The Rise of ‘Giantess’ Kink, 2023’s Most-Searched Fetish

Beginning in late 2022, a TikTok trend emerged using a play in perspective. Throughout the year, hundreds of videos with several million views each showed someone picking up what appeared to be a large version of an object and handing it upward to a much bigger person off-screen. The camera would then turn, revealing said much bigger person, usually a woman, holding a miniature version of that same object. The effect was this: We, the viewer, felt like we were looking at a giant woman.  A giantess, if you will. 

It surely isn’t a complete coincidence, then, that “giantess” became the most-searched fetish in 2023. 

According to Clips4Sale, an online kink and fetish content distributor, giantess became the #1 fetish search term globally in 2023, as well as the third-highest grossing category among content sold. In total sales, it was still beaten by fetish classics bondage and tickling, but this nevertheless represents a massive jump in popularity. When C4S launched in 2003, giantess content didn’t even make the site’s Top 50. But since 2017, they say, it has risen through the Top 20 to where it towers today. 

Giantess content can take on many forms. Often, it plays up not only the idea of a woman being extremely tall and large but of a man being teeny-tiny. So tiny, in fact, that said giantess could pick him up in her fingers and swallow him whole or step on him like a bug. Some may like the idea of worshiping a woman whose stature matches her powerful attitude, while others prefer the concept of being destroyed. Regardless, it typically falls into the broader genre of femdom, or female domination, wherein the woman takes the dominant role over a man. 

But why has the giantess become so popular now, whether it’s in fetish content or on TikTok? Notably, a decent portion of the giantess theme on TikTok is itself fetish content, too. A search for “giant woman” yields plenty of videos of barefoot women pretending to step on the camera or toying with miniature male dolls. While the original trend wasn’t necessarily playing up the fetish, it’s certainly easy for many to fetishize it. In the comments of many of the viral TikToks—which were intended to be fun, non-sexualized contributions to the trend—there are several comments from men calling the women goddesses and emphasizing how they wish to be small. Others have joked that these videos have been an entryway into the fetish: “This better not awaken anything in me,” one person wrote.

Of course, the surge in popularity of the giantess isn’t strictly due to TikTok—it has been afoot over the last several years. Various giantess-related subreddits, for example, have more than quadrupled in size since 2020. As with femdom writ large, a central theme of the giantess fetish is the powerlessness of the viewer. While other genres of femdom may employ that powerlessness through physical restraint with various ropes or chastity devices, pain via whips or stilettos or general acts of humiliation, the giantess fetish utilizes an almost childlike, fairytale fantasy. Were giant women with a penchant for bullying men to exist, the men involved would have no choice but to be dominated. In that sense, the giantess allows submissive men to experience the ultimate form of powerlessness. 

Powerlessness may be particularly appealing to men in the current moment as conceptions of masculinity shift and the discourse surrounding it becomes all the more contentious. The giantess fetish offers no room to question how a man should be—no matter how alpha, he is but a little snack from the giantess’ perspective. Again, to be entirely obliterated or consumed is a popular element, and per C4S, vore content, wherein a person is eaten by a giant person, was runner-up for fetish of the year. Crucially, the vore fantasy does not often emphasize death or pain, but rather the opportunity it presents to exist inside of someone. There, they can be safe, warm, and thoughtless. It is consumption in both the literal and figurative sense: Vore allows one to imagine being so metaphorically engrossed by their desires that it becomes physical. 

It’s this transcendence of meaning that defines the giantess fetish, too. It represents a desire-driven transformation, either of the woman into a giant or the man into a miniature form. Above all, though, it is a transformation that could really only occur through our phones. While we’ve been able to visualize giants in film or through animation, our phones now allow any of us to become gigantic by playing around with the cameras and posting it to TikTok. It is a fetish that is nearly impossible to execute IRL without a good dose of imagination and creativity, but what’s available on social media, Reddit, or Clips4Sale makes it feel almost real enough. 

The giantess—the gigantic woman—is a manifestation of much of our current gender dynamics. There are men who so badly wish to be stripped of any autonomy that they’d prefer to be subhuman, if they exist at all. They dream of female dominance, not only sexual or mental, but in terms of physical size. But naturally, there is no reality behind the fetish. Like so much of our sexualities at the moment, it only exists online.