are far from mutually exclusive. This is more accepted for a girl, who wouldn’t raise many eyebrows by clutching a GI Joe in one hand and a Barbie doll in the other—heck, a lot of guys find “tomboys” attractive. A boy wanting that Barbie, on the other hand, will probably provoke an intervention from his father, and quite probably his mother too, especially if they want to have grandkids someday. Even in modern times, men and women alike treat female as if it’s a step down from male, if only subconsciously. After all, male is the socially dominant human sex, and has been throughout our species’ recorded history. 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.
Humans are naturally inclined to equate physical power with authority and leadership ability, starting with our relationship with our parents, teachers, and other influential adults who are much taller than we are as young children. The fact that kids commonly hear adults referred to as “grown-ups” demonstrates how much we focus on the height disparity and get the idea in our brains that big people know what they’re doing. Even when we’re older, we’re said to “look up to” those we admire, as if to suggest that if they’re not taller than we are, then they ought to be.
Sexual dimorphism is the term used to describe systematic physical differences between the sexes of a species, and one of those differences for humans, of course, is the average heights of males and females. Imagine, now, that this dimorphism is suddenly reversed, so women regularly surpass 6’0” tall while few men reach that milestone. Will gender ratios in the government, military, and other authoritative institutions completely reverse as well? I don’t think so. Even if men and women had always been similar relative heights, so there would have been no past to affect our judgment, I still have my doubts that we would see much difference in behavior between the sexes. After all, in reality, there is a fair amount of crossover in height: most women are taller than some men, and some women are taller than most men, so a reversal would mean that most men would still be taller than some women and some men would still be taller than most women. The tendency of males to be more aggressive and seek control above concord would likely trump a slight female size advantage in determining which sex is dominant in making decisions, especially since men tend to possess greater muscle mass. This is why macrophiles tend to prefer more than just a simple reversal: we like to leave no doubt as to who is in charge. And, ultimately, those with the physical power make the rules—or choose to obey the rules laid down by those without the physical power to enforce them.
A striking difference between the Gulliver’s Travels miniseries and Swift’s book 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 “small” matters like which end of an egg to crack, laughing at those silly little people fighting their cute, insignificant battles around the ankles 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 have been 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 galloping across England, smashing houses and squashing citizens beneath their mighty hooves—a less humiliating fate, to be sure, than drowning in urine or being buried alive beneath a mound of feces when the stately steeds’ excretions fell from the sky. The change from a king to a queen also means that it’s a woman who calls us “the most pernicious race of odious little vermin that ever nature suffered to crawl upon the face of the Earth”—which, again, has a much greater effect being 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. I can’t help but look at these revisions to the storyline and wonder if they were adopted as a subtle implication that a matriarchal society would surpass the male-dominated one we know.
In a world where women are significantly larger than men and in control, to say that all females 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, some women do go to prison, but males outnumber females in the incarcerated population by an egregious ratio, which, especially considering the availability of weapons, can’t be passed off as a result of women being weaker and only deterred from criminal activities by lacking the physical strength to commit them. 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—at least metaphorically, because in such a society, the expression might change to who wears the panties—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.
Male is not inherently the physically superior sex in nature; in fact, reverse sexual size dimorphism is present in blue whales, the largest species known to exist or have existed in the past—the 195-ton record holder for the biggest animal ever to be accurately weighed was a female. Our fellow mammals are the class of animals with which most people have the greatest familiarity, and most mammals aren’t like blue whales in that regard, so it’s easy to understand why people think a female size advantage is rare and they don’t realize how, in a number of species, males are even unnecessary for reproduction or serve little to no purpose besides that. Beyond a limited number of mammals, reverse sexual size dimorphism is the case for many invertebrates and fish; certain reptiles and amphibians; and a number of birds, including birds of prey; and when you consider just the number of invertebrates in the world, that isn’t an insignificant figure. Ironically, even the largest specimens of Tyrannosaurus Rex—“rex” being the Latin word for king—appear to have been female, though I doubt scientists will ever upset tradition by renaming the species Tyrannosaurus Regina, the queen of the tyrant lizards. The methods by which sexual size dimorphism—reverse or not—is achieved varies from species to species, but a common element among those in which the sexes are equal in size or the female is larger is the absence of physical contests between males for mating rights. Given that men don’t typically win women through fistfights and natural selection is a very weak force among modern humans, why don’t we see our sexes’ relative heights starting to even out, or maybe even females gaining the upper hand? Most likely, the answer is sexual selection.
You may recall me saying that when I was in elementary school, I found the girls taller than I was particularly attractive. I’m simply drawn to height in general, and there’s no “disassociation with reality” involved with that, since women taller than I am 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. Actually, I wanted my mate to be taller, like all the girls did, but I didn’t publicly admit that at this moment, fearing that probing questions would result.
As much as humans have evolved culturally, we still have trouble shaking some 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 sense in that light. I can’t quite figure out why males usually 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. Maybe it’s many men’s not entirely baseless perception that a lot of women are less interested in shorter men, or even men of a roughly equal height, whom they’ll look down at if they put on high-heeled shoes. I’m not going to let those women off the hook on their preference, though, because avoiding shorter males due to “natural” instinct is not a very good reason, because humans are intelligent enough to not rely on instinct.
The world is, of course, a very different place than it was in prehistoric times. 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 other males possible can backfire horribly when she finds herself helpless to defend against his testosterone-driven rage. A woman thinking her man should be big enough to protect her becomes something of a self-perpetuating preference when it’s primarily men against whom women need protection. If all men experienced a significant reduction in height, a major excuse to seek a physically superior male would vanish right along with all the physically superior males. As much as I feel that people have a right to find others unattractive and discount them as mates for whatever reasons they wish, I question how often the degree of importance women place on a man’s height is even the result of an inborn preference as opposed to cultural conditioning.
