Inside the Often-Sexless World of Giantess Porn

For years smut streaming giant Pornhub has successfully built its brand by mining user data for bizarre, headline-ready trend reports. The site has taught us that, apparently, the Irish are really into public sex, Donald Trump seemingly led to a brief interest spike in golden showers, and Rhode Island is allegedly the most MILF-loving American state. But one of its strangest findings came buried in a January 2016 report on that year's porn searches. The category that witnessed the most growth over 2015, spiking by 1,091 percent? Giantess porn, in which (usually) women are filmed at odd angles, on miniature sets, or in front a green screen so they tower over the world. Sometimes they also smoosh, eat, or otherwise play with tiny (usually) men, buildings, or other itty bitty props.

"Searches for fetishes… fluctuate pretty regularly in volume," said Laurie Betito, director of Pornhub's Sexual Wellness Center. This spike, she said, "could have something to do with certain film genres like Godzilla and King Kong," both of which got reboots in recent years. Alternately, Betito speculated it could be an extension of some larger interest and search for dominance. Or it could be nothing at all.

These numbers give the impression of a fetish on the rise. But this apparent interest spike is somewhat deceptive. According to longtime giantess fetishers, the market for this porn is small, but very dedicated. Changes in searches and popular awareness seem to simply represent a shift in where and how this niche community gets its giant jollies. After all, the genre's made for a incredibly specific audience, one that likely wouldn't explode overnight as those Pornhub numbers suggest.

About that: Giantess content mainly serves the macrophilia fetish, in which folks (usually men) get off to, well, (usually female) giants. The fetish sometimes goes hand in hand with microphilia, the love of tiny people—say, the victim of a shrink-ray accident in a giantess fantasy. Some in this fetish community say men who're into giantesses want to escape the requirements of power and control via overwhelming physical domination. Conversely, it can appeal to women who get off on towering over men by asserting power they feel they may not have in life.

Others chalk it up to chance encounters in one's sexually formative years with movies like Attack of the 50-Foot Woman or Honey I Shrunk The Kids, in which one finds something sexual and then unconsciously hardwires size disparities to arousal. Either way, as Betito suggested, the fetish clearly involves dominance and submission and often intersects with other fetishes like vorarephilia (giantesses eating little people) or crush (giantesses stepping on little people, or even normal-sized women stepping on small creatures). "Feet are the most popular—foot crush especially," Giantess Roma, who's been consuming giantess content since the early aughts and producing it for about a year, recently told me. "Butt crush, boob crush, vore, and gentle, where [no one is] harmed, are [common giantess porn] sub-categories."

Although almost every fetisher has his or her own preferences for unique scenarios or dynamics regarding giantess content, he or she tends to de-prioritize one thing that may seem odd to the average porn consumer: nudity. Roma and other producers and performers—Media Impact Studios, Optic Dreams, Giantess Katelyn—almost never get fully naked for a scene, much less have sex in the giantess content they produce; some stay fully clothed. The fetish is so strong that arousal is usually triggered by size alone, to the extent that predominately gay men might find themselves turned on by giant women and predominately straight men by giant men, said Dr. Mark Griffiths of Nottingham Trent University, one of the few academics to study the topic.

Over the years, fetishers long scratched their itch with role-play, sometimes with tall partners, or by collecting and trading comics and movie clips of oversized ladies in enticing situations. In the mid 1990s, as fetishers began to find one another online and play with early photo and film editor tools, they started making bespoke content for one another, and posting it on message boards. It was around 1996, when a man named Gary Pranzo made his first scene, that the filmic history of the genre took off.

The community was never too large. Pranzo, who has become one of the largest retailers in and greatest authorities on the scene, puts it at about a million strong. He realized early on, through frequent visits to those giantess message boards and by being embedded in the community at large, that there was a lot of pent up desire that was being underserved. By the early 2000s, giantess porn was so lucrative the scene was bustling with artists and filmmakers, some of them fetishers and some just general producers tapping a promising market, using ever more advanced editing tools, building crazy sets, and utilizing fancier tricks of the trade to develop what Roma and others saw as convincing content. By 2006, Pranzo had purchased his own studio to meet demand, which he and Roma argue peaked sometime around 2010.

Then piracy struck hard. As in every other sector of porn, fetishers started moving giantess clips from paywalled and niche bastions of the internet onto growing tube sites, like Pornhub, where they could share them around easily and access them for free. Pranzo and company tried takedown notices, but because the community was small and tight-knit, by the time a video was off-tube almost everyone who wanted to had seen it and there was no one left to pay.

As a result, giantess content and the dozens of fetish producers serving the scene were pushed over to porn's ascendant custom video model: taking cash up front to produce a film catered to an individual's hyper-specific desires, then making a few bucks on subsequent sales before the clip's inevitably pirated. Connoisseurs like Roma complain that the quality of clips has gone down, as custom orders rarely pay enough and producers can't make enough for convincing effects. But the flow of new giantess remains constant.

It's easy to read Pornhub's trend reports as evidence that the reliable flow of giantess clips onto their platform has increased popular exposure to and interest in the trend. And observers like Astro Domina, a non-giantess fetisher model who makes two or three giantess customs a month, argue that demand for giantess content has been growing over the past few years. But longtime insiders like Pranzo and Roma swear the fetish community isn't growing. And it's hard to see many non-fetishers searching Pornhub for their usual hardcore flipping their lids and changing their habits after stumbling one evening upon an angled shot of a clothed giantess stomping on little plastic people.

Instead, Pranzo suggested, the apparent spike in giantess searches may reflect the migration of a rabid giantess consumer community onto sites like Pornhub. Likewise Domina's sales boost may just be members of the fetisher community now searching out cost-effective customs from general fetish producers rather than buying clips from old, big giantess producers.

Read as such, the story of giantess porn is a solid case study in how search trend reports might not tell us as much about shifting social preferences as headlines built around them might have us think. Sometimes, they may just reflect wonky upheavals in the rapidly changing porn market, and the exodus of niche fan bases from one corner of the internet to another. It's a weedy reality to sort out. Still, the numbers are a testament of a long and stable truth: Giantess fetishers may be small, but they have a shockingly massive appetite.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.