Hating Love, Loving Hate
This is the journey of a small-time fetish erotica writer, trying to find a place for a blog and an ethical newsletter platform. My opponents: disinformation about pornography and legislated morality by banks.
My kink is macrophilia. I find gigantic women attractive, and I’m enamored of the idea of being shrunken down to a few inches tall to start a relationship with a normal-sized woman. The only thing weird about this is scale. Everything else about this fantasy — sensory overload, domination and submission, wanting to feel desired, momentarily shedding one’s burdens — is present in the most popular sexual fantasies harbored by “normal” people in the United States. While macrophilia has never been formally studied, Dr Justin Lehmiller of the Kinsey Institute successfully polled over 4,000 Americans about their sexual fantasies, and the giantess fetish came up.
It comes up in waves, in popular media. In 1999, Jon Bowen wrote a primer on Size Fantasy in “Urge: A Giant Fetish” for Salon, the material of which was cannibalized for sensationalist pieces for a decade after. In this, Dr Helen Friedman, a clinical psychologist in St. Louis, shared her Freudian beliefs about what people should and should not be attracted to, suggesting macrophilia had no place in a healthy relationship. She went on to assert that no woman could possibly fantasize about giant men because they exist in a patriarchy and have no need to dream of obscenely powerful men.
As Size Fantasy writer and community member of a few decades, I can assure you this suggestion is naive and patently untrue.
The giantess wave is rising once again. In 2015, PornHub reported that searches for “giantess” went up 1021%. A new round of articles came out a week ago, based on Clips4Sale’s statement that searches for “giantess” increased 1000% in 2023, and Metro UK and Vice made much hay over this, as will a wake of lazy journalism and morning radio shows.
Regardless, this is the quality of “wow, look at this weird shit” journalism that the giantess fetish has to endure. By some estimates, giantess fetishists have greater shame over their fantasy than other kinksters do. I’ve started a podcast to illustrate, to curious outsiders, how everyone’s into something and wanting to be overwhelmed by the sexual experience has much in common with many other fantasies. It will never be a very popular show, and I’m doing it for fun rather than profit, but I still have heard from a couple listeners who confess they thought they were the only ones into this.
For now, I can host this show on WordPress, where I’ve run my blog of a few hundred short stories and series. I use this site as my media hub, to link to wherever else I exist (a list that gets shorter each year), a list of creative writer resources, and rosters of other creators in this realm. I say “for now” because WordPress’s TOS isn’t clearly outlined:
We know that there may be different definitions of this, but generally, we define sexually explicit material as visual depictions of sexually explicit acts. Nudity, in and of itself, is fine.
Writing about sex generally skates under most radars, whereas photos and illustrations of sex is on the other side of the line.
And I say “for now” because WordPress wasn’t my first home. After a dozen years of building my own crappy-looking websites on Geocities, I started an account on Blogger to host my short stories and talk about the fetish. In February 2015 they cheerfully announced they would be deleting adult-content accounts, like mine. Within days, they very resentfully announced they would not do this, due to protests from legacy accounts like mine. They also stopped calling them “adult-content” accounts and started denigrating them as “porn,” and these accounts had to self-report as porn so they would be ineligible for Blogger searches or referrals.
At that point I decided to move around half of my eggs into Tumblr’s basket, which very clearly had a laissez-faire policy on adult content. It was a haven not just for feckless pervs like me but for disenfranchised groups who were able to congregate and talk about difficult, personal subject matter. It was a safe space for LGBTQ+ users to trade ideas, confess, and heal each other.
If you know anything about online societies, you may have heard about Tumblr’s roll down the hill. Lacking any competitive features or assets, Yahoo purchased Tumblr in 2013 for $1.1 billion. (Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer lied about keeping Tumblr CEO/founder David Karp in place and promptly installed a new CEO, Jeff D’Onofrio; she lied about “not screwing up Tumblr,” too.) Verizon decided to up its own game by purchasing AOL ($4.4 billion, 2015) and Yahoo ($4.5 billion, 2017), which then constituted the christofascist-sounding Oath media group. D’Onofrio said there were plenty of websites for adult content and Tumblr would not be one of them, scrubbing it clean of sexual content and making it “the most welcoming environment for our community.”
That “welcoming environment,” in practice, looked like a mass user exodus and a 99.8% devaluation of Tumblr’s worth, compelling Verizon to sell Tumblr to Automattic (owners of Wordpress) for $3 million in 2019. Yet porn is the financial risk?