Even if it’s nature and not nurture that draws a particular woman to taller men, she really needs to take a hard look at her priorities for choosing whom she wants to spend the rest of her life with. I wish my wife were taller than I am, yet I don’t feel like I “settled” by marrying someone whose only shortcoming is that she comes short of reaching or surpassing my height. One may argue that it’s different for me because I would greatly narrow my options by limiting myself to taller women, whereas an average-size woman wouldn’t exclude many men by disregarding those shorter than she is, but that doesn’t change the fact that the love of her life could literally be right under nose, and she’ll miss out on her greatest chance for happiness if she only goes looking for love with her neck craned toward the sky. The other issue with the argument that men have it different ignores the very tall women above 6’0” who nonetheless maintain that males my height are not tall enough for them, despite the fact that we’re tall even among our own sex; those women just happen to be extremely tall for their sex. I actually saw someone ask once how a man would kiss a woman inches taller than he is. Seriously, do I really need to dignify that with a response?
The Impossible Dream?
Dr. Freidman is not the only one to suggest that there’s something wrong with taking an interest in people so different from us in size because they don’t exist. I have a few responses to that. First of all, the universe is a very, very big place, so it seems presumptuous to definitively suggest that no other intelligent life is present. That’s effectively the message, because if other species of people do exist, who’s to say how big or small they are? Frankly, I think extraterrestrials with whom we’d stand eye to eye would be quite a coincidence. While the universe’s sheer expansiveness makes the existence of other life and even other people seem incredibly likely, that same aspect of it might also cause us to never meet any of those other civilizations that are probably out there, but who can say for sure? Many humans have imagined the interactions we might have with other races of all shapes and sizes, and even if we never encounter any—or they truly don’t exist in the first place—that doesn’t mean our flights of fancy are useless for exploring our humanity and remarking on our relationships with other members of our own species, who we know are real.
Even if such giant or tiny people with proportionately sized penises and vaginas were a reality, the next criticism commonly leveled at macrophiles is that sexual relations are impossible between individuals of such different scales. Since when has the likelihood of two people mating ever been a prerequisite for sexual attraction? 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 appealing, and that’s not merely because I and possibly she are already in a relationship. Most people, for that matter, make no attempt to hide their beauty or handsomeness 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 other members of the opposite sex or to appreciate the sight of those besides our mates. My desire and/or ability to stick my penis in a woman is irrelevant to whether she draws my attention.
Thanks to pictures and videos that bring representations of strangers into our homes on paper and on screens, we can be aroused by people we may never meet, let alone with whom we expect to engage in sexual intercourse. 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? If not, then their attraction to women who may as well be imaginary characters to them makes them no less disassociated from reality than I am for fawning over giantesses; and if they do think they’ll end up together, then…well…I’d say they’re a lot more disassociated from reality than I am.
While macrophiles don’t mind seeing gorgeous, scantily clad subjects, we’re also inclined to appreciate more average, modestly dressed people like the ones we can see and touch in our daily lives. One may argue that to alter people’s heights means we don’t appreciate them for who they really are, but aren’t people altered all the time whenever they put on makeup or are airbrushed for a magazine spread? Besides, when nothing about people is altered besides their size relative to their surroundings, we can just as easily consider everything else around them as what’s changing, especially from their viewpoint: shrinking people wouldn’t look any different to themselves, instead seeing the world expanding around them, while growing people would watch the rest of the world diminishing before their eyes. And, don’t forget, there are ways to make people “shrink” or “grow” without changing anything besides our own perspective. Photo editing skills aren’t needed to create a point-of-view shot that depicts a mousy 4’9” girl seemingly towering above the viewer, exuding power and confidence. Those qualities weren’t Photoshopped; they existed within her all along. Looking at her another way is all it takes for us to bring them out.
I may have been too hard on the person who said that shrinking women enhances their femininity and growing men enhances their masculinity, because I tend to agree with the more general notion that altering people’s sizes often magnifies their natural personalities. In the case of the stereotypical view of a woman as gentle and a man as strong, however, I think we need to adjust their sizes in the opposite direction. After all, it’s easy for a woman’s touch to seem delicate when she’s so small that her hardest punch feels like a tap, and it’s simple to think a man has everything under control when he possesses absolute power. Meanwhile, someone’s gentleness truly shines through when her touch is soft to a person as small as her finger, while a man would need a great deal of determination to survive when even a housecat is a fearsome predator. On the flip side, a person who lacks will and confidence will obviously have her shortcomings augmented by a lack of size, but perhaps an even better way to convey someone’s weakness is, ironically, to make him a giant, allowing him to cruelly exercise his power over supposedly “inferior” people, only to have those people outsmart and defeat him despite his literally huge advantage.
While humans may not really come in such widely varying sizes, we needn’t look any farther than the end of a leash for an example of an animal that does. Different breeds of dog, from Great Danes to Chihuahuas, are all members of the same species. As of September 30, 2010, the world-record holder for the largest dog weighed 245 pounds and the smallest weighed 24 ounces, differing in size by a factor of about 163. If two humans were so different, how tall would they be relative to each other? Well, their heights wouldn’t differ by a factor of 163, because as height increases by a certain proportion, so do width and depth, meaning that weight increases at the cube of height. Therefore, a human who weighs 163 times what another human does would be taller by a factor of the cube root of 163, or roughly 5.46. (5.46 x 5.46 x 5.46, rounded to the nearest pound, is 163). In other words, these dogs are equivalent to a foot-tall person standing eye-to-shin with someone who’s 5’6”. Dogs attained this variation in mere thousands of years thanks to artificial selection by humans, but given enough time and the right conditions, there would be nothing stopping our own species from doing the same. If we look a little harder than just at man’s best friend, to the insect world, we find the genus pheidologeton, or “marauder ants,” whose “super-major” workers may be 500 times bigger than “minor” workers, which is like a 5’6” person alongside someone who is 8.32” tall. Clearly, extreme size differences among full-grown individuals within a single species are not inherently impossible by any means.
