Sizing up Our First Year

Sitting here in my favourite writing chair after celebrating Christmas, I finally have some time off work and am able to reflect on the thrilling rollercoaster ride that has been the setting up and running of shrinkingmen.com over the past twelve months.

And as difficult as some aspects have been (initial technical and customer service nightmares with my website host, finding time to write and record and publish when life got so busy I was eating meals standing up), I can genuinely say, hand on heart, that I've loved every moment of the creation of materials for this site.

I'm a writer and a size play fantasist at heart, heavily inspired by science fiction. I'm also a Gemini, if that means anything. I'm not sure how much I believe in all that astrological stuff myself, but I do know that my own life has two distinct aspects: the cerebral/creative and the physical. I'm at my happiest and healthiest when I can delicately balance these two aspects. How do I do that? Writing and the gym.

A giant muscleman in denim shorts resting his bare foot on a Mini car in a city street

When I was six years old I received a small blue child's typewriter for Christmas and have never stopped writing since then: poems, short stories, novels, scripts, plays, articles, reviews, educational materials. You name it, I've written (and continue to write) it.

Writing is a balm for my mind and soul and is fuelled by my secondary love of reading.

But if I'm not careful, I can easily be dragged into a sort of mental slump, a creative energy vortex during which I begin to ignore my body's needs (healthy eating, fresh air, exercise). None of this is good in the extreme. Most extremes aren't.

A giant in a hoodie holding out his baggy joggers in a gym as musclemen laugh and a tiny man looks up

I was never a sporty kid. I'm laughing as I type that sentence because it's quite possibly the understatement of the decade. I hated PE lessons at school with a vengeance. I was skinny and weak and severely asthmatic and many of the other kids at my school were bordering on feral. While I frequented the library and was editor of the school newspaper, they lit fires in their science lessons after being erroneously trusted with bunsen burners. They fought in classrooms and yelled at and argued with the teachers who were trying their best to provide us working-class kids with an education.

I digress. My point is that although my early childhood experiences bred a disdain for group sports, around the age of 15 I developed an interest in working out.

A giant bearded man in a workshop holding a tiny shirtless man in his hand

I hadn't come out, even to myself, at the tender age of 15. Although my parents were (and remain) very tolerant and open-minded and were extremely supportive when I did eventually come out to them at the ripe-old age of 20, most of my experiences growing up in the 80s and 90s led me to believe that gay was bad and effeminate and something to be ridiculed and, in many cases, beaten out of you. I stayed in the closet, battling internally for many years with my own sense of self. Unable to hold up a mirror to myself, look myself directly in the eye and say those world-changing words: 'I am gay'.

Like many gay men, I went through the bisexual stage. I convinced myself that maybe I was bi. Somehow this was a little easier to digest. I had posters and magazines of women so cartoonishly overexaggerated in their feminine physical characteristics as to be laughable.

A giant bodybuilder flexing chest to chest with a smaller shirtless man in a gym

A Pamela Anderson Bay Watch poster adorned my bedroom wall for one summer while I secretly jerked off to the handsome, young, muscular men in the same show.

All through these times, I was fantasising about men. And size was a big (pun intended) factor in my fantasies from as young as 11 years old.

I remember my first day at high school vividly. Or, more accurately, I remember one specific part of it: playing in the yard at break time as a naive 11-year-old and spotting an older boy -- 16 years old -- and stealing so many glances at him as I pretended to continue to focus on my play with my friends. At one point he smiled at me when he caught me looking at him, and my heart melted, and I knew I liked boys.

A tiny builder in a hard hat and tool belt standing on a giant's bare foot

Except I immediately repressed the idea I might like boys. As mentioned above, I didn't fully come out until the age of 20.

TV and movies growing up in the 80s and early 90s were jam-packed two elements that greatly influenced my subsequent sexual preferences.

1. Musclebound male protagonists

He-Man
GI Joe
Terminator
Predator
Rocky
Rambo
The Incredible Hulk with pro bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno
Dolph Lundgren
Gladiators game show
The hunks from Bay Watch
WWF wrestlers
Van Damme

... the list goes on.

A green Hulk-like giant grabbing a man in the rain

2. Size-related storylines:

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
The Incredible Shrinking Woman
The Borrowers
Land of the Giants (made in the late 60s and 70s but repeated on weekends when I was a kid)
Alice in Wonderland
The Indian in the Cupboard
Innerspace
Attack of the 50ft. Woman
Big
Honey, I Blew Up the Kid
Big Man on Campus
The BFG
Clash of the Titans
The Princess Bride
The Neverending Story

Illustration of a muscular man in a khaki vest in a gym

I became obsessed with strong men with big, overdeveloped muscles. In my early teens I bought a set of plastic dumbbells and, not having a single clue what I was doing, performed single-arm bicep curls for hundreds of reps with a light weight each and every day, frantically trying to get my arms to grow to resemble those of the men I saw on TV and, later, those I admired in bodybuilding and fitness magazines sheepishly bought from my local shopping centre.

