I wish there was a term for exclusively male giants

[foreverlurk]

@i-am-insane ‘minigirl’ is pretty common for manga/manhwa, hentai and other Asian media, but hasn’t caught on anywhere else. Not having a single, easy word for “tiny woman” has been a problem for finding content since forever, made even worse by the enshittification of search engines over the years. “Shrinking woman” is even harder to look for, since you get lobbed with tons of irrelevant (to us!) stuff like weight loss, dwarfism, anorexia, etc.

[TakoAlice8]

@DFP said in I wish there was a term for exclusively male giants:

The problem isn’t that women are special. It’s more that women are the exception. So, we come up with words like “giant” to designate large people, but then we start to show female giants, and we need a way to designate them, so we create the term “giantess”. The problem isn’t the language. It’s the way people use it. Because people are too lazy to type 4 extra letters “giant” gets used for big folks regardless of gender. Then we begin to label people that do correctly say “giantess” as sexist and insult them for speaking properly. It’s somewhat amazing to me because I’d get the same label if I started writing “men” regardless of gender so I could avoid typing 2 more letters. It’s not exceptionalism so much as laziness and political correctness run amok.

I’d suggest that within this community if nowhere else, the word “giant” be used exclusively to refer to males of size and “giantess” be used to refer to females of size. Also, any time someone doesn’t use the correct terms they be politely corrected.

Women being the exception actually better describes how I feel about the term giantess. I guess the term “giantess” upsets me because it reminds me how much our language is rooted in patriarchy, with people thinking the default gender is male.

About using the word “giant” to exclusively refer to males of size. What would people use to describe people of size outside of the traditional gender binary? Xgiant or something like that?

[i am insane]

@TakoAlice8 said in I wish there was a term for exclusively male giants:

About using the word “giant” to exclusively refer to males of size. What would people use to describe people of size outside of the traditional gender binary? Xgiant or something like that?

I mean, giant, in itself, is a gender neutral term, it just means ‘big’. It’d make more sense to pick a male exculsive term… problem is how the english language works. There’s not really a good thing for the niche of ‘neutral’ because ‘giant’ is neutral, and for a male version, what? Hisiant?

I suppose you can just to ‘giant man’, but it feels awkward.

[Olo]

Trying to keep and modify “giant” seems futile. In English the suffix “-ess” is how a generic noun is “marked” as female. It’s a deliberately sexist construction, assuming the default person is male.

I think we’d be better off using another synonym altogether or even inventing entirely new words.

[DFP]

@Olo Thank you and everyone else for a stimulating conversation.

Personally, I feel that the point about “giant” being recognized as a male term is fairly completely attached to the masculine now. I even did it myself. Perhaps the only option within the size community now is to accept that giant is to be used for anyone of large size, kind of like BBW is used but SSBBW has never really caught on. In that case perhaps we should start saying things like:

giant-man
giant-woman
giant-person
man
woman
non-gender
mini-man
mini-woman
mini-person

Although I doubt it will ever catch on considering how loathe people are to type a single key more than required,

[BigGrumpy]

@TakoAlice8
You will find in most languages the male word doubles as ghe gender neutral word

I agree with you however

[DFP]

@BigGrumpy Yes, I understand and have seen the same myself. However, because the masculine term is so inextricably tied to the gender-neutral term is exactly why I suggested that the only viable, if extreme option would be to designate new terms for all gender and non-gender labels since the non-gender terms have become so intertwined with the masculine.

[BigGrumpy]

@DFP i agree with you
I asked copilot (Microsoft chatgpt) its thoughts
Giantor(like actor or emperor
Giantan(like barbarian or titan
ius traditional latin male suffix

[DFP]

@BigGrumpy Interesting. My Latin is fragmentary at best so that you for educating me.

[protect-tinies]

Personally, I don’t think the lack of a term for male giants in the size community has anything to do with gender politics. I think it’s just because ninety-nine percent of the size content that features giant people is focused on female giants. It’s because giantess content is MUCH more popular and visible (and prolific) than giant male content. The GTS people have a louder voice, as a group, so it’s much easier for them to coin terms that suit their needs and to have those terms catch on. The SW people can coin their own terms too, of course, but those are much less likely to catch on and become commonly used, because they don’t get tons of use and aren’t being constantly reinforced, except maybe in very small groups.

Also, people who like giantess content tend to pay very little, if any, attention to other size content that isn’t giantess-related. If they don’t intentionally go looking for it (and why would they?), they’re not likely to see it in the first place. For them, it’s as if the rest of the size community doesn’t exist…they live in a bubble. If something doesn’t exist in their world, they’re probably not going to feel compelled to create special nomenclature for it.

It’s the same reason why normies don’t have a word for male giants: because they spend almost zero time thinking about giant people (of either gender). Why would they need special vocabulary for something that simply isn’t on their radar? Even in fiction, giant people are not common. The lack of vocabulary comes from a general lack of caring.

[Olo]

Provocatively, when Rebecca Sugar wrote her Sizey song for Steven Universe, she didn’t write “All I wanna do is see you turn into a giantess.” I don’t think we need to limit ourselves to a single-word term for “male giant” or “giant man.”

[AnnDViant]

I wonder if the French have a solution to this…

[foreverlurk]

@AnnDViant in French we say “géant” (male) and “géante” (female), always have. Sadly, there’s no real single word for a shrunken (or tiny) woman, which again hurts visibility and searchability. The closest we have is “lilliputienne” (i.e. an inhabitant of Lilliput, used as an adjective), but it’s not seen very often.

There’s also not much size literature in French, in our folklore or popular culture. Charles Beaudelaire did write a poem called “La géante” in his seminal “Les fleurs du mal” :

La géante

Du temps que la Nature en sa verve puissante
Concevait chaque jour des enfants monstrueux,
J’eusse aimé vivre auprès d’une jeune géante,
Comme aux pieds d’une reine chat voluptueux.
J’eusse aimé voir son corps fleurir avec son âme
Et grandir librement dans ses terribles jeux ;
Deviner si son coeur couve une sombre flamme
Aux humides brouillards qui nagent dans ses yeux ;
Parcourir à loisir ses magnifiques formes ;
Ramper sur le versant de ses genoux énormes,
Et parfois en été, quand les soleils malsains,
Lasse, la font s’étendre à travers la campagne,
Dormir nonchalamment à l’ombre de ses seins,
Comme un hameau paisible au pied d’une montagne.

[Olo]

German, another language with gendered nouns, has Riese and Riesin for male and female giants, respectively. Oddly, German uses the same word, Zwerg, to refer both to IRL people with dwarfism and to imaginary people who are Tom Thumb-sized. And yes, a female “dwarf” is a Zwergin.

(Tom Thumb is Daumling (Thumbling) in the original German Kinder- und Hausmärchen by the Brothers Grimm)

[foreverlurk]

@Olo Yeah normie literature in French often refers to tiny/shrunken women as “naine”, the same term as women with dwarfism. I never liked that personally, I much prefer “lilliputienne”.