The dimorphism in dogs and marauder ants is not along sexual lines, however. A Great Dane of either sex will be gigantic compared to a Chihuahua of the opposite sex, but neither sex of Chihuahua or Great Dane looms over the opposite sex within its own breed; and as for marauder ants, workers of all sizes are female. So, what is a “realistic” size difference between the sexes of a species, in the sense that it actually exists? Pinnipeds, the group of animals that includes walruses and seals, tend to exhibit the most extreme size advantage of males over females. Southern elephant seal males, as an example, are usually five to six times heavier than females. If such a difference were reflected in the height of humans, men would stand about 1.75 times taller than women, so if men average 6 feet tall—as they do in the Netherlands, widely cited as the tallest country in the world now—a typical woman would stand about 3’5”, able to give her husband fellatio while they’re both standing straight up. In species exhibiting reverse sexual dimorphism, however, the differences can be much greater. Spiders are a prominent example, with males of some species weighing a hundredth of what their mates do. Translating that to human society, men would reach heights a couple of inches above a foot, not even coming up to women’s knees.
The main reason that sexual size dimorphism can favor females to a more extreme degree is a simple one: girls give birth. A daughter could theoretically be larger than her father from the moment she’s born, but, obviously, offspring can’t be born larger than their mother, and in fact need to be quite a bit smaller in order to exit her birth canal without tearing her open. While males of a species in which full-grown males greatly outsize their female counterparts could be born as tiny as their sisters and then shoot up in height during childhood, getting around the problem of a mother’s size, it seems like a better strategy—especially for mammals, who tend to produce a few relatively big offspring instead of a bunch of little eggs, most of whom are not expected to reach adulthood—is for children to be born bigger, and that is more easily accomplished with a big mama.
For Real, or Meta-phor Real?
My apologies for that terrible pun. I devoted a good deal of space to responding to the criticism against the “impossible fantasy” of macrophilia, even though such a redundant phrase shouldn’t need a lot of defending. Admittedly, I find “realistic” scenarios exciting—which is part of the reason I like to analyze mixed-sized relations to such a degree, as if they were a real part of our lives—but that doesn’t mean that a fantasy’s level of realism somehow makes it more or less worthy than another fantasy, especially because macrophilia, as it turns out, is very metaphorical in nature. This excerpt from the January 20, 2011, issue of The Economist shows how physical size can be symbolic of much more:
Jan Pen, a Dutch economist who died last year, came up with a striking way to picture inequality. Imagine people’s height being proportional to their income, so that someone with an average income is of average height. Now imagine that the entire adult population of America is walking past you in a single hour, in ascending order of income.
The first passers-by, the owners of loss-making businesses, are invisible: their heads are below ground. Then come the jobless and the working poor, who are midgets. After half an hour the strollers are still only waist-high, since America’s median income is only half the mean. It takes nearly 45 minutes before normal-sized people appear. But then, in the final minutes, giants thunder by. With six minutes to go they are 12 feet tall. When the 400 highest earners walk by, right at the end, each is more than two miles tall.
I could have just told you that the 400 highest earners in America earn more than 1,760 times as much as those of mean income, and you’d probably say, “Wow, that sounds like a lot,” but I think the visual, visceral image of the mean earners in America being as small as grains of sand, not even rising above the sole of the richest people’s shoes, is much more effective at communicating the disparity. Size is also a largely appropriate metaphor in the class mobility sense, because even though it’s possible to become much different in size from one’s parents, just as it’s possible to experience different financial fortunes, socioeconomic status and physical stature are both largely influenced by the family from which you come, not necessarily on how hard you work or the quality of your nutrition. It’s ironic, really, that the “little people” in life are often the least appreciated, because they perform the jobs that “somebody has to do.” I’m sure we’d experience quite a shock if all the men and women who do the menial jobs cleaning up after the rest of society went missing. Humans as a whole look upon the natural world in much the same way, where “bugs” and the other “vermin” that we casually crush beneath our shiny shoes perform tasks vital to the functioning of our planet.
Part of what attracts me to the idea of a relationship between a giantess and a smaller man is that there’s an especially strong sense that the man is being loved for who he is as opposed to what he can provide physically. This is not to suggest that macrophilia is a sexual attraction to dependency, especially when you consider that, in the modern world, the best careers tend to involve using one’s mind instead of one’s might, and the next big idea could come from a tiny person’s brain—but, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that a shrunken person can’t generate any income. I’m the breadwinner in my family, and I don’t mind that, but I’m annoyed at anyone who expects more of a man than a woman in that regard. If my wife suddenly shrunk, I wouldn’t look into her tiny, teary eyes and taunt, “What can you do for me now? I’m going out to find myself a real woman,” and I’d like to think that I wouldn’t suddenly get demoted from my status as a “real man” because I could no longer provide. I feel like a modern, independent woman should be able to supply her own material possessions; the love of another person is the one thing she can’t provide for herself, and if she’s looking for the love of another person, a person can fulfill that need all the same at any size. Shrunken people actually have an advantage in that they’re cheap dates: they don’t need a separate meal at a restaurant, you can hide them in a pocket or purse while you’re checking into a hotel room to get a lower rate…the list goes on. Then, if the relationship evolves and you move in together, you don’t need to get a bigger place to hold the both of you. Even if shrunken people don’t build your family’s financial wealth, neither do they really diminish it much, if at all, so anyone who can support himself or herself should be able to support a physically insignificant significant other.
