Beyond the Screen: Why Impossible Fantasies Belong in Stories
Handsome giants, shrinking egos and an imagination with absolutely no respect for the laws of physics. Perhaps your next great escape deserves a few pages.
You've opened seventeen tabs in pursuit of one very specific man. The face is almost right. The attitude needs work. And, frankly, he's about ninety feet too short.
Such are the administrative burdens of having excellent, highly specialised taste.
For men drawn to macrophilia, shrinking and transformation fantasies, finding something that matches the picture in your head can become a hobby in itself. There is always another thumbnail, another clip, another promising title. Sometimes the search is entertaining. Sometimes you've spent longer choosing than enjoying.
Which raises a rather appealing possibility: give that busy clicking finger a rest and let your imagination take the lead.
Erotic fiction offers something particularly suited to impossible tastes: room to build a world around them. The attraction can have a history, a personality, a deliciously inconvenient plot twist. And the giant can finally be the right height.
First, a little science. Keep your shirt on.
Claims about pornography's damaging effects are everywhere. Some deserve attention; others would have you believe a browser history can diagnose your entire nervous system.
The useful distinction is between using pornography and experiencing problems with it.
A 2024 systematic review examined 20 studies of problematic pornography use and mental health. It found a complicated relationship involving factors such as loneliness, anxiety and self-esteem. All the included studies were cross-sectional: snapshots of people's lives, rather than experiments establishing what caused what. The findings warrant concern about difficulties people experience, but they don't show that watching porn inevitably causes mental-health problems.[1]
Frequency alone doesn't settle the matter either. A separate study across three samples identified both frequent users with problems and frequent users without them.[2] A busy browser is not, by itself, a diagnosis.
For readers, useful questions are more personal: does watching still feel like a choice? Is it satisfying? Is it crowding out sleep, relationships or things you meant to do? Those questions deserve more attention than scare stories about a permanently “fried” brain.
And we should play fair with the comparison. A 2024 study of cohabiting couples linked video pornography use with lower sexual and relationship satisfaction, but written erotica use was also associated with lower sexual satisfaction.[3] That doesn't establish that either medium caused those outcomes. It does mean we cannot honestly declare erotic fiction a scientifically proven health upgrade for everybody.
A book is not a prescription in a handsome dust jacket.
What we can make is a compelling case for a different experience—one you might find more rewarding.
Your imagination has excellent casting rights
When you read, the author provides the words and you help construct the experience. A voice acquires a particular warmth. A room takes shape. A raised eyebrow suggests exactly the sort of trouble you appreciate.
There is research behind the idea that reading involves mental simulation. In a brain-imaging study, researchers found that readers tracked changes in stories using brain systems that overlapped with those involved in related real-world experiences.[4] This wasn't a study of erotica or a competition between books and videos. It supports the more modest—and rather wonderful—point that following a story can involve actively constructing its world.
People differ in how vividly they picture things, of course. You needn't run a private IMAX behind your forehead to enjoy dialogue, suspense or a character's spectacularly poor decisions.
Prose leaves space for your interpretation. The author may specify broad shoulders, a low voice and an infuriating smile. Your mind can handle the casting call.
No auditions. No wardrobe budget. Although that shirt may need a larger size by chapter three.
Some fantasies need more room than reality provides
Macrophilia—an attraction to giants or enormous differences in size—presents certain practical difficulties. A hundred-foot boyfriend is unlikely to fit through the front door. Shrinking yourself to six inches is not currently an option on the NHS. And mysterious transformation potions remain a questionable purchase, however persuasive the customer reviews.
Stories take these inconveniences in their stride.
A familiar flat can become an unexplored landscape. A conversation between equals can acquire a completely different significance when one person suddenly needs to stand on the desk. A character can wake up with an unfamiliar body and spend the rest of the story discovering what that changes—and what stubbornly stays the same.