A man in a leather jacket on a dungeon throne with a chained shirtless man kneeling at his feet

I often bought another magazine at the same time so I could place it over the cover featuring an oiled-up man wearing speedos and flexing his huge muscles as I carried it to the till to pay, cheeks burning furiously. I'd shove the magazines in my bag and race home to pore over the images of handsome men with perfectly tanned skin stretched over bulging muscles. Needless to say, many of the pages were stuck together upon the second read.

And at the same time as being influenced by these big, powerful muscle hunks, I was inundated with shows and films featuring size-related transformations.

The Borrowers TV show had me going to bed and wishing so hard that my screwed-up eyes and scrunched-up firsts hurt for a tiny man of my own to be under my pillow when I awoke.

Shirtless lads crouching on a street at night with beer cans, grinning at the camera

I remember going to visit Granada Studios (an attraction featuring some sets from shows made by Granada television, as well as many interactive experiences), and walking into the Borrowers experience where everything was constructed in huge proportions to make the visitor feel tiny. It worked. The entrance to the experience was a small space on which the ceiling lifted and a giant animatronic cat's paw descended upon us, complete with vicious hissing and cat shrieking noises. It was both terrifying and exhilarating.

Entering the main section of the experience was like walking into a giant child's bedroom with a huge rocking chair you could climb on and have your picture taken looking like a tiny doll. There were over-sized children's toys and furniture and a bed and it was enough to almost melt my brain.

Black and white drawing of a giant bodybuilder facing a much smaller man inside a circle

I loved it, but I simultaneously found myself aroused and this was not ideal in public and when accompanied by my family members to boot!

There's a sensation I experienced at that place that I've struggled my entire life to put into words. It's a sensation I also experienced watching many shows and movies featuring shrinking. The best I can come up with (and perhaps some of you can relate) is a heady mixture of vulnerability and arousal, of being overpowered and helpless but also excited. I suppose people with many types of fetish experience this and it's possibly a big part of the draw: BDSM, self-wetting, foot worship, small penis humiliation (which is also a big turn-on of mine), being farted on, feeding, master/slave... I can imagine those may also be accompanied by that same sensation deep in the pit of your stomach; something primal and fierce reacting to the power dynamic shift, the voluntary giving up of one's own will and handing your fate over to someone bigger, more powerful, stronger, more dominant. I'm convinced there's a link to the feelings of childhood, but that's too Freudian for this blog article.

A giant shirtless bodybuilder in jeans towering over a crowd of men

It's a thrill and it's why we're here. We love to get that kick of seeing or imagining or hearing scenarios in which men undergo transformations: getting smaller or bigger, having their cocks shrink or grow, being dominated or humiliated or being the dominator.

My stories and materials this past year have also been a medium for exploring other fetishes: smoking, leather, loss of intelligence, animal transformation, foot fetish, muscle theft and growth, scallies, forced change of sexuality, voice change, weight gain, mind control and others...

Shrinkingmen.com, which began as a madcap idea has led me into a world of imagination and fantasy that has excited and thrilled and aroused me. It's made me realise and come to terms with some aspects of myself I hadn't realised before. It's allowed me to find out about the topics and scenarios that turn other people on. It's enabled me to offer up some new content for gay men with size-related fetishes. And let's face it, there's not that much high-quality content out there, except for one or two other sites.

Explicit size-play art of a man in a Superman costume seen from above

Many of you have been kind enough to purchase my stories and art and audio recordings, helping me to continue to build the site; to make it grow.

Here are some stats to give you guys an overview of the impact you've had these past 12 months:

65,646: the number of visitors to shrinkingmen.com in the past 12 months.
1,122: the number of purchases from shrinkingmen.com in the past 12 months.
2,710: the number of Instagram followers to @gayshrinkingmen as of the time of writing.
2,740: the number of X/Twitter followers to @gayshrinkingmen as of the time of writing.
67: the number of followers on Patreon as of the time of writing
27: the number of illustrated Shrink Files stories publishes in the past 12 months.
20: the number of Fetish Audio recordings published in the past 12 months.
14: the number of Micro, Macro & Muscle art packs published in the past 12 months.
10: the number of issues of the gay size-shifting superhero series Shrivewave published in the past 12 months.
48: the number of free size fetish blog articles published in the past 12 months.
242: the number of people currently signed up to receive our free size-related newsletters by email. If you haven't signed up, just enter your email in the box at the home of the homepage!

A muscular man in a black T-shirt standing in front of a giant black boot

And so I'll finish by offering a heartfelt thank-you to all of you who have followed me on social media, liked posts, commented on posts, visited the site, read the blog, subscribed to the newsletter, bought content or become Patrons. It means a lot. I'm dedicated to making shrinkingmen.com grow even huger in 2024 with plenty of new stories and recordings and art and some other ideas in the mix.

If you'd like to contact me with thoughts, ideas, feedback, please do so: [email protected]

Here's to a micro, macro and muscle filled 2024!

Tom