As surprising as this may seem for a macrophile to say, I would never choose to be reduced to a few inches in height and put my wife in a position like that, but if forces beyond our control made that happen, it’s knowing that she’d love or care for me all the same when I need her most and couldn’t offer her as much material support, if any, that appeals to me. There are plenty of other reasons I wouldn’t choose to be irreversibly reduced, too, such as that I appreciate the ability to open doors on my own and therefore live a life of freedom. On that note, there are plenty of macrophile fantasies that we’d never actually wish to come true, if we knew they would happen. Someone may wag a finger and notice, “You wouldn’t be alive to appreciate a woman crushing you to death under her foot,” and, indeed, I’m sure most macrophiles who dream of such a thing would not really want their soul to be squeezed from their body beneath a sole. The fact is, though, that we can read a story or look at a picture, no matter how violent in nature, and survive it. One reason we read books and watch movies is so we can vicariously experience situations and places we’d never want to encounter ourselves. Even those who live the most dangerously, like rock climbers without a safety line, practice and take as many precautions as they can to make sure they don’t go splat. They don’t have a death wish; they have a life wish, and it’s in the course of facing danger—or tricking our mind into thinking our body is facing danger—that we feel the most alive.
All else equal, it’s nice to have a mate who can provide more sexual satisfaction and bring home more bacon, but I’m a person who believes the “all else”—namely, how attracted a couple are to each other and how emotionally and mentally compatible they are—is far more important. Earlier, I remarked that we’re constantly attracted to people we can’t or won’t have sex with, so there’s nothing “unnatural” about being attracted to someone significantly larger or smaller than we are simply because we can’t have sex with him or her like we would with someone our own size. But what if some people went beyond looking and took the next step, starting to date someone so different in size from themselves? They may be able to convince themselves they were made for each other, until they find themselves naked in the bedroom for the first time. At that point, when men are gaping at cavernous vaginas that could swallow them whole and women are staring at tree-size “wood,” the reality sets in that, at least in one sense, they were clearly not made for each other.
Or were they? Do a couple’s genitals need to fit together like a lock and key in order to enjoy themselves sexually? I’m sure gay and lesbian individuals would say no, and I agree with that assessment. Sexual arousal and intercourse are at least as much psychological in nature as they are physiological. I say that with kinks and fetishes in mind, of course, but even beyond that, I think most of us are far more enthusiastic about having sex with someone we’re attracted to and who is attracted to us, even if that person doesn’t feel any different “inside” than someone with whom we don’t share a mutual attraction. If a couple use sex toys or other aids in the course of their encounter, I don’t believe that means the experience can’t excite them just as much and bring them just as close to one another as if they purely used each other’s bodies to get off. I get aroused simply imagining my wife masturbating to the thought of me, at any size, which is to say nothing of how I’d feel if she were a giant and took me in her hand and rubbed me over her body at the same time. Simply being close to and attracted to the person you’re with, I think, is more important than the sexual logistics involved. In fact, 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 is trying to say you don’t belong together in such physically mismatched bodies, I find that extremely poignant. That’s another reason I would never make a conscious choice to shrink myself, since I would be the one placing the obstacle in my own path, which isn’t nearly the same; it would be a bit like causing a car crash just so I could be there to save people and look like a “hero,” acting brave and noble in the face of a mess I created. When a size difference occurs naturally or comes about through other involuntary means, on the other hand, it’s a beautiful metaphor for loving someone when loving them might not always be the easiest, most superficially gratifying option, and showing the world that the two of you really are meant to be, for better or for worse, for bigger or for smaller.
It’s All Relative
The concept of giants is nothing new to the human psyche: stories of David and Goliath, Odysseus and the Cyclops, and Jack and the Beanstalk are just a few examples throughout history. However, even in the modern day, for most people the word “giant” will likely conjure up images like these, of ugly, brutish males in the role of villains who ought to be slain. Gulliver’s Travels, if not the first tale to break the mold in this regard, is certainly the most well known. A Brobdingnagian town would be complete with civilized men, women, children, and animals milling about, just as if an English town had been blown up in proportion by a factor of twelve. The Land of the Giants, or LOTG, was almost like an extra-planetary, more modern version of Brobdingnag, also with life forms no different from the ones we know, if not for the fact that they’re all twelve times bigger than they are on our world. Just as I highly doubt that we’d perfectly match an alien race in size, I’m even more doubtful that they’d otherwise perfectly match us in form, so the appearance of the giants in LOTG was obviously not chosen for the sake of realism. Part of this is probably due to practical considerations, namely that it would have been more difficult and expensive to dress all the aliens up as little green men and women—er, giant green men and women—or in some other cheesy costumes. But I think the main reason to make the giant aliens “human” is an even simpler one, and that’s to make it easy for us to relate to them, despite their size, which is, in effect, the one variable among all the constants, offering us a fascinating glimpse into how physical size plays such a major role in our perceptions and even influences our behavior toward others.
