This interview is part of a series examining the function of the erotic imagination in helping individuals with marginalised or non-normative anatomies, neurologies or neurotypes, gender identities or queer sexualities explore their relationship with their bodies, their brains, and their relationships with/perceptions of the world around them. Focusing upon size kink communities — consisting of individuals or collectives whose erotic fantasies predominantly involve giants/giantesses and tiny folk, superhuman growth or shrinking, or the particular expansion of certain body parts — this series explores how figures within this particular niche kink space have used the limitless creative potential of their erotic imaginations to empower themselves: to help accept, or even embrace and take pride in, their unique bodies and neurologies.
An A3, Z-fold riso-printed zine documenting this interview and providing further context to certain topics discussed within, can be purchased from Abigail’s online shop. Elle’s essay, Size Dysmorphia: A Sizeshifter Origin Story — which delves a little deeper into her experiences with Alice-in-Wonderland Syndrome, her journey to discovering her kink, and her deployment of her divergent erotic imagination as a mechanism to help cope with the sporadic, unpredictable sensory-perceptive (or somesthetic) distortions she experiences — is also linked below.
TRANSCRIPT
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Hey!
Elle Largesse
Can you hear me okay?
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Yeah, yeah, I can hear you perfectly.
Elle Largesse
Good morning, or well, good afternoon?
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Good afternoon. How are you doing?
Elle Largesse
Oh, I'm good. Sorry, I'm just making sure the screen things are lined up. Okay, great.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Yeah.
Elle Largesse
Yes, so I'm— Oh my God, I love your background or mural.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Yeah, thank you! Yeah, there's actually, I actually, there's actually a poem in gold on the other wall that I keep telling about. Erm, I sort of transcribed a sort of edited version of a poem called Waiting by a performance artist called Faith Wilding. Sort of early '70s, like, LA performance artist.
Elle Largesse
Oh, that's wonderful.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Thank you. So... yeah, I... okay, so just to start off, I should also point out I am also a little bit unwell today, so I may not be quite on top of my game today and I admittedly, like... kind of did not have quite as much time as I thought I would have to sort of prepare for this, particularly because I've just come off another interview that I've done on similar sort of topics today.
Elle Largesse
Okay.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
But yeah, just to sort of let you know how this is roughly going to work, I usually budget about 60 to 90 minutes for these calls. The last one I did went a little bit over, erm, but that's okay. I know I can go until about 5pm at least, anyway. I have a few questions I've got written down which I'm going to sort of introduce into the space, but generally speaking, I want this to be quite an open conversation. I feel like it's probably going to be a thing where, like, I'm probably going to be learning as much about myself as I'm going to be learning about you, obviously from previous and like, considering like what I've seen from like your writing online and the amount of just work and research you've also done into kind of exploring, like, sexology and sexuality and kink space, I feel like there's a very good chance that could happen. Like, I will spend this call wondering why the hell you're not doing this research instead of me.
Elle Largesse
Well, thank you. I'm sorry hear that you're not feeling well. And I just want you to know, like, I fully understand if you need to pace yourself or stop and, like, rephrase a question or something like that.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I think I'm a bit stumbly over words. I found myself getting a bit like that a lot, but that might also just maybe, might also just be me being autistic as well.
But... yeah, I kind of want to start off the same way I started the last call and just like... just like talk about sort of like... your first real sort of like memories of becoming aware of your kink and also your sexuality at large and see like just where those intersections lie. And obviously I'm going to come on and talk about the whole, like, Alice-in-Wonderland syndrome thing in a second because I'm desperate to talk about that.
But just before we get on to that, I kind of just wanted to kind of introduce that as a way of... just getting to know your story a bit better, behind the scenes.
Elle Largesse
Well, I should also let you know, I am also recovering from being sick, like, a week and a half ago. So I have to clear my throat a lot and I'm sorry if that is loud in your ears at any point. Let me know and I can--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
That's absolutely fine.
Elle Largesse
Okay, okay. So, yes, I, uh... [Laughs] I meant to review my 2018 article before this, uh, this call, just to make sure I was getting like the dates and some of the details right in my mind... As, as I'm sure you, you probably know, having read all of my stuff at this, well, at least some of my stuff at this point, I have C-PTSD, so Complex PTSD with the dissociative subtype. And that means that I have, uh, some, some difficulty holding onto memories. Sometimes they're crystal clear and sometimes my brain is like, "You know what, we don't actually need to hold on to that. Why would-- We're just going to put that in a room and lock the door?" So, I, you know, this is my life, I lived it, I do remember a lot of it. However, sometimes it's hard for me to access those memories. So I wanted to let you, know if I'm like, "Oh yeah, I don't remember that." It doesn't mean I don't remember that. Like, I can speak to it, but I may not be able to access it all the time perfectly.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
That kind of makes sense. So like, I mean, I don't think I have C-PTSD at this point, but it is something that I have explored in myself a bit. Like, because, I mean, I kind of feel like... I don't know, I kind of had a lot of experiences growing up where, like, particularly surrounding some gender identity as well and like the situation I kind of grew up in around that, where, like, I kind of wondered if that's something I experienced, but like, I definitely empathise and that as somebody who's had to have that conversation with themselves about whether it's something I experienced or not.
Elle Largesse
Yeah, thank you for your empathy on that.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
If there's anything again that, like, you either, like-- Saying you can't remember is, like, just as valuable as saying, like, giving me a detailed story, like, it's really with that being the case because like, that's still like an important part of you, the not knowing as much as the knowing is.
Elle Largesse
That's a very good way to put that. I appreciate that. And most of my, the circles that I travel in at this point in my life are-- we're all queer and neurodivergent and ha-- at least half I think the people I am friends with are, you know, have had trauma or are survivors of something. So, yeah, um, I feel like what you're saying about exploring that for yourself, like asking if it's relevant for you, yeah, um resonates.
So I'm going to be looking at my-- [laughs] my article to help jog my memory, which I know you've read the article. So I don't want to just rehash things you already know. But... you know, I... To answer your original question, size feelings for me -- whether that size dysmorphia or size euphoria, just the size feelings for my brain says, "Hey, you're really big right now, or you're really just super tiny and everything is out of reach." Like, I know it's not out of reach. I can sit here and touch the laptop in front of me, but there's part of me that kind of expects it to be further away because I feel a little bit tiny today.
And it's just, it's like an overlay. It's like I get both sensory inputs. the one that's like, "Yep, that's my arm, that's my hand, that's the laptop." And then a secondary... It's like two different songs playing or something, like, two different radio channels broadcasting at the same time, where another one is saying like, "Ah, that's gonna be out of reach," and then like, "Yep, that's in reach, I promise." Um, I've had that for a very long time. I know that in... in childhood... I just remember being fascinated by anything to do with size, you know, like a lot of children's shows will have an episode or two where the characters get caught in a shrink ray or a spell gone wrong, and "Oh no, they're all giant or tiny or whatever." But I think for me, my mom introduced me to The Borrowers and we watched that, like there was a BBC mini series from 1992 with, like, Ian Holm played the father. Oh my God, like, I loved it so much. And just... they went above and beyond with all the set design. Like, I really wish I could have some of the props from that show. Watching that with my mom was just a sweet, wonderful thing that we did together. And it never occurred to me that like, other people... didn't watch this like, oh, you know, she's... using a button for like a plate, like, or she's, um... you know, using a giant, like, you know, little golf pencils we have, like, she's using a giant version of that to write in her diary. It just seems so natural and comfortable and good. And it didn't occur to me that other people didn't feel that.
I don't remember the moment when I realized... "Dude, nobody feels this way, except me. Oh, man, what do I do with that?" But... [pause] yeah, it's, I remember other movies: Ferngully; Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Um... I remember being kind of freaked out by The Incredible Shrinking Woman. That was on, like, Christmas morning for some weird reason at my grandparents one year. And it was just so awkward. I think I was a teenager at that point. But it was just so profoundly awkward watching that with my, like, family around me like, at that point I was like, "This is not okay to watch with other people," and yeah, Lily Tomlin getting stuck in the sink.
Hmm. Anyway. Magic Schoolbus was delightful. It was— I like the the ones that are playful with it, where it's It's gentle and comforting. And as a kid obviously I liked it a lot, um... Anyway.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Yeah, I mean that, that makes a lot of sense in that-- [audio distortion]. So, I think I may have mentioned in the, um, the email I sent you that, like, the first person I actually spoke to in this project was— I don't know if you know Katharine Gates, the author of Deviant Desire—
Elle Largesse
I've never met her but I've heard a lot about her through all the SizeCon folks—
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Yeah, yeah, I'm like, yeah, I'm trying to come across next year to actually attend that and I'm like so desperate to also meet her in person as well as we did kind of realised we were academic soulmates in a way when we had that call--
Elle Largesse
Oh, that's wonderful!
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
We, we discussed this a lot this idea that, like, how just... deeply rooted in very innocent childhood things, like, the development of kinks can be. I mean, I, I personally... can, like, point to very similar things. I can, like, distinctly remember things like-- I don't know, like, where it is now but, like, my great-grandfather gave me, like-- he gave me like three classic novels from his own collection when I was like eight years old, and like of course the one they got pored through like the most was Gulliver's Travels and particularly Gulliver's Travels in Brodbingnag, and it's like I annotated the hell out of that book as well--
Elle Largesse
Oh yeah I do that constantly [Laughs].
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I also have, like, distinct memories of-- So this is probably going to show, like, the difference in age between us and also probably going to show like the difference in country between us, but there's a very popular kids book series, erm, called, erm, called Horrible Histories which I don't know is really a thing in the US but it's like a big thing in this country. It's been adapted to TV and everything. But, like, I remember there being... in one of the books which was about the Vikings there was, like, an illustrated story in that [which] was based on like an old legend about sort of, about sort of mythological giants but which featured this illustration of like... one like young giant kind of like lifting a boat and trapping like a load of, like a load of warriors on an island or something.
I remember some of the images from that book just really clearly as, like, for the same reasons. Like, it's interesting how like these things can feed the erotic imagination and I don't know like... I don't know exactly why this is the case and why these wires get crossed but like, I don't know, I don't know if that's something you've ever kind of wanted about yourself, like with yourself or with others or, like, if you have your own theories regarding all [that].