So I’m running on WordPress for now, having shied from Blogger and Tumblr. I ventured into paid subscriptions through Patreon, then left when their CEO, Jack Conte, complied with the demands of white supremacists in censorship. Indie news group It’s Going Down documented how white nationalist Lauren Southern was raising funds on Patreon to block the rescue of immigrants in Europe, getting her account suspended. In response, an alt-right campaign from basement-dwelling bloggers to Fox News demanded that IGD be taken down, based on misinformation but ultimately because they’re leftist.
Shortly after appearing on Dave Rubin’s YouTube channel (Rubin, an alt-right commentator so intellectually unarmed that left-wing pundits consider him off-limits), extolling his defense of freedom of speech, Conte suspended IGD’s Patreon account for no good reason. Southern was removed because of her activity, but IGD was removed under pressure from Proud Boys, Fox News, and The Daily Caller for no reason grounded in reality.
I wrote to Patreon to learn their official position on capitulating to white supremacists; in May 2021 I was told an investigation was underway. I wrote back in July 2022 to ask after the progress or results of this investigation, and Patreon’s Trust and Security sternly advised me that they do not share any information about internal investigations. I asked them very clearly if they could confirm that Jack Conte is not sympathetic to white supremacists, and they iterated they were unable to do so.
So I quit Patreon, losing my dozen subscribers, some of whom followed me to WordPress, where I began exploring their paid subscription features. This worked well for several months until Stripe, who manages their financial transactions, learned that I write adult content. Whereas most platforms ban images but permit writing, Stripe has zero tolerance for any form of adult content and suspended my account, sundering my meager subscribers.
Now, I’ve been off Facebook for several years, due to their political interference, their psychological manipulation of unconsenting users, and their inadequate policies to deal with harassment. And I quit Twitter after the Faulknerian idiot man-child purchased it in a display of ego, dismantled it from the inside, and reopened the doors to Nazis and disinformation. But word tends to trickle down, nonetheless, and I happened to catch a post in which avowed white supremacist and misogynist DC_Draino thanked Twitter for reinstating his account, enabling him to earn $7,000 in ad revenue.
Guess who brokered that transaction.
I wrote to Stripe to ask how they could support the payout of a white nationalist, and they said they’d look into it. They said they’d get back to me within three weeks either with an answer or with a reason why it was taking so long. I wrote back to them several times within 90 business days and never heard back, not until I complained about them on Twitter. Yes, I held my nose and created an account to promote my podcast, and the squeaky wheel really does get the grease on Twitter. They asked me to DM them the problem, I explained it all, and they said that they don’t support adult content.
I said, “No, I’m asking about this Nazi you helped pay,” and they said, “sorry, we don’t support adult content” and stopped responding. They did send me their TOS, and they do prohibit “Pornography and other mature audience content (including literature, imagery and other media) depicting nudity or explicit sexual acts,” and nowhere does it say they will refuse to do business with Nazis.
Then I deleted that Twitter account because I kept getting alt-right propaganda and hate speech accounts recommended to me.
Some time after this, I took a community education course on starting a podcast, and I started a podcast. The instructor said she was also teaching a course on starting a newsletter, so I signed up and started a newsletter through Substack.
You know where this is going.
I started That’s About the Size of It, a newsletter dedicated to commenting on the portrayal and mention of giantesses in the media, whether actual giants in movies and video games or just very tall women earning several times my income on OnlyFans. Three months into it, and after a new dozen subscribers, CEO Hamish McKenzie responded to users concerned about Nazis being given a platform on Substack. In a note (read: blog post) written by himself, he literally said that he wished people didn’t hold Nazi views, but they do, and who is Substack to censor that. He’s another naive free-speech absolutist, who believes free speech can only be preserved by giving space to people whose agenda is to destroy free speech, that mature and rational discourse in the “marketplace of ideas” can refute an ideology that has proved bulletproof to mature and rational discourse for the past goddamn century.
And the comments, among his supporters, shift between “eww, porn is gross” and “hold on, let’s just see what the Nazis have to say.” Because Substack has a policy against adult content, but not the oppression of marginalized groups. And they hate porn, because they listen to the disinformation by the opponents of porn, but they are open to the fresh and exciting ideas of actual Nazis.
I’m shutting my Substack account down this weekend, a mere three months after having started it. A new personal record for deleting a social media account once a CEO declares it’s not their role to prohibit hate speech. But where can I go? Beehiiv also has a policy against adult content. Buttondown and Ghost do not have such policies, and even WordPress has a newsletter function, but their financial transactions are handled by Stripe, who has suspended my account.
(Buttondown pointed out that if my newsletter is free, and it is, Stripe doesn’t need to be involved: That’s About the Size of It.)
Why should it be more difficult to find a place to talk about sexual fantasy than it is to decry certain skin colors and genders as not legitimately human?