At first, it may seem like the tendency for a person of one size to look at a person of a vastly different size as something other than a person is entirely a one-way problem for “giants” who have a hard time seeing their smaller counterparts as equals, but such feelings can be directed toward giants just as strongly, if not more so. After all, size differences are more noticeable to smaller people, in the sense that, relative to body length, they need to look up more than larger people need to look down. For example, to look a person one-twelfth your height in the eyes, you would need to look down almost 92% of your body, which sounds like a lot, but that person would need to look up 1,100% of his or her height to find your face. You would never need to look down more than 100% of your height at anyone, but as someone gets extremely small, incremental changes barely noticeable to you would continue to make a monumental difference to him or her.
Stories like Gulliver’s Travels and LOTG strayed from the common knowledge of the previous millennia and made a bold suggestion: giants are people too. They needn’t be gods and goddesses or rampaging monsters, but can instead be regular folks with jobs and families, just like those of us one twelfth their height. Nowadays, even in tales of superheroes with extraordinary abilities, we like to get a sense that the characters are otherwise just like us so we’re able to relate to them, and it’s much the same theory with giants, who are merely extraordinary in the most ordinary way. I say “extraordinary in the most ordinary way” because none of us have x-ray vision or teleportation abilities, but it’s quite possible that there are planets in the universe where the people are much smaller than we are, so all us humans may be “extraordinary” and just not be aware yet! Despite the frequency with which words like “god” and “goddess” are thrown about to describe giants in macrophile stories, we like to know that somewhere within that massive body resides the soul of a mortal person with quirks and flaws. In the same way that you may look at someone your size in our world and think he or she is “out of your league,” it’s understandable that your first impression of someone so much more powerful would be that he or she is an infallible deity who would never associate with the likes of vermin such as you. But if you build up the courage to share your feelings, you may find that, far from that majestic creature seeing you as some lower form of life, the attraction is mutual, and the only reason that person didn’t initiate the conversation is because he or she figured the reason you never approached was because you saw him or her as nothing more than some clumsy, lumbering monster. Imagine that: a giant who is shy, who craves acceptance and fears the rejection of someone who doesn’t even come up to his or her knee!
An interesting point of LOTG is that the society in which the Earthlings find themselves is ruled by a totalitarian government. Upon seeing the Giants towering over the Earthlings, we may think they have absolutely nothing in common with us and can’t understand how we feel. While it may be true that the cats and kids on their planet aren’t likely to kill them, many of the Giants are “little people” in their own right, feeling helpless to rise up against the oppressive masters of their government who offer rewards for the capture of Earthlings and threaten punishment to citizens who offer them help. Most of them don’t catch Earthlings because they’re cruel; they do it because they and their families will benefit from a reward, and their families will benefit even more from the “reward” of them not being thrown in jail. The Giants call the Earthlings “Little People,” and while the last half of that phrase makes it clear that they recognize our intelligence—unlike them, we’ve achieved space travel, after all—the government obviously places a lot more emphasis on the first half of that phrase, which separates us from them. It’s a lot easier to treat people different from how you’d want to be treated when you focus on the few ways they’re not like you instead of the many ways they are like you, and it’s especially easy to treat them however you wish when they’re powerless to stop you from doing so. Because of that, positive conduct toward a much smaller person seems especially genuine and pure in nature—more so yet when positive conduct toward smaller people is not taught by society, or is even discouraged. Even as a fan of kind, gentle giants, I’ve come to welcome their antitheses into my fantasies because they provide a contrast to the protagonists and make them look all the more noble and righteous by forcing them into fighting passionately for the rights of their minuscule brothers and sisters.
What makes size such an intriguing trait is that it can be either the least noticeable physical difference between two people or one of the most noticeable, depending on the circumstances. A common theme found in macrophile stories involves people corresponding via phone or email, or even seeing each other through a digital photograph, videophone, or Web cam, not realizing, until they finally meet in the flesh, that a tremendous size difference exists between them. When you’re typing back and forth with someone, there’s no way for you to know that his or her computer mouse is as big as your house, because no matter how large the letters he or she is typing appear on her monitor, which would have a screen bigger than the ones at drive-in theaters, they’ll appear the same size on yours. This idea doesn’t hold as well for snail mail, since receiving a letter that requires a semi truck to deliver it should be a pretty big clue.
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 seem to 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, these examples show that 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 her cramped dorm room that has as much square footage as a present day middle-class family’s entire home. Then again, our descendants may descend in height to the point that a college campus could be built over an area the size of that same modern family’s backyard.
The Twilight Zone played upon this idea beautifully because, in addition to the series’ famous episode teaching us that beauty is in the eye of beholder, at least four episodes that I know of featured giant—or are the others 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” could, in fact, obliterate the house next door beneath her big toe. Or perhaps the “giantess” is an Earthling 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. 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 to some and tiny to others all at once (“The Little People”). In the fourth episode I have in mind (“Stopover in a Quiet Town”), we turn out to be the small ones, but we only see the giants at the very end, when it’s revealed that the town is quiet because it’s nothing more than a child’s tabletop play set, and an Earthling couple, who imbibed a bit too much alcohol at a party and couldn’t remember how they arrived there, are the only creatures in it that aren’t fake. In some cases, a plot depends on Earthlings being indistinguishable from 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 the 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 so-called “skyscrapers” around her. We hope the child’s attitude toward the Earthlings is merely a result of being too young to have fully developed a sense of empathy, and that her mother will step in as the moral authority to teach her that these people are practically tiny versions of themselves, not toys to handle as she pleases, but their only hopes for a savior are dashed when the mammoth mama points out that the girl’s father intentionally “brought them all the way from Earth” and tells her daughter she can resume playing with her new pets after lunch.