Elle Largesse
I-- Yeah. I think for a lot of us who came to size feelings early and like that fascination with, you know... So many kids media have elements of siziness to them, um, and I think for a lot of us when we come to that experience early... for it to then transform into sexual feelings, it's a-- it feels transgressive, it feels extra special taboo. And, um... There's a constant question of why. Why do I feel this way? Why, why, why? And I think in some respects, I'm actually lucky to have, to be able to point to like, "I got a brain condition. Ha!" [Laughs] Which is not to make light of the fact that Alice-in-Wonderland Syndrome is a brain condition. These are migraine adjacent experiences. And for at least half the people who have Alice-in-Wonderland Syndrome, it can be related to things like tumours and really painful migraines, and-- So I don't want to make light of that. However, I do take some comfort in the fact that like, you know, I think I came to the kink side of this as a way to process how surreal these sensations are and the fact that nobody else was feeling them. So it felt... I don't want to say wrong. It felt different and strange and weird and, like, transgressive. And I think leaning into the "Oh this is naughty or wrong or bad or I need to sneak around and not tell anyone I need to keep it secret and special." I think that elevated it in my mind to something... private just the way like as an adolescent you begin to realise like, "Oh we're not supposed to touch our generals in public. This is a private thing but it feels really good." And so as you're exploring your sexuality and what what your body decides is sexually relevant comes... it all comes just... into this messy place where you're trying to figure things out and you're making up narratives for yourself of, like, "Why do I feel this way?" Well, maybe I feel this way because it's sexy. Oh yeah, it is really sexy. Hmm. Let's think about that some more and just put all of these size feelings in a box with "Sexy" written across the front.
And so it's more than just like wires getting crossed for me. I think it's...[pause] I don't know, like... [pause] I'm referencing my article again to jog my memory, because I know I've written, like, I was trying to read -- I can't remember the author's name -- The Erotic Mind, which delves into a lot of like, "Why do we find things erotic? How do you explore things that are erotic in ways that are non-judgmental and that hold space for acceptance?" Um... Yeah, I could tell you like, the early things I stumbled onto that like... really made it clear, like, "Oh, I'm not the only one who feels like this is kind of sexy." And, you know, could give you a list of those, but I put them in the article, so...
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Yeah, it's always kind of good to cover new ground. I think that's always the good thing about just like, getting an oral history, because that's kind of what this is. This is kind of like an oral history project at this point, just getting the things, um, getting those little insights that you can't quite grasp from-- [inaudible] the fact that you're just speaking to a person, having a dialogue on these things.
As I say, like, I end up sharing quite a lot about myself in these chats and like, I kind of expect to do the same today, because like, yeah, I mean, there's just something that can be grasped from that that just can't necessarily come across within the space of something written.
But, like, as I say, it was just so fascinating to be able to read through, like, particularly the article on AiWS [Alice-in-Wonderland Syndrome] and size dysphoria. Erm... I came in knowing about AiWS, at least in a vague way. I'd actually given AiWS to a character that I'd written years ago. I spoke about--
Elle Largesse
Given an account?
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
A character. Like in a piece of writing I made. Erm, because I, er, actually spoke about this a lot in the last interview I did. Erm, I wrote-- I used to write almost obsessively as a way of, like, trying to just imagine-- like, it was like a gender dysphoria thing before I even really knew what gender dysphoria was or that I experienced it. Like, I used to just write stories about characters that were basically kind of... personal, like... just headcanons of myself as female basically. And one of them, because of the fact that... kinda playing with the idea that, like, I am a very tall person, like, not even for a woman, I'm just very, very tall outright. I kind of... liked the idea because of the fact that I was just so outsized-- so exaggerated compared to the average woman, like, I'm like the better part of a foot and a quarter, foot and a half taller than the average woman.
So I kind of thought about playing with the idea that, like, she's never quite aware of her body in that way. And like-- It's not the same thing, but I often found that if I'm in, like... if I'm in certain spaces, it's kind of really weird to picture what it would be like for somebody who's not my size to be in those sorts of spaces. And there's kind of like-- these moments where I'll realise I get this lot when I'm looking down my bathroom sink, for example, like that's.. I realise how that's significantly lower than perhaps it should be for me. I kind of wanted to... It's not AiWS because I didn't have that experience. I hadn't read an actual account from someone who's had it before I read your article. But I kind of liked the idea of just playing with, like, the idea that she kind of didn't really know, like, what her body was or like how, just... It was a way of processing the weird discrepancies between her own body and [how] everyone else experiences the world.
Elle Largesse
That! Yes! That! The-- Oh, gosh, yes all so much of that! Like, processing the weird discrepancies between her body and the world? Oh my gosh, yes! That! That, that, that! Um [laughs]... And I also want to be clear that like just because I have AiW-- Alice-in-Wonderland Syndrome and that's where my size feelings come from... There are so many people in the world who have a ton of different "size feelings" that are not rooted in that. And you can absolutely have size feelings without needing it to be anchored in--.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
This is my point. I kind of want-- I know there's no, like, definitive answer as to why people feel this way, why people have any sort of kink, let alone size kink. But, like, the fact that this was something that... this, this just felt like so.. like there's such a real connection I got from reading that article and like-- obviously you can tell me if I'm wrong, tell me the ways in which I'm right. Like, it was just such a combination of like, kink, neurology, emotion, body. And this is like exactly how, like, it feels to me, like these things are all kind of intrinsic to each other. And this is why I'm kind of, trying to boil down a theory on, in a way to try and combine... things like sexuality, gender identity, neurology, and emotion in the body and sort of say they are combined-- that they are something that's way more sort of, integrated, I guess, than common knowledge and culture sort of give them credit for. So just to... like, yours just seemed like such a great case study of someone who'd had that experience--
Elle Largesse
Thank you.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
And this is, I kind of... I mean, I feel kind of... If there's like anything you can elaborate on that we can have an actual discussion about that's like... again, might be kind of related to what was in the article and might not be. Just something that you might feel like is worth adding to that. Just--
Elle Largesse
What you said about, um, you know, imagining a giantess figure being unaware of her body, that resonated for me. And I don't think I talk about it super a lot in the size dysmorphia article. Because my C-PTSD shows up with dissociation, there are a lot of instances where I just don't feel aware of my body. And that is my brain trying to protect myself, um, but... So I'm actually going to share... I'm going to share a link -- where did zoom go? There's zoom! -- in the chat. [pause] So this is a recap that I did at the end of last year, um, or I guess at the beginning of this year. And you don't need to read through all of it. But if you want, if you scroll down, there's a section where I called it Behind the curtain: sexy, sexy data. Um, and this is some of the nitty gritty of-- This is... If I am a case study, then this is data from a single year about how Alice-in-Wonderland Syndrome showed up in my life. Where I tracked it using an app on my phone. The Dailio app. I use it for journaling and diary stuff, but just tracking how many times do I feel small? How many times do I feel giant? Or how many times can I not tell what my body size is?
And so for me, like when you say, like, using the giantess as a way of looking at like... [pause] are you even aware of your body? I'm just too big to be aware of my body. Like that is such a thing that I feel. Oh my God [laughs]. Like Abigail, like [laughs] when I am, when I am super big, like to the point where like I can't... I know like I feel so large, I logically wouldn't fit in the room. It goes past a point where I'm like, "I don't want to feel this. I don't want to even think about it." So I tune out the big feeling. And then I-- because of that, I'm tuning out my body too. So I'm like, "I'm so big, I don't even know what I'm feeling."
Or if I'm so tiny that every fucking thing just feels out of reach. Like this is not helpful. I need to do laundry. Like I can't wash dishes while I feel two inches tall. So I'm just going to put on a podcast or an audiobook and tune it out and just focus on like, "I'm cleaning a dish. Okay. The dish feels like it should be bigger than me, but that's okay. It's fine. I'm cleaning the dish and I'm ignoring everything else."
Yeah, anyway, so... The thing that I gave you like, so in 20 -- where is this? -- 2022, I tracked about 31 moments of feeling, like, noticeably big and then 98 moments of feeling small. And I had 16 moments where I felt noticeably human-sized, but that is super freaking underreported, like, because that’s the normal, like you don’t notice when you’re, yeah..
And then there were 24 moments where I checked in with my body and I could not tell my size. So for me, that can be a red flag for depression, but it’s only a red flag in as much as it’s just a flag for, "You’re dissociating." Like, did you notice you’ve blanked out your entire body? No, I didn’t notice because I blanked it out. So that was a very rough year, you can see, there’s also overlap with, like, I’ve got these bullet points of all the different mental health things that I went through. Like, 192 triggers where, like, 118 of those were mild and 74 of them were intense. And 29 panic attacks. Weeee! Then I spent, like, 52 hours of talk therapy plus 43 hours of EMDR therapy, which was super helpful and helped me get in touch with my body.
And I actually haven't been tracking this as much this year. Partly because it doesn't seem to matter as much. Like the therapy is helping me more be aware of when I'm dissociating. Ask myself if I want to dissociate. Like first off, it is a fucking miracle to be aware that you're starting to dissociate. That is just... like if that's all I got out of therapy, would count it a fucking win.
But, like to go beyond that, and be like, "Do I want to dissociate right now?" Uh, yeah, I'm pretty overwhelmed. Life is really overwhelming right now. Maybe I'll tune out for an hour and just read a book or stare out the window. But then I can kind of check in and come back to it, like, "This is not a useful tool anymore. I need to go finish writing a story or meet a deadline or something." So I'm going to come back gently to my body using these tools that I have learned, and part of those is mindfulness that is not my body.
I feel like I'm going off on a tangent here, but for what it's worth... if your body is part of the reason you need to dissociate, mindfulness can be kind of dangerous. I know for people who have disability or chronic illness, chronic pain, like doing mindfulness in the body can be excruciating because your body is effectively a war zone. So why would you want to be super present in, "Oh, yay, I'm imagining my body, I'm in my body. Oh, my body's really painful. Fuck this." Like, you know, and so if your body is giving you a lot of weird messages, like, "You're larger than the room," and, "This is making you claustrophobic." Why would you want to be mindful with that? But there are ways to be present in the moment where it's just like, like, okay, I'm holding a cup of tea and I'm feeling the warmth. I'm not like having to be fully mindful of my body. I'm just like, I'm feeling some warmth. Okay, I'm present right now. And that helps me come back from the dissociation and remembering that I have a body, even if it's telling me it's super big or super small.