Film, illustration and animation can create extraordinary versions of these worlds too. Prose offers especially direct access to a character's thoughts: the disbelief, curiosity, wounded pride or surprising affection that accompanies the impossible event.
That's where size fantasy has so much room to play. The centimetres matter, naturally. So does the man discovering that his favourite chair is now a climbing expedition.
Big characters. Complicated feelings.
A handsome giant makes an excellent entrance. A handsome giant with a personality can carry a story.
Is he a show-off, a protector, a terrible flirt, or a man whose enormous confidence conceals a very ordinary insecurity? Does the smaller character feel intimidated, amused, unexpectedly brave? Perhaps the fellow with the commanding presence becomes rather less commanding when somebody calls his bluff.
Themes such as muscle growth, transformation and shifting power can give fiction a way to explore identity, trust, vanity and vulnerability. Leather and an impressive pair of shoulders may establish a look; dialogue and character development give us someone worth following.
For a series like Shrink Files, those possibilities are central to the appeal: ordinary men in extraordinary situations, with their familiar assumptions suddenly looking several sizes too small.
There is room for cheek, tenderness, rivalry and comedy. Being pocket-sized needn't prevent a man from having the largest ego in the room.
The pleasure of not rushing
A story can linger over the build-up: the odd detail, the suspicious promise, the moment a character realises the room hasn't grown after all.
You can pause. Reread. Let a conversation land. Stay with one set of characters long enough to care what happens next.
If browsing clips has started to feel like searching for a parking space, that change of pace may be welcome. Choosing one story creates an opportunity to follow something through, rather than continually checking whether the next option might be better.
That is an invitation to experiment, not a promise of treatment. Reading can become avoidance too; changing the format doesn't automatically change the habit. If any kind of sexual media feels out of control or is disrupting your life, support from a qualified professional matters more than swapping tabs for chapters.
But if you're simply craving a different sort of escape, a story gives you another door to open.
The impossible has always had a library card
Long before digital effects, stories were making people enormous, miniature and unrecognisably transformed. Gulliver's Travels plays with scale and perspective; Alice's Adventures in Wonderland makes changing size part of its strange logic; transformation runs through mythology.
Those aren't erotic precedents. They are reminders that storytelling has long given impossible experiences a convincing home.
Adult fantasy draws on that freedom for its own purposes. It can explore an idea without requiring it to become a real-life ambition. Enjoying fictional power dynamics doesn't write the rules for an actual relationship, where consent and boundaries still belong to the people involved.
You can appreciate a fictional curse while remaining firmly opposed to finding one in your morning coffee.
Turn the page. Think big.
You don't have to renounce video, acquire a smoking jacket or start describing everything as “literature”. You can simply make a little more room for stories.
Choose a premise that intrigues you. Give the characters time. Notice whether you enjoy the anticipation, the humour, the freedom to imagine details your own way.
At Shrinking Men, Shrink Files explores worlds of shrinking, growth and transformation—places where a change in size can turn an ordinary life into a very unusual adventure. Explore the series at shrinkingmen.com.
Your imagination has no height restriction. It seems a shame to keep making it queue outside.
Sources and further reading
- Vieira, C., & Griffiths, M. D. (2024). Problematic Pornography Use and Mental Health: A Systematic Review. Sexual Health & Compulsivity.
- Bőthe, B., et al. (2020). High-Frequency Pornography Use May Not Always Be Problematic. The Journal of Sexual Medicine, 17(4), 793–811.
- Nolin, M.-C., Bőthe, B., Villeneuve, E., & Vaillancourt-Morel, M.-P. (2024). Associations Between Pornography Use Through Different Media and Sexual and Relationship Satisfaction Among Cohabiting Couples. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 53, 3405–3417.
- Speer, N. K., Reynolds, J. R., Swallow, K. M., & Zacks, J. M. (2009). Reading Stories Activates Neural Representations of Visual and Motor Experiences. Psychological Science, 20(8), 989–999.