Just as with LOTG, the human appearance of the aliens is probably about more than just cost-cutting or lack of creativity, but rather because the more human a giant looks, 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 child with smooth skin, curly brown hair, and a cherub face, whose reaction is to simply giggle at their confusion and terror, it’s very easy to be angered at their insensitivity to our struggles, to wonder how they can see 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 stock of our own actions toward comparatively helpless beings.
Gulliver is a leviathan in Lilliput but bite-sized in Brobdingnag, so he knows firsthand that “big” and “small” are completely subjective 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?
The Lilliputians are about one-twelfth Gulliver’s height, and he in turn was one-twelfth the height of Brobdingnagians, meaning that the Brobdingnagians are a whopping 144 times taller than the Lilliputians. Thus, a 66-foot-tall Brobdingnagian woman would seem 792 feet tall to a Lilliputian, who would appear less than half an inch tall to her. Now imagine that these hypothetical “Sub-Lilliputians” and “Super-Brobdingnagians” of which Gulliver speaks existed, respectively shorter and taller than ourselves by a factor of 144, making those two races differ in height by an unfathomable multiple of 20,736. What the Super-Brobdingnagians measure as 5’6” would be like 21.6 miles to the Sub-Lilliputians, whom they would need to view under microscopes. It boggles my mind to think about this pattern continuing. I consider the movie Men in Black, in which a glass sphere perhaps an inch in diameter dangles from the collar of a cat but 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 ours by extension, be hanging from an ordinary 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 tired of us and moved on to another accessory, tossing our planet and countless others into a shoebox to be forgotten, or—worse yet—losing us on the floor of her messy room, hidden under a pile of clothes, dooming us to be scooped up and tossed into a washing machine with her delicates? Such images of worlds within worlds within worlds ad infinitum bring to mind the concept of fractals, which are, essentially, shapes that look the same—or very similar—no matter how far one zooms in upon them, or perhaps even zooms out. Fractals are not merely a human construct; they’re found to varying degrees in nature: think crystals or systems of blood vessels. Are we part of some cosmic fractal, so that other universes exist within our own, on dimensions too small for us to detect, and our universe too may be a mere speck floating through another universe, a la Horton Hears a Who!?
The Big Picture
A significant proportion of macrophiles are men who fantasize about giantesses, and I suggested that this may largely be due to the novelty of physically superior women. This theory would also explain why many like to see power bestowed upon other groups of people who don’t typically possess as much of it, like teens, minorities, or, in the anthro world, meek species like mice. However, to say that macrophilia is only rooted in a desire to upset the status quo would be to oversimplify it. Macrophiles, more generally, like to see major imbalances of physical power and how they affect relationships between people, but that can also include exaggerations of the status quo, such as massive men and/or wee women, which is something that a multitude of macrophiles prefer.
Although I’d still say that scenarios involving bigger females and smaller males are my favorites, I enjoy a wide variety of macrophile material. As I said earlier, King Kong marked one of my first realizations that I possessed this penchant, and that movie featured no giant women; just a huge male ape. As someone who can get aroused by a variety of interactions beyond FEMALE/male, I know personally that macrophilia—at least for some of us—can’t be explained entirely as an expression of female admiration. As much as I love and respect women, it’s erroneous to suggest that the relative physical size of the people in macrophile fantasies always reflects how lofty or lowly our opinion of them is. That would imply just as strongly that any man who likes seeing shrunken women is a male supremacist, and that any woman who dreams of being a man’s tiny toy has got to be some bimbo who’s been brainwashed into believing she exists purely for the pleasure of males. Considering how much I dislike double standards for men and women, I’m not about to imply that a female dreaming of giant guys connotes anything about her level of ambition, intelligence, or any other dimension of her personality. On the flip side, a man imagining a woman as a giantess doesn’t automatically indicate a high regard for her; she can just as easily be made into a sexual object, even if physically overpowering and taking advantage of her isn’t a possibility. Of course, macrophilia can no longer be painted as a “battle of the sexes” whatsoever when we remember that a lot of macrophiles have an interest in seeing interactions between individuals of the same sex.
And it’s not necessarily just homosexual individuals that like to see same-sex interaction, either. I, for one, am aroused by encounters between women of different sizes, and I’m not one of those men who is inordinately obsessed with watching real-life lesbians make out. The women needn’t even be touching, for that matter; they could simply be completely heterosexual women next to each other, minding their own business, and it may excite me. I think this is because there’s an added sense of intimacy—not completely sexual in nature—that would exist between individuals of very different scales, especially “handheld,” which helps to explain why that relative size is so popular. When people are so big compared to others, their dermal imperfections would be far more noticeable, and the heat and aromas radiating from their bodies would be quite palpable. Having someone your size sitting only inches away from you would probably seem like an invasion of personal space, but little people could get that close, if not closer, and most of us would likely not feel uncomfortable, assuming we even notice.
Chances are that plenty of close contact would occur as the larger members of society routinely picked up their smaller counterparts. While there would be a number of ways to carry people, the most natural and secure manner would be holding them upright in a fist, with one’s upper arm pointing straight down and the forearm parallel to the ground and angled at least slightly toward one’s torso, essentially meaning that one person would have fingers hugging most of his or her body mere inches from a giant person’s chest, as seen from the latter’s perspective. This wouldn’t leave a lot of room for shyness on the part of either party, especially if the smaller individual is a man whose penis could press against the hand of a woman whose breasts would teasingly jut toward him, not far out of his reach.