You know, um... [laughs] I feel like that was a lot. But, uh...
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I mean, that's absolutely fine. Like, if a lot is what is necessary [Elle laughs], then like, I would absolutely encourage you to be like that.
Elle Largesse
Thank you.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
But yeah, I mean.. I don't know, like I've kind of found, like, I do have like, like... it's not the same thing, but I do, I do often feel like I use, like, sort of like... I guess I use personas in general, let alone sort of size-related personas, in order to kind of like just help process my feelings of the world--
Elle Largesse
Yeah--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
A lot of, like, the fiction that I'm kind of creating as part of this project-- Like to fill you in, over the next few years I'm going to be putting together a book that's sort of part-nonfiction like sort of researching, erm, not just like sort of the giantess as a figure and like size kink communities but also like the medicalisation of kind of like gendered and sexual non-normativity, and also just like monster theory in general. Like sort of queer, trans, neurodivergent, et cetera, et cetera, people kind of latch on to monsters in popular culture.
Elle Largesse
Oh, there's a great book. Oh, oh, You keep talking. Sorry. [Laughs]
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
But yeah, and the other half of it is going to be a piece of fiction I'm writing which I do use a kind of like a kind of a kind of giantess persona in order to kind of explore a lot of feeling-- a lot of like, sort of anxiety surrounding sort of like-- sociopolitical things that I've kind of experienced or that I'm kinda anxious about and particularly as a queer/trans person, as a neurodivergent person, and just as a person who's... I don't know, just growing up in a world that's incredibly chaotic, you know. But I've always-- I've always kind of done this and there's always been, erm... Like I've always been-- I don't think, but I'm pretty sure I don't dissociate as a person. I'm pretty sure, although like somebody could tell me I'm wrong, if I was in sort of like--
Elle Largesse
It can be hard to know. I didn't figure it out to my 30s. [Laughs]
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
But yeah, I do have moments where like... I mean I have another character that I kind of created just through me being at work and just like-- So for context there, I work in like a very historic venue in London. It's a one of a kind in the world venue.
Elle Largesse
Oh my gosh, that's so exciting.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
It was the world's, like, last surviving, operating Victorian-style music hall, and it was like a kind of, it was a wrecked building that was sort of, it's been left in its kind of like burnt out state almost. It suffered, like, fires; it suffered dilapidation, it was used as a warehouse for years. But it's like, it's this proper old Victorian building and I kept imagining... I kind of became obsessed with this Victorian female giant and sort of like human exhibit named Anna Swan, who was sort of alive and working around about the same time that the venue I work at first opened.
Elle Largesse
Uh-huh.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I kept imagining as I was just like, just stood behind the bar just being my, like, Front of House dogsbody self, like trying to pay my way as an artist. Just, like, standing there, looking out over the alleyway beyond the bar and over this like very dilapidated space, just like imagining myself as that figure. Who was famously at Barnum's American Museum when it burnt down in the 1860s, which--
Elle Largesse
Did she then die in the fire?
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
No, she didn't. She was rescued by crane.
Elle Largesse
She was rescued by a crane?!
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
She was rescued by a crane because she was like, almost eight-foot-tall and about 160 kilos, and nobody was strong enough to lift her out. But I kind of-- I don't know, I kind of, I always describe that space a good place to like, it's-- I can't even remember the phrase, it's like something, it's like something daydream when you have like sort of, like, problematic relationships with just like constant daydreaming. And the name hss just slipped my mind at this point.
Elle Largesse
Oh, no, it's fine. I mean, that's what I've done my whole life. That's why I'm a writer is-- as a kid, I would just be so daydreamy. And like all of the adults will be like, "Oh, you're off in your own little world again." And I'm like, "Yeah, what's wrong with that?" And they're like, "I mean, you're reading another book and you're often you're daydreaming again and you're gonna be a writer?" And I was like, "Does that mean I get to daydream more?" And they're like, "Yeah," so I was like, "Then I'll be a writer!" [Laughs]
But yeah, that's why I was like, I didn't know I was dissociating until a therapist told me that in my 30s. I was just daydreaming. Like, why would I want to live in this body? That's just, yeah. But oh my gosh, what you're saying about this, this historical space that you get to inhabit and then being close to this historical figure who is eight feet tall, like that-- I'm so glad that you discovered her story and that you get to explore that. I don't know. I'm a history nerd and I just love that.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
[Inaudible due to audio recording issues] I have a skirt that's almost six foot high that I use to portray her. I've got the proper cage and everything.
Elle Largesse
Aaaahh!
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
As part of my, with some of my Arts Council fund, I actually learned how to walk on stilts so I can actually portray her properly.
Elle Largesse
That is the coolest thing! I'm so excited for you to do that! And I know it would be super hard to bring--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I can send you the photographs of me during the original class.
Elle Largesse
[Laughs] That would be awesome. And I know it would be super hard to transport that on an airplane. But I gotta say, that would be the coolest cosplay at SizeCon. Like everyone would try to--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I mean, if it's theoretically possible-- So Katherine Gates actually set me up with a few people who run the Coney Island Burlesque and the Coney Island Sideshow.
Elle Largesse
Cool.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
So she's trying to help me set up the possibility of performing some of these characters at Coney Island--
Elle Largesse
Oh, my gosh, that would be amazing!
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
But as I say, I don't know how the hell, like, shipping a six-foot skirt, a corset and some stilts across the Atlantic is really going to go down.
Elle Largesse
[Laughs] How big would the box need to be for skirts of that size. [Laughs]
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I mean, you can flatten it down quite easily into the suitcase. It's just like, um, it's just like, I'm more worried than I'm exceeding the baggage capacity of a passenger aircraft more than anything. [Elle laughs] But yeah, I kind of just, I kind of-- am a little bit curious just to like go back to your sort of experience of size dysphoria. Do you have, like, have you been able to sort of keep track about the kind of range of, kind of like, body size feelings you actually sort of go through?
Elle Largesse
Great question... [Pause] So okay. So the size feelings are pretty random. Sometimes I'll just wake up and I'm like, "Wow, I feel a foot shorter than usual." Or sometimes I'm like, "I am two inches tall. Cool. That won't make today weird, you know." And you know, there's just no obvious reason. And sometimes it will be absolutely, like, triggered by a thing where like, I will see something that is really tiny. I'm like, "Oh, I feel so tiny just looking at this thing." Or a lot of times-- I remember I used to exercise near a place where there were large power... you know, like a, not like a telephone pole, but like the really large transformer kind of--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
My dad works for the National Grid in this country. I know about electricity.
Elle Largesse
Great! What is it? What is it called? Like the big metal towers?
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Pylon.
Elle Largesse
Pylon. That's what a pylon is? Ah, nifty. Well, I don't actually know how tall the pylons were in the area where I would go to exercise, but I would be out there and I'd be trying to work through big emotions and I would let myself get angry and to process, you know, big anger and release it with physical exercise. And I actually... that's kind of an interesting little side story that is a bit of a case study on how to release, um...
Okay, I'm going to grab this for you really quick because I don't want to forget it. Sorry, one second. [Elle pauses to search on her computer for an article she wrote in 2020, titled Sexual Brakes, Trauma and Kink in the Burning Twenties: A Review of Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski.] Where did it go?
So there's a way I use size kink and size feelings to process big emotions and I wrote about it in an article in 2020. And this is a long article. Half of it is me just being an absolute sex nerd geek about Emily Nagoski's book Come as You Are and her follow up book Burnout. But there is a section in here, um... [Pause] Okay, actually hang on, here's a link to the exact section that I wanted to show you.
So you're talking about like completing the emotional cycle of, like, "I have a feeling. My body wants me to have that feeling and process it and let it go. And if I do that, then it actually lets it go. And now at the end of that, I can feel safe again." But a lot of us get stuck in the, "I have a feeling" and we're like, "I don't want to feel the feeling. I'm going to ignore it." And then it just gets stuck in us and we never process it. But there's a way to do it by-- they call it completing the stress cycle. And you can do that by lying down in bed. But -- actually that wasn't the correct section. Anyway, if you scroll down two more sections, it's called What this looks like for me: stress cycle sprints with a size shifter. And it's basically how I use these size feelings to put myself-- It's almost like a meditation that's really angry and involves building destruction. [Laughs]
And, you know, it's... this is just a long, long thing. But you can scan through it later if you're interested. But it is a case study in one way that I use size feelings to get through my mental health, to be healthier mentally and to talk to my body and to befriend my body. I'm not even saying this right. But to answer your original question, what size ranges do I feel? When I do this, I would feel 100, 150 feet tall, partly because I was doing this right next to pylons that were 100, 150 feet tall.
And it was so easy to just, as I would let the anger flow through me and own that for once in my goddamn life. Because in the rest of my life, I don't feel like I'm allowed to be angry. And we could totally talk about feminist theory on that if you want. Fuck the patriarchy making us feel like we have to be small and not take up space. But like when I would allow myself to own my fury and own, like, how I wanted to just break down injustice with my own two fucking hands.
Ah, feeling big. it was so easy to feel as big as the nearest thing around me. And sometimes I would get to this point where I'm like, "I need to fucking scream and punch something." But I don't feel big today and I would go out and exercise and I wouldn't feel as big as the pylons. It wasn't like a guarantee. Sometimes I would feel small and sometimes my anger makes me feel really small and that is especially frustrating.
