Dave agrees that his fantasies are an escape, but he takes issue with the perfunctory Freudian assessment. "Why is it that psychology always needs to blame the parents for everything? My folks are French and Catholic, so they were a little more strict than most of my peers' families. But they were definitely not abusive."

In the wired world of macrophilia you find precious few females. For some reason, women don't swoon over King Kong-size men, and their aversion may be more than a simple matter of taste. "We live in a patriarchal culture," Friedman says. "Women already see men as larger and more powerful. They don't need to fantasize it."

So where do guys get the jones for jumbo women? For Dave, sexual awakening dates back to Liliput. Dave says, "I was turned on by "Gulliver's Travels" before I knew what the birds and the bees were all about." In the book there's a scene in the land of Brobdingnag where Gulliver gets intimate with one of the local giantesses -- the enticingly named Glumdaclitch. Dave read that scene for the first time in the sixth grade and says, "I've fantasized about giantesses ever since." Would Jonathan Swift flip his periwig if he knew that his witty satire of English society was now serving as the stuff of wet dreams for a slew of GTS-lovin' horndogs?

For macrophile film buffs, a handful of options exist. From the 1958 cult classic "Attack of the 50-Foot Woman" to Disney's cornball caper "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids," Hollywood has fixated on giants in a big way. And when you're sitting in a theater, the nature of your physical relationship to the actors on screen -- the ratio of your size to theirs -- is in itself a macrophile's dream. Slumped in your seat, you gape up at the tragicomedy unfolding on screen and it's as if those gigantically beautiful people with the swimming pool-size eyes could lean out of the picture and scoop you up in their very large hands.

Dave says that because the macro audience is basically invisible to Hollywood, the onscreen GTS will remain captivating but rare. The appeal of the Internet, conversely, is that macros can create their own outsize dramas. "That's why the Internet has been the media of choice for so many of us," he says.

But Friedman sees a different reason why macrophiles -- along with cross-dressers, transsexuals and other alternative lifestylists -- migrate online. "The Internet provides comfort and privacy," she says. "It's a way for them to get together and share information. It's not the big coming out, but it's a first step."

Disassociated from reality or not, there's no denying the impressive scope of the macro's imagination. In a culture that often glorifies tininess and limp-noodle frailty in women -- think of Gwyneth Paltrow's anemic scarecrow charms -- the macro closes his eyes to the puny pop idols du jour, and looks instead to the gargantuan giantess roaming the landscape of his dreams. In a no-brainer world of prepackaged sexpots and pay-per-view porn, the macrophile stands as one of a dying breed: the true dreamer. To those critical of the dream, Dave shrugs: "Like any fetish, if you don't have it, you probably won't get it."

In other words: It's a giant thing -- you wouldn't understand.
salon.com | May 22, 1999

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