Perhaps, for reasons such as this, a coiled fist would be considered a rude manner in which to hold strangers, co-workers, or casual acquaintances, leading it to be reserved for significant others, family members, and close friends. But even being cradled in an open palm closer to someone’s face would, I think, be quite a bonding experience, as you would be hyper-aware of each other’s actions so as not to experience a mishap, and you would self-consciously try to imagine how you must look through one another’s eyes. It’s not quite as natural to think as much about how someone sees us when they’re close to our size; isn’t it just like looking in a mirror? We don’t spend a lot of time reflecting on how we appear to insects, since they don’t see us the way a person that size would; it’s the feedback loop of reactions between equally self-aware people who we know can see the world just like us, albeit from a much different perspective, that’s central to macrophilia.
Of course, we know that not everyone thinks about this as much as we do. If people can judge other people as less than equal for a reason as silly as skin color, then it’s not hard to imagine how people could see beings so small and not see another person—not because they’re otherwise bad or evil, but because they’re ignorant, like the boys in Rogue’s “Bunnies at Play” that I mentioned earlier. A more well known example of this is the French movie La Planéte Sauvage (Fantastic Planet), which won an award at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, though I think a lot of people may only recognize it from a few clips in The Cell (2000). Yeah, the ones with the giant blue people—and no, I’m not talking about the Na’vi from Avatar; the Draags would make the ten-foot-tall Pandoran natives look like malnourished mice. Anyway, in the memorable opening of Fantastic Planet, some Draag children—all boys again—flick and drop a human woman, who turns out to be the then-infant narrator’s mother, with all the casual cruelty of a human child burning an ant beneath a magnifying glass. I should mention that they do feel a sense of remorse upon realizing they’ve killed her, but only because it means they can’t play with her anymore. “Unaware” scenarios similarly feature ignorant giants, but in these cases, they’re ignorant because they don’t know the smaller people are around in the first place. Even the most ardent animal rights advocates—those who quite literally wouldn’t hurt flies—have surely stepped on ants and killed them in the course of walking around, since it would be highly infeasible for us to carefully examine each patch of ground before we bring our feet crashing to the earth.
Unfortunately, recognizing a physical inferior as a mental equal can sometimes lead to greater mistreatment instead of a positive bond. A person could look into a pair of tiny eyes and see the intelligence there, knowing there’s a mind capable of realizing its body’s helplessness against such godlike power and contemplating its possible fate, and that’s the perverted draw, because a creature like a mouse doesn’t make facial expressions, cry, or beg for mercy; those are distinctly human acts. Does getting excited by these scenarios mean we’re sadistic? I don’t think so. I would compare our morbid fascination to rubbernecking at the scene of a deadly car accident. We think, Oh, those poor people, yet we study the scene as if hoping to calculate the carnage. I say this as someone who, in fact, generally avoids turning my head or watching videos of real-life violence and bloodshed, yet even I sometimes need to make a concerted effort to resist our natural temptation to do so. Sometimes, in macrophile stories, heroes will step in to save tiny people from their towering tormentors, but we know that doesn’t always happen, and we’re reminded that the world we live in, for all its beauty, can be unfair and cruel. Any day could be your last, so try to give someone you love a hug or a kiss before you leave home for the day or go to sleep, because you never know when an unfamiliar hand might snatch you from your office or bedroom and not put you back.
With all the seemingly unrelated—even conflicting—interests among macrophiles, and sometimes even existing within a single macrophile, it seems as though trying to find some connection between us all beyond our common affinity for size disparities is a fool’s errand. But I believe there’s a major point that leads at least a good portion of us to be enamored of giant things, and that connection is…a fascination with connections. I suppose you want me to explain what I mean by that now, huh? Well, I’ve already touched on it in bits and pieces throughout the essay, but I guess now would be a good time to bring it all together.
Humans are social animals, and it’s common for us to want to feel like we’re part of a group. We want to belong, to not feel alone, which is why it was such an amazing experience for me—and for many macrophiles, I would think—to initially discover that others thought about giants the way I did. That comfort in being part of something bigger can extend beyond human communities, though. Even when we’re completely alone, praying or taking a walk through nature, there’s something satisfying in knowing that we’re an element of something that extends beyond ourselves.
Macrophiles simply take the desire to be part of something “bigger” to its most literal extent. This literal interpretation can also apply to interests closely related to macrophilia, with vorarephilia, or “vore,” being a prime example. For anyone who doesn’t know, vore is an attraction to being ingested by another being. Not all vorarephiles are macrophiles, or vice versa, but there is a strong correlation between them. It makes sense, since it’s much easier to eat something alive when it’s bite size, and, unless the consuming creature can dislocate its jaw like a snake, something can’t get very big before that’s not the case anymore. A significant size difference is especially conducive to vorarephilia when the vore fantasy involves swallowing something whole, so the smaller being remains alive inside the mouth, throat, stomach, etc. of the larger one, at least for a short time. Being part of something bigger can involve making sacrifices—including “the ultimate sacrifice”—to perpetuate it. For a vorarephile, being eaten, dying so that another being may live, is such an act of devotion.
Other animals routinely, albeit unwillingly, become meals for other animals, which is something that’s often 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 people 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. One step too far, many will counter, but one step nonetheless. If you’re not a vorarephile, think about that the next time you’re having a romantic meal where you and your partner are sensually feeding each other pieces of a slaughtered animal.