I'm five-foot-two, and all, so, the women in my family are average height, like, five foot six or something. All the men in my family are six-foot-six or taller. All of them are just, you know... and so when I was, like, a teenager and kind of hit my my full height of five foot two, at just all my family events they're all just fucking so tall and they never would take me seriously when I would get angry. And there was just like this thing of like, you know the thing like where a tall person like lean on, like, put your elbow on a short person's head and be kind of like "Ha-ha, you're so cute," and I'm like. "Yeah, I'm cute. Fine. Okay, but I'm really angry and I need you to take me seriously..." And so there are times when my anger makes me feel small in that respect like, that... you know, I'm not going to be taken seriously if I try to take up space and, you know, I just have like a young face and I'm short and people are just like, "Oh, that's so cute! She's throwing a tantrum." I'm like, yeah, I'm throwing a tantrum because I want to punch something and I want to be 150 feet tall right now, and you don't give a damn. You think i'm just cute and short and fuck you [laughs]. So, um, with that like the section where I say, "Are you ever small instead?" Um, there is-- I actually wrote a short story called Do For One -- I'm really bad at story titles, but whatever [laughs] -- The story was inspired by my kink partner/long distance partner within the community, Pseudosize, helping me process these size feelings and my anger while I was stuck feeling small. And they did a really good job of experimenting with me and helping me come up with a different sort of, kind of... cathartic meditation of, "How do you help a tiny express their anger in a way that's respectful and helps them own their anger and release it." And long story shorted involved punching their hand. But just... like there's space for big emotions at any size and I can never predict how big or how small it will make me feel.
Also coming back to your original question of like how big or how small, what are the ranges I feel. Sometimes it depends on who I'm around, what media I'm consuming, what they're interested in. Like a roleplay partner I had for a while was really into micro sizes. And he just was super into micro sizes and I was experimenting with that more and I wrote a couple stories where like the character... when I say "micro," I don't mean microscopic, I just mean like, I don't know, under a centimetre, like millimetre kind of size. And that wasn't a size that I'd ever really felt by default on my own before.
But in the process of playing with this person and trying to push my limit of imagining, "What would that feel like?" Like maybe my lower limit before then had been maybe an inch.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Yeah.
Elle Largesse
But in playing with that person, I pushed that my imagination and just tried to test it. Like, "What would that feel like?" And then I started feeling that size. And I certainly felt felt that when I was writing the story. That's another reason I use writing a lot to embrace my kink is because it helps me have an outlet. Like, you were saying how you would have personas and a headcanon of you, how you wanted to view yourself, or explore what that felt like. I do that with size feelings in my size erotica. And so sometimes I would feel especially big or small.
You know, I tend to not feel much bigger than... skyscraper sized. Every once in a while I'll feel larger than a skyscraper because I have a kinky thing where I want to use a skyscraper as a sex toy. I don't know if that's weird to say out loud. But I mean, totally a thing, right? [Laughs]
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Yeah, a couple of weeks back, I was actually round-- So I was doing a day with a performance mentor I was working with at a studio space called Theatre Deli, which is like right in the middle of the City of London. And like we were going out for lunch-- like the building is right by, erm, The Gherkin, which like, I don't know if you're familiar, but it's--
Elle Largesse
Is that the one that looks like a dildo?
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Yes!
Elle Largesse
Okay!
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I was actually like, "I want to do a performance where I'm actually just like giving that building, like, the kind of-- Almost like a lap dance almost."
@47:24 - Elle Largesse
Oh, I love it! [Laughs]
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I actually said that like-- Weirdly enough the nickname "Gherkin" wasn't actually originally given to that building. So the full nickname was actually "Erotic Gherkin." It was coined by a--
Elle Largesse
Really?!
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
It was coined by an architecture critic in the Guardian in the '90s that was originally-- like it was originally coined to describe the original design for the building which is about twice as tall and was not it was not anywhere near as phallic but somehow looked more like a sex toy [Elle laughs] than the one that was built. I always wanted to do a performance where I actually do, like, a kind of almost like a performance lecture where I go through, like, buildings I'd like to fuck, you know.
Elle Largesse
Oh my god, do it, do it! I'm cheering you on!
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I often find myself looking at-- there's like an old, there's a there's a skyscraper in the West End of London called the BT Tower which is like the old, like, sort of telecoms tower for London. And like it looks a little bit like the Sonic Screwdriver from Doctor Who and it used to have a revolving restaurant at the top of it, and I'm just thinking like you whip that thing, you get that thing going up to speed and you've got yourself a magic wand right there.
Elle Largesse
Oh my god, I love it! Oh that's brilliant.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Don't ever think you're gonna feel weird for saying things like that and, for me personally I kind of feel like existing in an urban space. I don't know exactly where abouts you live, whether it's like a whether it's like an urban space or not. But like I spent my entire life sort of like living in and kind of existing around, like, central London. Like I went to school in central London and everything. And like there's a lot of fuel there for just, like, kind of [inaudible] on size. I was sort of thinking about, like, I often used to get really messed up with perspective whenever I was walking around somewhere like Buckingham Palace way. Because like the Palace itself was this like-- it's only like a two or so storey building, and it's sort of surrounded by-- you kind of look out across the parks, you've got these, like, kind of, there's a few like kind of modern, I say like a few, there's a few like kind of Brutalist buildings from the '60s, like, where the old Ministry of Justice is, and there's like an old kind of like octagonal skyscraper, like kind of just to the side of it. And there's a load of more modern buildings like hang behind the trees, but they're all kind of like really cramped together, and like the size perspective is always really weird, and it feels like-- it feels like you're walking through like the Legoland version of that space. [Elle laughs] I keep imagining like... it always looks like a doll's house to me and I keep thinking I'm just going to see a giant hand hand reach out and open up the front of it in a second.
Elle Largesse
I love that. I love that.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Yeah, I kind of, I completely get that, that sort of, that kind of playfulness and also the way you use it kind of process emotion as well. Like, the story that I'm writing [Nancy//the World] is like very much a story about a young woman who uses a size kink in order to process her, just, anger at sort of just, queerphobia and patriarchy and capitalism. And use size to, like, actually kind of just make that a reality. Like there's a-- like, the whole story is -- I was trying to describe it to the last person I interviewed who like-- I wrote this story about two years ago that was basically just me extrapolating the plot line of a really crappy low-budget series of giantess porn films from the '90s that I found when I was a kid. And this entire story is just an even bigger extrapolation of that. It's just like...
Elle Largesse
I love it.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Yeah, this like 18-year-old high-school dropout who like, does have like very, sort of, explicitly a size kink. I was describing this scene about a third of the way through [the book] where I introduced it, where she and her friend are just like walking up through the Santa Monica mountains and they see a load of, like, warships leaving the port of Long Beach. And then she just kind of goes on this Freudian slip tangent and lets it slip that she wants to fuck the warships and like-- doesn't realise that like-- And then her friend's like, "No, I also experience a different sort of weird kink. We should help each other explore that a bit." And then eventually they do end up sort of sneaking around a load of, like, labs in the sort of Southern California area, producing like a kind of growth serum and then just destroying America, like sort of leaving behind this very, like, lesbian, socialist utopia in its place.
I completely get the idea of just like, destruction as like this cathartic process like sort of anger and rage and the possibility of something better, you know.
Elle Largesse
Yeah. And I think I think for me it's very rooted in the idea of wanting to take up space and like you say... you know, well, at any rate, I love what you're describing. And I love the story that you're telling and I think that's awesome. I looked through some of what you had... Before we go, I wanted to check with you like I was curious about reading some of your stories and just because I'm like-- the way the my brain works and I can tell that part of you seems to embrace some things about this kink that are hard for me.
So I was curious if content warnings were available for any of those.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Yeah, so I would say-- I mean, I did have a look through the, like, content tags, like, on your website and like, there's... I mean there's like there's, I guess there's elements of destruction but there's nothing hard. There's no like sort of hard violence, no kind of like-- I don't end up talking about things like war or anything like that.
Elle Largesse
But no graphic, like-- sometimes the destruction, people want to focus on like the human element of the destruction--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I'm not like, I'm not like that--
Elle Largesse
Okay. Got it.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
For me, like, whenever I read a story like that, I'm just like, "I don't care about--" Like, for me, it's about destroying systems rather than destroying people.
Elle Largesse
Oh, I love that. Yes.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
in this story, I'm writing, there's like, there's like a very distinct progression between these two characters that I portray, that means that there's-- I split it up to three sections, literally called The Micro, The Meso and The Macro.
The first section, or The Micro, is all about them kind of meeting each other and processing their own kind of experiences with kind of like... the kind of trauma of their upbringing, whether that's to do with gender, to do with sexuality, to do with their bodies, to do with the way that they were kind of treated by their families growing up.
The Meso is where they start kind of, they start meeting other people like them who have had those experiences and like organising and kind of like actually going through, like... doing sort of acts of just, civil disobedience and kind of like maverick sort of protest and disruption, and also starting to [inaudible].
And then The Macro is where they start realising like the end game is, "We have to destroy-- there is a far, there is a far greater system that we have to disrupt that can't be done through just like this very kind of, like, localised collective action and so like we are going to transform ourselves into beings that even like nuclear weapons couldn't take down." And it's just the way of, like... there's this-- I would like to think, I would like to think there's nothing, like, certainly in what I've already written there's like nothing I can think of. I mean, I'm just having a look at one of them here I'm like thinking about I would maybe steer away from sending you something like The SCRREW Manifesto, which is something I don't think I've published online yet, but like--
Elle Largesse
I did read the pamphlet, which is-- that is a badass pamphlet. Like the [email] you sent with the [manuscript from] Anguish of the 50-Foot Woman, [and the one] with like Nancy Motherfucking Archer.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Oh, that is the SCRREW Manifesto.
Elle Largesse
Okay. Yeah, that's where I got a sense of like, "Maybe this goes to some dark places." But also, I just want to like high-five you, like, it is fucking awesome.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
That one kind of does. I'd maybe, like-- if you're sort of aware of like... I think, particularly because of your experiences with C-PTSD, like I do put in like quite graphic, like, descriptions of what sort of, what sort of feeling, what those sorts of things like stress and trauma can kind of feel like, and I do give kind of quite violent imagery in that. So I maybe still can't--
Elle Largesse
Good to know.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I mean, I did--
Elle Largesse
Looks amazing!
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Yeah. I mean, I also did have like-- I had like a quick look through like a couple of the stories. Like I found there was... I gotta say, the one story you wrote that kind of -- I think you mentioned it -- was kinda written in the -- I can't remember if was coincidentally or not -- with the advent of the Barbie movie and the kind of like explosion of, just, pink media over the summer. The one with the size-change party.
Elle Largesse
Oh, yes, er... Sparkly [A Sparkly Femme Size Orgy]. You liked it?