I may sound like a vorarephile—or a vegetarian, who would, ironically, seem to have absolutely nothing in common with a vorarephile—but I’m neither. I am, however, an anthropomorphile. That interest, like vorarephilia, can exist independently of macrophilia, but there are plenty of macrofurls like me out there. It’s easy for to imagine how someone could possess the fetish trinity of macrophilia, vorarephilia, and anthropomorphilia all at once. After all, when I first read macrophile stories that featured immense individuals inflicting death and destruction, I found the ones with inhuman giants far more palatable, and vorarephilia, likewise, may come across as somewhat less grotesque to an outsider when humans aren’t dining on other humans. Even those of us with largely gentle macrophile fantasies, however, tend to get aroused by the presence of some amount of “domination” or “teasing.” Macrophilia and BDSM often go hand in hand, because at their core, they’re both about the trust that develops from someone making himself or herself vulnerable to another. Even though it seems like simply being in the presence of gigantic people should be enough of a demonstration of their power, it doesn’t hurt for them to offer the occasional good-natured reminder—mischievous, not malicious—that they could have their way with you if they wanted to. Especially for men, who more often end up pursuing women than vice versa, there’s something thrilling about feeling like the irresistible object of desire: the trophy, the prize, the catch…or the prey, if you will.
Yes, in nature, prey will meet a violent end by predators, and on the surface, it seems disgusting to sexualize that, but cats, as one example, are widely associated with sensuality, and they’re known to even occasionally toy with their quarry. As I said earlier, Humans seldom see what they eat until it’s all processed, so we don’t tend to think of ourselves as a part of predator-prey relationships, but just as inserting a part of your body into an orifice of someone you love—or being on the receiving end of such a gesture—is an incredibly intimate act, so too is ingesting another animal as a meal, bringing its body into your own, leading it to become a part of you.
Humans haven’t been an apex predator for long, though, which is why I believe we tend to identify far more with prey—or as prey. In the feral parts of our brain, there’s probably still a piece of the mind of our tiny mammalian ancestors from 65 million years ago, who gazed out the entryways to their burrows at the scaled titans who ruled the surface. I mean, just look at how many giant monster movies exist. Nowadays, we may cower in nicely furnished basements instead of earthen burrows, or we may gaze out a skyscraper window instead of a hole in a tree to see an eye bigger than our bodies peeking in at us, but the message is clear: beneath the veneer of our civilization and technology, we’re still largely helpless little animals. Well, we may be powerless as individuals, but our species’ success is largely a result of that social nature I talked about; we can achieve more together than we can alone. It’s easy to imagine how the primal sense of fear and danger that beastly behemoths arouse within us can arouse us in a completely different way, prompting us to get close to someone we love and engage in an activity that ultimately results in us passing on our genes to another generation before we inevitably plummet down a gargantuan creature’s gullet.
In LOTG, Earthling technology had advanced further than Giant technology, and it’s not uncommon for the technologically inferior race in a story to be the physically superior one, because size is the great equalizer—or un-equalizer, depending on how you want to look at it. Thanks to weapons, major imbalances of physical power can exist between humans of the same size who, if stripped of that technology, would be very evenly matched, but it would be quite another sensation to wield such an inherent dominance over others. Would the maxim “all men are created equal” ring hollow if people were born at such extremely disparate sizes that entire armies of armed men were like nothing more than a bunch of toy soldiers to a single young child whose exposed skin could deflect their bullets, and who could crush them with his or her bare hands and feet? Imagine how much different of a course world history would have taken if Europeans had been greeted in the New World by fifty-foot-tall natives! Or would things have been different? Might the natives have still been brought to their knees by something much, much smaller than even the itty-bitty invaders: the diseases the colonizers carried, to which they had long ago developed a tolerance? Not only can minute things like the aforementioned microbes hurt humans, but our bodies also depend on many bacteria to live healthy lives.
I said that macrophilia takes the desire to be part of something bigger to its most literal extent, so where does microphilia fit into that picture? Well, in many ways, it’s like we’re part of a living fractal, where the world we see through microscopes seems just as “big” and infinite as the macroscopic world we observe through telescopes, with the vast majority of organisms on Earth being too small for us to discern with our naked eyes. I think the popularity of multi-size scenarios—“multi-size” in the macrophile world means at least three different sizes, like in the illustration at the top of this essay—is a reflection of the realization that macrophilia, rather than ultimately being concerned with who’s superior to whom, is more a matter of how all creatures and people great and small, and greater and smaller, have their place in making this world what it is. Macrophilia is not so much an attraction to one person’s dependence on another as it is an attraction to how all of us are connected to and interdependent upon each other in surprising ways that are usually not immediately obvious. Physical size is an excellent means to illustrate this idea, seeing as how the importance we assign to something and the respect we accord it often vary in proportion to that trait, but nature has no sense of superiority and inferiority; those concepts are entirely human in origin. When all is said and done, though, we’re in this life together. Helen Friedman decided that macrophilia was not a healthy expression of sexuality because it wasn’t about feeling a connection to another person, but, quite the contrary, I think that’s exactly what it’s about.
As I said in the introduction to this essay, I can’t answer exactly how the macrophile attraction to experiencing a physical manifestation of our connectedness translates into sexual attraction, any better than I can provide a logical reason for my attraction to breasts; it’s just what gets our juices flowing. A woman could write the most eloquent piece on why she loves men—so could a gay man, for that matter—but I could still never personally understand an attraction to another male, and likewise, I don’t expect anybody who started reading this essay without any inclinations toward macrophilia to have developed some along the way. What I do understand is how much we have in common, and how all sexuality is a bit strange when you get right down to it. Whether you’re a macrophile or not, I hope in the course of reading this that you’ve taken the same thing away; what I hope you’ve gained is a different perspective on something. If my experiences as a macrophile have taught me anything, it’s that I need to look at my surroundings from different points of view.
I have office hours now, so if you’d like to ask me questions, share your own experience with macrophilia, discuss theories, 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!
© Copyright 2003 Davy Kraken (UN: kraken at Writing.Com).
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