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Yeah--
Elle Largesse
Oh, great! That was so much fun--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
It speaks to an idea of, like, I like sexuality that gets a bit silly and gets a bit fun.
I kind of feel like there's... there's like a song [Red Wine Supernova by Chappell Roan] I could almost soundtrack that [story] to, that like just kind of perfectly sums up this sort of like, just silly, like idea of sexuality where it's just all about the fun of the moment. You know, I kind of-- that's something that I feel like in a lot of... you don't really see from just any sort of mainstream sex space or even a lot of kink space I feel like, where something's just explicitly about the fun, you know, of that moment--
Elle Largesse
I really wanted that one to just be sparkly and fun, and just, like, I wanted a femme size orgy where it's just like, "Sleepover! Alright, who wants to take a dip in the champagne flute!" You know [laughs]... Like, I just wanted it to be fun and quirky and that was a really great one. I actually have a... short story in draft right now that is more explicitly kinky about-- it was inspired by Barbie and it's so kinky and I'm kind of embarrassed to share it. So I'm still working through the process of getting that on the page and just letting it go. So that's why I was confused. I was like, "Wait, you've read my Barbie story? I haven't released that yet!" [Laughs]
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
It was kind of written in... it was a bit of a coincidence, which--
Elle Largesse
Yeah, I love it.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Yeah. It's not actually the first piece of media I've engaged with that was just released in that time that's just completely coincidentally-- I literally, I literally... Like, a couple of friends of mine actually produced an entire Fringe show [Body Show by Frankie Thompson & Liv Ello] that was about kind of like, just, the body, like, sort of gender, eating disorders, and the apocalypse that was like, basically, like, accidentally the world's first Barbenheimer adaptation--
Elle Largesse
Oh, hilarious!
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
--had their Edinburgh previews on the day that, kind of, those two films dropped and they kind of like ended up rewriting the entire thing to sort of like really hammer home the connection--
Elle Largesse
Leaning into it. I love it! Oh, that's great!
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
But yeah, I was gonna check. Do you have a time constraint?
Elle Largesse
I don't. I meant to say that earlier, that I'm fine.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I know, because I can go for at least another half-hour, forty-five minutes.
Elle Largesse
Yeah.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Because I said-- that you-- I was kind of thinking you were saying, like... "Before we go." And I was just wondering--
Elle Largesse
Oh yeah, I just-- it's like it popped into my brain. And because I have memory issues, I've gotten in the habit of like, when I think of a thing, I say it aloud. So I'm not the only one who will be liable to forget. But yeah, I don't need to go.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I did have a couple of other things that I wanted to--
Elle Largesse
Yes! Please! Go right ahead.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Um, no, so I kind of, I kind of did-- I feel like it's worth-- I mean, you spoke about not wanting to get into a ton of feminist theory here, but I kind of think-- [Elle laughs] --because I feel like, through what I've sort of seen of your writing, like whether it's like, your actual stories or whether it's just like the blog posts you've made, like, I feel like... [pause] Actually, I want to go here first. I think this is going to be a better way to lead into this conversation. Like you mentioned Come As You Are earlier. I did have like a very good browse over what you wrote about that again, like, in between having to do the other interview and having to wolf down my lunch before coming on with you.
I kind of wanted to talk about like, just-- I know you mentioned a lot of books like that. You also mentioned in the Size Dysphoria article about The Topping Book and The Bottoming Book--
Elle Largesse
Yes!
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I wanted to talk about, like, approaches to like your own sort of sexual self-education and just, if there's anything that you think I might not have come across, but you think you should share and I should kind of look into reading.
Elle Largesse
Oh my God, you're asking me for book recommendations. Ahhhh! I am a big, big book nerd. I love reading. Um... and yeah, The Bottoming Book and The Topping Book were... I won't say my introduction to kink, but as a-- there was a friend in the mainstream kink community who was the one who encouraged me to start an "after-dark Tumblr." I met him through just polyamory hangouts and I would just sort of hint like, "Yeah, I'm kind of kinky but it's a weird thing. We don't need to talk about it," and he's like, "It's okay if you don't want to tell me about it, but you could totally get an after-dark Tumblr, and explore it there and find your people," and I was like, "Maybe I will," and as I started doing that and I still wouldn't tell him what my kink was about, he's like, "For your own safety, I would ask that you read at least one of these. I don't care if you're a bottom or a top or both. But read one of these books just for your own safety and promise me that you'll be careful in, like, selecting a Dom or something," you know. And so those-- I read both of those books because I'm a switch and, I really... It was helpful because I had already read The Ethical Slut by Dossie Eastman and Janet Hardy. Which is a lot of people's first introductions to polyamory.
Ethical Slut is all about how to do non-monogamy ethically, and it's got a big sexual focus. So there's other books I would recommend on polyamory. Like a lot of like my vanilla friends are like, "I'm thinking about trying polyamory do you think I should read Ethical Slut?" and I'm like, "Maybe?" It's pretty sex-focused. If you want to know, like, how to divvy up the laundry and bills maybe try these other books on polyamory [laughs]... So I'd read Ethical Slut with my live-in partner when we met back in like 2011, and I will say there's nothing quite like reading a book about sex and relationships when you're getting into a new relationship, if you read that with the person. Oh, man! We, like, read pages aloud it was so sexy. Like, oh, my god, it was just very affirming. And I think it helped us build some communication skills. My living partner isn't super kinky, but that's one of the reasons that I have a long distance partner. I met in the community. Their name is pseudo_size on Twitter [FOOTNOTE: Also known as "Pseudoclever"]. But yeah, so... we read, with that partner I read Come As You Are, and that was really, really enlightening.
At this point, I am, I'm the only cis person in my polycule. And we were talking about how frustrating it is that... like, Emily Nagoski addresses this in Come As You Are, that there's no... there's so little good research out there in, like, the sex academia communities about people who aren't cis, like... We need more research on for trans folks and just gender diverse people and how they interact with sexuality. So that book is really limited--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Yeah, I want--
Elle Largesse
Oh, go ahead--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I was gonna say, I actually brought this point up with Katharine Gates when, like, she mentions this like in her introduction to the second edition of Deviant Desires that she, like... I think she was kind of afraid of dealing with trans bodies because of the fact that... she kind of didn't want to sort of... It was almost out of a kind of place of, uh, just fear in a way of just not wanting to kind of like just...
Elle Largesse
Not wanting to mess up?
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Pathologise, you know, like, sort of trans experiences or link trans experiences to sexuality too much, to the point where it's kind of like, the sexuality invalidates the gender identity and, like... What I'm doing with this project is just saying I do not fucking care [Elle laughs] like, if like I am saying the quiet part out loud here, that for a lot of trans people, like, certainly from my experience [and] from people I've spoken to, including the interviewee before you, who was a transfemme member of the community... Like there's often very little difference between, like, sort of gender euphoria and sexual attraction--
Elle Largesse
Yeah.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
--and like I bring up this phrase, [that] I think I've brought up in every single interview I've done so far, which is-- I have this concept which I call the "Be" versus "Do" conundrum, which like is just the idea that, like, for a queer or a trans person, like, you look at someone you feel some sort of like attraction to, you don't know whether it's you just want to emulate their style, to emulate their body, just kind of--
Elle Largesse
Yeah, do you just want to be them or do I want to do them?
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
--I've spent a lot of my life trying to figure out what the hell the answer to this question is for me, and then, like, particularly when it comes to size kink as well and then, just, over the last year realising, like, "The answer is both."
Elle Largesse
Yeah--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
"The answer's straight-up both." Like, to talk a little bit about my own journey for a bit. Like I... a lot of-- like as someone who like is a trans woman is also like about six foot seven. It was like very difficult for me to find like sort of, just... women who looked like me, sort of, in spaces-- or women who have bodies that were similar to mine. And like, upsettingly a lot of, like, the people, a lot of the people who kind of like gave me the strength to kind of come out and start dressing femme were people I kind of discovered either through like kind of freak-show or fetish spaces where their bodies had kind of been claimed by sort of... others, whether it's like just... mainstream television or whether it's kind of predominantly male fetishists, as like just something to be gawked about or something to be wanked over. And it... fills me with a bit of shame that I kind of-- that's how that happened for me. But, like, I kind of... Years later, and particularly after I went on the anti-androgen drug that kind of like killed my testosterone basically. I kind of... started to re-explore kind of like the giantess body as something kind of erotic and realised that this... speaks to me and I like imagining myself as this.
Elle Largesse
Yeah.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
It just kind of makes sense. It also helps me to embrace the size of my own body as is. You know, I'm just kind of owning the idea that I am actually just straight up-- I'm just straight up a giantess by most people's standards. I tower over most people naturally. So like, to embrace this body and to kind of like normalise my relationship with it is just like such-- just makes so much sense. But, I...
Elle Largesse
The whole "Do" versus "Be" thing that, that is absolutely-- that resonates for me. That's how I figured out I was queer when I was younger. I was like, "Oh, I don't want to be this character from Firefly. I want to have sex with her. Oh, ho-ho, yeah--"
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I know it's something that, like, I feel like every queer person knows. I just I don't think I've ever seen anyone distil it into that sort of... I like how greatly it just distills what I-- Yeah, yeah, in any case, like, I kind of said to myself that... I kind of wanted my research to be the thing that-- if I end up becoming like a subject of, just, vitriol from the press in this country, which like is the most sort of queerphobic, transphobic thing you could possibly imagine, then, like... I don't care. I want to kind of, I want to say that quiet part out loud, that like--
Elle Largesse
Yeah--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
--for us, like, it's, it's not a case of like... sexuality and gender, and neurology as well, as I've said, are not separate things, they're all kind of very interwoven. But like, but you are right, there's like, I mean... there's not a great deal of research into kind of like, just queer and trans bodies and sexuality and... I mean, I don't think there's also a great deal of research into kind of like, this particular sort of, like, kink niche as well, which is why I became so attached to Katharine and her book, because it was the first place I'd ever seen someone study macrophilia as something that was, that was just like, a point of interest rather than something to be pathologies, you know.
Elle Largesse
So, this is awesome. I'm so cheering you on all of that. And it's bringing up a lot of things for me that I wanted to touch on.
You're going back to the idea of feminism and like... Like what you said about... like finding your role models in spaces where, you know, it was maybe material intended for... you know, a cis guy to jerk off to because it was like his fantasy or whatever. Finding your connections and just a little hint of like, "Oh, there's a body that looks like mine. Oh, but it's being used for sex. Great. So now I get to deal with, like, weird, societally enforced shame that it should have no place in any of this."
But basically like... Aghhhh, like, how am I putting this into words? I'm so much better at writing. So the... [pause] reclaiming... [pause] I want to type it... Reclaiming sexuality away from objectification and being able to claim an identity or a body size and say, "This is my gaze as a queer woman. This is my gaze and what I am interested in and what I find sexual." And yeah, maybe it's something that this person would be fapping off to, but it is maybe something that I'm fapping off to and I get the right to do that. It's my goddamn fucking body. And if I want to imagine my tits growing to enormous proportions because I really like that, then that's nice that you like it too, but I'm doing it because it feels really good in my body to imagine it.
And yeah, it's a hypersexual trait that the patriarchy says, you know, "Oh, breasts should be inherently-- your breasts are inherently sexual, so you should always cover them and, don't, like, show yourself nursing a child, which is actually the original intention of tits." But being able to say like, "Okay, the patriarchy says my breasts are inherently sexual and should always be covered, and-- I'm going to play with that. I'm going to own my own body and determine when it is sexual and when it isn't. Sometimes I'm just being nude and this is just my body and I'm allowed to own that." And I'm like, I struggle a little bit because I have like D-cup breasts and there are some experiences I've had where people shamed me for showing some cleavage. Like someone threw a napkin over my chest when I was younger in a public space. Not a napkin in the British sense, but like a dinner table cloth. Yeah, anyway [laughs]. But you know, just, just things where somebody looks at us and says, "You're too sexual just because you exist in the body you're in," and saying, "I'm allowed to be sexual. I'm allowed to own that in the way that feels good to me."
And I don't know, one of my kinks that I've had a struggle to own and claim is like bimbofication and objectification. Both of those I feel are very uncomfortable to own because I like being an intelligent woman, you know. I was very proud of the degrees I got in college and I, like, clearly spent a lot of time thinking about writing and thinking about philosophy and sex and kink and erotica and eroticism.
And sometimes I just want to turn off my brain and be a happy, sexy little bimbo. And the only examples of that are typically in situations where a guy just wants, like, a little sex doll and how transgressive is it for me to say, "Maybe I want to be a little sex doll. Maybe I don't want to have thoughts in my head. Maybe fuck the girlboss thing that so-called girlboss feminism says I have to be all fucking things at all times. Uggghhh!"
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I just want to-- On the subject of bimbos and bimbofication for a second, I want to ask: have you ever heard of a musician called Scene Queen?
Elle Largesse
No, but I'm typing it. I'm writing that down.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Look her up. She's a kind of-- She describes her music as "Bimbocore" and it's-- like a very kind of like... it's kind of like... Imagine heavy metal coming from a woman who's like a proper kind of like mid-00s, like trashy kind of like... [Elle laughs] I don't know, like a kind of Paris Hilton-style figure, you know--
Elle Largesse
I'll check it out--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Yeah, and it's also like very kind of like feminist and sexual, like, and just, I mean... I'd also be slightly wary because like, there's... I think there's like a couple songs that do elude to some sort of violence, but like--
Elle Largesse
Okay.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I think I think you would enjoy their music. You'd enjoy the aesthetic of that, if you kind of want an outlet for bimbofication that doesn't kind of invalidate you as like a kind of... as a kind of intelligent woman and a feminist scholar, you know--
Elle Largesse
Thank you. It's a fun thing to embrace and explore the the sides of our sexuality that maybe we're not allowed to. Like, "Oh, how could you possibly identify with that thing that's meant to be degrading to women?" And there was-- there's a piece that I wrote called Embracing My Inner Size Slut, and it talks about using objectification and, like, hypnosis and mind control to play with that idea agency, and to, like-- I actually wrote a story about it called Woman in Ecstasy and it was about a woman becoming a living art exhibition.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I think I saw the artwork for that. Was that the one you mentioned the Vagina Museum in the intro to?
Elle Largesse
Yeah! [Laughs]
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
It did also just dawn on me that I'm pretty sure they have finally found themselves a new location thankfully.
Elle Largesse
That's awesome! Yes, thank God! I love them. But yeah, so... I wrote this along-- It just got to be too long for an intro for a short story. So I made it its own blog post. But kind of, like, playing with those themes and like... "Are we allowed to like things that are meant to be degrading? And how could that possibly be empowering?" But it's empowering because we choose it. And we say, I don't give a fuck what you think. I don't-- like, am I-- are you going to think less of me? Okay, I think more of myself because I'm giving myself the freedom to explore what feels good. And I'm doing it in a consensual way. And I don't know, for me, that was part of my journey with sexuality was... I do a lot with non-consensual fantasies. And I think there's some really interesting exploration to be done with size kink and agency. So one of the appeals of, like, "Oh, I'm attracted to a giantess or a big person or something is because they can overpower me. They're inherently so big, they could just pick me up and do whatever they want with me. They just so happen to do the thing I find sexiest in the world." But, you know, it's like that--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Just on that tangent, I don't know if you've ever come across the creator Aphrodite.
Elle Largesse
Yes, she's a friend. I would consider her a friend--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Like, I was thinking about the little short comics she made like a couple of years back [Elle laughs], where she was, like actually talking about that very specific thing about just, like, men in role-play situations just, like, demanding she does exactly what they want to the script and just, like, invalidating it being her fantasy as well--
Elle Largesse
Thank you so much. Please include that in your work like because there is such a theme of like... men in the community sort of demanding all the women play to their fantasies and it's like, "I am a human. I am not a wish fulfillment machine. I have size feelings too, and, you know, like we are not here for your pleasure. We are here for all of our pleasure and my own." But yeah, so I think it's really fascinating where like I can explore non-consensual fantasies within size kink... I Actually had to go see a therapist about this in like, I don't know, 2016 Because it was I was working at the time at a nonprofit that serves survivors of violence and sexual assault and it really fucked me up to have these sexual fantasies of my own that I've had for years prior to that, but that I ended up in this non-profit working with real people and their real pain, and also... well, I get my kicks by going home and fantasising that a giant person is going to pick me up and use me as a sex toy. And that's very non-consensual. How the fuck do I reconcile any of these dark impulses with, you know... how unhealthy is my sexuality that I want to do this or want this to be done to me?
And the therapist was essentially like, "You know, you're not your fantasy or your thoughts. Like, you're the one who observes your thoughts. And as long as every real person involved is a consenting adult -- that's fully informed consenting adult -- then no matter how non-consensual your fantasy is, what you're participating in is an inherently consensual act."
Anyway, so I just think there's a lot of interesting things to be said about the way that consensuality and feminine empowerment allow you to make a choice. That to me is what feminism is about. It's about making a choice. And how do I want to express the way like I feel 50 feet tall today. Okay, so I'm going to express that by having a fantasy where I pick someone up and use them like a sex toy, or fuck a building, or Destroy a building because I'm really angry at how like voter suppression is working in Texas. And I want to destroy the Texas state capitol. Just, yeah, like that is not a very consensual fantasy for the characters in the story who are fleeing the Texas capitol. But it is for me. I'm the only real person involved in that fantasy, you know.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Yeah, no, I get this a lot. This is why like whenever I see particularly like sort of like... larger scales [of giantesses featured in size erotica], sort of like... You get this happen so often where they just cut from the actual action to a very-- sort of description of one singular man, his experiences of trying to escape, and it's like, I don't give a fuck.
Elle Largesse
[Laughs]
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I kind of imagine, like, as I'm writing my own story, I kind of don't want there to be... I did sort of think about writing as a film script originally and sort of wanting to say, I do not want to see a single man actually in this film at all [Elle laughs]. If there is a male figure in the film, it is from his POV looking at the female characters. You never see the men, you only see the gaze.
I want to produce something where, like... the queer or the gender-nonconforming, gender-subversive woman is just front and centre of that and it's just all about their experiences and their fantasies more than anything else.
Elle Largesse
Yeah. Oh, yeah. The female gaze, just, oh, and the queer gaze. And I want to see more of that in writing. That's why I've been trying to write more queer stories where, maybe it's not necessarily like the heterosexual story arc in erotica where it's like, okay, you got a man, you got a woman, and they're having the sexy times, and they both have an orgasm, and now we're done. Yay. Like, I want to explore more themes where it's not necessarily about, like, "Did someone come?" It's about pleasure and just exploring what our bodies can do and who feels fulfilled and how are you connecting to each other?
And, yeah. I didn't answer your question, but the book Girl Sex 101, and... oh, I never sent you that other link from the Amazon book I was going to recommend... Girl Sex 101 has amazingly helpful trans... Oh, I actually, I actually previewed some of it in... the later chapters of my story, Dare You Not to Grow. I used that book as some research for a particular kind of... thing. So I'd really recommend that book.... I'm just going to go ahead and put this in the chat. This is related to something you said a while back, which I can't remember now, but this is specifically-- you were talking about queer villains and how that shows up in fantasies. This is about how fantasy talks on disability and like how many villains are like disfigured or their bodies are unusual. And so this is a very embodied take on like fantasy villains. Anyway--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
That would be very useful. Because I want to really play with that in this story [Nancy//the World]. This character I'm writing from this perspective of [Nancy] is... very kind of gender ambiguous to the point where it's really having like a severe effect on their life and they can't figure out-- they go between having to present as different sorts of genders constantly in order to kind of survive basically. And her friend, I kind of wanted her to be not like... she's kind of like sort of... it's kind of like an invisible disability where she's like very kind of fatigued, she gets fatigued quite easily, and she's also quite fat as well, which is opening this whole other can of worms.
So like, I know these are all kind of intersections that do lead you towards sort of like, just, sympathising with the monster in stories--
Elle Largesse
Yeah. Yeah.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I mean, I find this a lot when I watch horror, like I feel like you have to give me a reason to hate the villain otherwise if it's not clear enough [Elle laughs] I will be siding with the villain. I remember, like, watching a film quite recently which I think it was... I think it was called Lights Out [FOOTNOTE]. It was a horror movie I watched just before Halloween where, like, the main monster was this girl who was killed by this kind of light therapy that was done to her to try and like cure, like, sort of this skin condition that ended up... sort of destroying her body and making it so that she could only kind of like survive in a physical form when the lights were out. And I'm like everyone kind of like hates this person but, like, from every sort of interpretation I can think of, it's just like everyone else is kind of bullying her. I'm like, I want this bitch to kill everyone right now. Like I'm in that place right now but--
Elle Largesse
Yeah, I can think of some villains I feel that way about. I've dropped two more -- I think -- two more books in the chat. One is Erotic Mind, which I have not finished, but what I have read so far was really fascinating and good. I was doing the exercises and like writing out some of the exercises he did. I found it very enlightening for myself. And then The Body Is Not An Apology by Sonia Renee Taylor. Oh my god. Like, their Instagram is amazing. And they're actually closing it down soon. So if you're on Instagram, go check it out while it's still there. But the book was very helpful in just embracing bodies and... like really deconstructing some of the systems of oppression that find value in humans hating themselves and shaming each other. So it was really good to deconstruct shame in that way... So I know that we're coming up on 90 minutes and I want to be respectful of your time, but I could keep going just a little longer.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
So my hard cut off is five [p.m.] because then I do have to start thinking about getting to work.
Elle Largesse
So five would be in half an hour from now?
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Yeah, but they are like very open with me. They know about this project. They know-- and they know know about this project. They know it's dealing with a lot of kink stuff here. I said this to my last interviewee, I'm so happy that I work in the space where I can actually just talk about the project that I'm doing and actually be like really open about what this is--
Elle Largesse
That's wild. I'm so happy for you!
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
My workplace actually just breaks every single rule of, like, just how workplaces should act. There's such a great community around the space. [Redacted for privacy reasons.]
Elle Largesse
Oh, I mean as long as they're healthy boundaries about you know like yeah, that's good. That's so cool--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I can do things like talking about finding erotic-- like finding like nuclear weapons erotic [Elle laughs] and like not only accepting that but also getting them to agree like it... But yeah that's very [inaudible]. But also just... I feel like... just to check, you don't actually kind of like, do, like, anything related to sort of like sexology or anything like that professionally or sort of like, academia or writing professionally, because like you seem to have a lot of knowledge about this for someone who doesn't do it professionally.
Elle Largesse
I mean we can't monetise all of our hobbies [laughs]. Fuck capitalism. [Redacted for privacy/safeguarding reasons.]
@1:30:33 - Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Yeah, it's always kind of fascinating one to notice about the person kind of behind the kink a bit as well. Because I know that-- I know it's something that I don't-- I've spoken a lot about not wanting to divorce, like, the kink or the sexuality or like the neurology from the person, but like it's always... a bit fascinating to find out more about just the person and to, like, to create a full human, you know.
@1:31:05 - Elle Largesse
I wish that I could be a full human. I... I'm not, I don't feel safe enough or brave enough to fully be like, to integrate all of my parts. [Redacted for privacy/safeguarding reasons.]
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Yeah--
Elle Largesse
Um, I wish I could integrate those. If I ever need to return to my nonprofit career... Part of that was at educational nonprofits and people don't let you work with kids... If in Texas, if they think you're some sort of sexual deviant. So I need to keep these two sides of myself very separate.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Yeah.
Elle Largesse
So... that sucks. But I very much support for anyone who's able able to and who wants to come out fully as kinky, I fully celebrate and support that.
But there's also plenty of reasons for a person to not come out. And that is a-okay too. I thought I would take this kink to the grave. Like, I really thought I would never tell another living soul. And I'm so glad that I did. Just to find that belonging, I think is important. That's one of the reasons I write about this stuff and want to delve into it. And like when you said that, like, "Oh, something you wrote resonated for me," I felt my whole heart just grow like five times larger.
I just felt like this, this is why I do what I do. And your extremely kind email-- I'm not kidding. I smiled for like three days straight. Just to know that somebody out there saw it and got it and like--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
So did I when I received the response as well. Because like, honestly, I... and this is going to have come across as I've been speaking to you. Like, I... like... I'm autistic. I appreciate an info-dump, you know [Elle laughs]. And I know that I have a tendency when I kind of reach out to people to do that too, and my access assistant-- and also Katharine as well. Katharine Gates has also wanted me about this. Just like, "Condense everything. Don't push everything on people all at once." But there are some people for whom that kind of works for though, and like I am so... yeah I was kind of.... I was kind of overjoyed at your overjoyed reaction to it, you know--
Elle Largesse
Yay! I love it.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
But that's been the big part of this project that I've been able to learn that I'm not, like, alone or that like the people that experience this are not this kind of.... are not just like unsavoury, you know. There are good people and, like, queer people, like, behind this facade and it's like... Because, I don't know... until I did the original exhibition that I did-- like, I did an exhibition on this topic [FOOTNOTE: Anguish of the Fifty-Foot Woman at ArtWorks] like two years ago that was like... It was very basic and I was very cagey about, like, having any connection at all to the kink, and just saying, like, "This was something I had kind of come across at one point, and it kind of like related a bit to my experience of body as a tall woman," and... I thought... I don't know, I kind of thought the same thing. I thought it would be something that would just be, like, something that was just an uncomfortable fact about myself I would have to kind of hide, but like--
Elle Largesse
Yeah.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Sometimes I wonder how good a job I did with it because, as I do say, like I was... I kind of did do a parody of a giantess porn film in before during that piece [Elle laughs], and my parents did literally see me stripping out a lab coat into a bikini in a cardboard city and watch me pull tiny men out of my bra and knickers.
Elle Largesse
Okay, what you have described is hot and the fact that you did it in front of your parents is-- oh, my heart just gave like a little terrified, like, anxiety leap for you. I hope that went well!
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I'm a performance artist and I know a lot of people in that world. I've seen people do very kind of strange things. I've seen people like, sort of, pretend to fuck demons on the Soho Theatre stage in front of their families and stuff like that... um...
Elle Largesse
I admire the courage that takes. So there is-- [Abigail interrupts] Oh, go ahead. I want to make sure we get to the questions you feel are really important so I will try to give slightly shorter answers.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
No, no, don't worry at all. Actually there was one big question i didn't actually manage to come to, like, because we-- I think just the amazing length of discussion we had about AiWS kind of distracted from that but, like, I kind of wanted to ask you about, like, when you first became like... When you first became aware of the existence of like, sort of, size kink communities and how like-- I guess you kind of mentioned Tumblr but like, I just kind of wanted to go into a bit more detail on that, like, the... sort of discovering the community around it and if there's like any figures within the community as well that you kind of like-- you found kinda really resonated you know.
Elle Largesse
Yeah, so I can tell you, I can tell you, in fact, the exact story -- I don't want to tell you the exact story, but -- I stumbled on to some breast expansion stuff and I read a short story about a... a scientist who tested a breast enlargement serum on herself and like wacky hijinks ensued, and like... her breasts got so big they had to like shoot her into orbit and like build a space station around her. It was obviously ridiculous. And I couldn't stop reading it and I like printed it out and hid it under my bed [Laughs].
I don't know. And, so I was like, "Well, I want more of this breast enlargement stuff." And I, um... we were playing around in some chat rooms and I think it was alt.sex.stories text repository, um, that was kind of the big gateway drug and, like, the Erotic Mind Control story archive.
And the story that I'm reluctant to tell you about... is the Master PC universe, which is pretty patriarchal and... it's definitely aimed at a male audience to just control women and change their bodies to whatever they want and make them into obedient little sex slaves... It's basically, a stereotypical geek invents a computer program to allow him to change the bodies and minds of women. Like you would enlarge their breasts and ass and narrow their waists and make them taller. But like never tall enough.
But I just was kind of hooked on that idea of, like, "Yeah, give me a remote control so that I can change my own size. Yeah, give me the ability to like hit the arousal button and I go from, like, 'yeah,' to like, 'Oh yeah! I'm turned on. Thank you!'" That was... yeah, that was really helpful but I didn't like that it had, you know, the internalised misogyny and it was definitely non-con but was not tagged as such. So, yeah... but I... I kind of at the same time I was learning how to like self-pleasure myself and figuring out, like, that I could take the size feelings -- all the, like, feeling small or large -- and I could kind of channel that into orgasm, and then like... It's like okay, I'm feeling big or I'm feeling small-- Usually the small is what turns me on the most for some reason, I don't know why... I mean I do know why, but [laughs]... Feeling small and the act of shrinking is giving up power and it's giving up agency. And I find that very sexy to play with. And so... I could-- after the orgasm of that I could kind of sometimes find my way back to normal size feelings... Which was cool, but then that was also a very dangerous combination of taking all of these size feelings which I felt throughout my life and channeling them all into kink and putting them in a little box in my brain that I could stick a lid on and lock and shove into a dark corner. I think was like-- I understand why my brain needed to compartmentalise that... as a survival technique. But also, it cut me off from a lot of things and it... made me, I don't know... It coincided with a lot of shame. I remember there was a website pre-Google called Ask Jeeves and you would type in questions and it would give you answers, and I asked Jeeves--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I know what Ask Jeeves is, I'm not that young!
Elle Largesse
I don't know, like... [Laughs]
So I would ask Jeeves how to get rid of a fetish. Ask Jeeves, "Why am I like this?" Um, you know, like, "How do I retrain my perversion?" And there was just nothing that I could find that was useful and... I don't know... I just like, I kept it secret. None of my friends talked about anything like this, so, like, I definitely wasn't going to bring it up with them. But it just...
I think part of my process of building that Tumblr in 20... late 2015, 2016, was... processing my shame around it and moving from shame to acceptance, and trying to get past the judgmental thing of like, "I am fucked up to feel 100 feet tall. I am fucked up to feel two inches tall and to want people to do these things to me, and to want to do things to people without their consent," and... finding a way to say, "Okay... for whatever reason my body responds to this sexual fantasy. I get to decide what I want to do with that." I could go out there in the world and and do things to real people without their consent, and that would make me a terrible person because I'm doing terrible things.
I choose instead to take those physical responses and to say, "I'm going to write stories. I'm going to find people to role-play with, either in person or online, and I'm going to do that in a way to be like, hey, these are the five things I want to get out of this role play. Are you cool with that?" And they'll be like, "How about these four things?" And I'm like, "OK, I'll take that off the table. We'll do these four things." And now I know they're fully informed, they're consenting, and I'm choosing to explore this dark fantasy in a way that is as safe as I can make it.
And I'm putting content tags on all of my stories so that people online don't stumble into something that they find really disturbing or triggering, and so they can engage with it safely. So I'm trying to do this in a way that's like... as ethical as I can make it, and I feel like there's no harm in that. I'm not harming anyone. I'm embracing a part of myself that would otherwise be dark and shameful and contributing to my mental health problems. I got enough of that already. Thank you. I don't need to add shame on top of it.
But shame is a normal thing. I think at SizeCon... like you're saying your experience here with these interviews, how it kind of helps make us feel less alone, that's what I get out of SizeCon. Especially-- I mean, I've never been to the in-person SizeCon, but SizeCon Micro [FOOTNOTE describing SizeCon Micro]... Seeing people around the world just say, just say out loud, like, "Oh, I want to use a building as a dildo." And it feels so like, "Did I just say that out loud? Oh, my God!" But you see people nodding on the screen and they're like, "Oh, oh, me too. Check out this skyline from this city. Check out that building. Yeah?" And you're just like, "Oh my god. Ha ha! Yeah."
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I don't know, like. Sometimes I feel like-- I used to and kind of still do have like quite a big kind of like... sort of special interest in architecture. And I'm like [Elle laughs] this is kind of a whole new kind of framework, I guess, when I think about that--
Elle Largesse
I love it!
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I don't know how much time I'm going to be able to spend actually exploring SizeCon Micro next weekend because, like--
Elle Largesse
It sounds pretty busy. And happy birthday, by the way.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Thank you. But I still do want to, I still do want to see if I can pop in on a couple of days. And like, I did, I did also submit an artwork to the photo, the funny knowledge, like, hopefully, hopefully gets in because I had a bit of discussion with them [the SizeCon staff] last night, where they were kind of, they weren't sure if it was kind of...
So like, the piece I'd sort of made was a sort of adaptation of a photograph I took of an advert I found sort of on a-- just on a set of billboards on some boarded-up buildings in the West End of London for the fast-fashion brand Missguided, which just featured like a load of models straddling skyscrapers--
Elle Largesse
Nice.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
It's like, very, like, as in like, this is absolutely indistinguishable from a kind of giantess pornography--
Elle Largesse
Basically, yeah.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Indistinguishable to the point at which I will refuse to believe the person who made these did not have a size fetish.
Elle Largesse
I love speculating about that, like, "One of us!"
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Yeah, I kind of use it as a way of like, a lot of... A lot of the sort of stuff I'm writing about, particularly in the endgame, like, involves the connection between sort of hyper-consumerism and hypersexuality and the ways in which kind of giant figures kind of like-- are sort of present in that space and quite prominent in that space in a weird way. Um... so I hope that gets in because I also think like... I say as just such a like... as someone who is like a quote-unquote, like, "professional respectable artist," like, you know, I'd like to say that like, "This is an open call I've gone for and, like, I actually want to get and want to be part of--"
Elle Largesse
Yeah.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
It is just, like, it's not the same thing as like going for some of the other calls I've gone for that have been for like major sort of, like, national or international galleries or things like that. I want to say that this is a respectable place for kind of just... like there doesn't need to be difference between, like, kind of "high art" and, like, the kind of art that kind of, like, fetish communities like the size community create. There doesn't need to be that divide between the two, and what I'm doing is basically bridging that gap, I hope.
Elle Largesse
Thank you. Thank you for doing that.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Like, you know, creating a piece of like piece of art and like a piece of literature that is like... is a piece that is objectively about... the way that non-normative and transgressive and subversive bodies are treated in... and sort of navigate a very kind of... biopolitically-charged world, but also has a lot of space for, like, just sort of explorations of, like, very out there kinks. And, like, features a character who like actively does fantasise about sort of... as I say, warships and nuclear weapons and buildings and mountains as, like, sexual objects and... yeah, I don't like anyone ever... anyone who says that the pornographic cannot be artistic, like, but just--
Elle Largesse
Yeah.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
--on its own. It's just that fantasy is so much... just, like, that opinion does pop up so often within sort of, like, art critique. I won't believe it. I won't have it. I hope this project kind of like does something to kind of just give... like kink spaces and the creatives within them just, like, actual respect, you know. Respect they deserve for the creativity they have.
Elle Largesse
Amen. Yeah, it's... I don't know, there's a lot to be said about, you know, the puritanical basis of American culture and how, like, our really fucked up relationship to sexuality that we enjoy and feels good and sells lots of things, and the weird ways we decide it has to be partitioned from the rest of society, and punished for being this thing, even though we like it.
There was a book, Brené Brown is, you know, pretty... cishet white feminism. But the work that she did on shame, interviewing thousands of people on their experiences of shame, I did think bore a lot of fruit in terms of research and what to do with shame, and how people show resilience in the face of shame.
I read her book, I thought it was just me, but it isn't. Something about, like... But anyway, it was really helpful to me in examining my own shame around like, here I am, I want to be a published author, fantasy author, and go to mainstream fantasy, lit conventions, and talk to my favourite authors and be a novelist. And here I am actually playing the sandbox of erotica and putting all of my energy and word counts into... really kinky things. And yet is this not writing? Is this not a story with a character and a plot line, and, you know... And I mean, like, shame tells you that you're never good enough and and American culture says that you know if you're working to create art that is sexual you're not good enough.
And I think that's it's... Like we're not doing anything bad. We don't have anything to be guilty about. We're you know, we're a lot of us are doing our best to play responsibly and to explore these sides of our... our basic humanity. And I think people look at this like, "Oh well you know you're too afraid to be out and fully open and out of the closet about kink. And so that you're treating it like a dirty little secret." I'm like, "I live in Texas." I don't know if you see in the news about Texas and how they treat gender non-conforming people and, like, queer people--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I mean, this is kind of why, like, as I've started like... [Abigail leans away from the microphone and coughs] I'm sorry, I had to do something absolutely disgusting there.
Elle Largesse
Oh, that's fine.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Yeah, that's why I kind of wanted, like... The bulk of my story is set in Southern California, but I did want to move my character in their early life to, erm, the kind of like West Texas, New Mexico border, because I thought not only... not only was I like... my book opens with, like, a meteor falling on my main character's bedroom. And like, it's done like a very big subversion of the sci-fi trope of that kind of like, sort of -- I don't know -- extraterrestrial object, sort of like--
Elle Largesse
Yeah, yeah--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
--falls on her, and that's what kind of triggers their sort of like, monsterification, if you will. And it's just like, it's not, it's just another thing that happens in her life and it kind of involves discussions of, like... Like, everyone blames that for her sort of being this extremely kind of, like, sort of tall, ambiguously sexed sort of... freak of a human being, but it's not, it's just her just genetics basically.
I sort of moved her there early on in her life because I just thought it's close to-- it's close enough to Roswell. I kind of thought that might be quite fun to play with, just, and really own the sci-fi trope--
Elle Largesse
Yeah, absolutely--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
--but also like just thinking about, again, just how, like, aggressively Republican that part of the country actually is.
Elle Largesse
Actually I will say New Mexico and, like, El Paso--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Like I very specifically set her in a county right on the border that was, like, was effectively Texas. That was like, hard Republican, and sort of like turned hard Republican as soon as the Civil Rights Act was signed into law as well. One of those places.
Elle Largesse
Yeahhh.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
And I could sort of both play with the kind of like Roswell mythos and also, like, incorporate some Good Ol' Texas in there, you know.
Elle Largesse
If you need someone to like help you with Texas-isms, you know -- fixin' to, and y'all, and things like that -- let me know. But yeah, Southern California is a--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I will be looking for patsies to test out sort of first drafts on.
Elle Largesse
Is "patsy" a UK term for a beta reader?
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
No, I mean, people-- Like, a "patsy" is somebody who, like... It's like somebody you're going to set up for like a prank or something basically.
Elle Largesse
Oh, it's like a poor schmuck who will read my story.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
So far this is the second interview I've had to do where I've had to explain the meaning of a word. Like, I've had to--
Elle Largesse
Fine [laughs]--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I did the same with Katharine as well. Like, it was even funnier. I had to explain the meaning of the word "naff" to Katharine-
Elle Largesse
Naff...
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
--whilst I was having-- Like, "naff" kind of means-- It's something that's kind of like a bit knockoff and kitschy, I guess. But I was happy I had to bring this up because we were talking about January 6th. I was describing, like, seeing inside the US Capitol Building and realising that how [Elle laughs]... just kind of like knockoff it looked inside in a weird way. [Elle laughs] It just looks like such a knockoff of, just, like what a kid thinks like Greco-Roman kind of... just, like, ancient mythological building sort of looks like.
It's funny when that happens. But yeah, I feel like that is going to come up. As much as I kind of... I want to play with the idea that like there's just so many layers of these characters so they're like... like... characters like... Like, my character is like this kind of maverick genius who, like, creates this, like, size serum that transforms her into a giantess, but she's also beneath that that is just a fiction that's being created by this like young woman who like does fetish sex work who's just trying to make sense of, like, the plot line she's been put into, but on the-- But that's also a fiction coming from someone who lives in, like, suburban northeast London like thousands of miles away trying to like-- who just like has developed an obsession with like the kind of mythos of, like, 20th-century America in turn from someone who's spent all of a combined two weeks in the US in their life. Um, so...
Elle Largesse
I mean, I know plenty of Americans who are obsessed with the mythos of Britain so...
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Yeah, I mean politically we're not doing great either, like... Because of the fact that this project has been government funded as well. Like, I'm like--
Elle Largesse
Oh my god, I was just so impressed at that! Like I'm cheering you on! Yes!
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I was saying that like [Elle laughs], I want to like, I'm planning on doing a photo shoot as my, like... as my kind of, like, giantess persona character soon.And like, for one of the shots, just like, for no other reason than just, like, for the meme basically [Elle laughs], I'm gonna do-- well, I'm gonna have a shot where I do, like, I'm holding up a sign just saying, "Rishi Sunak paid me £10,000 to make giantess porn," which is also going to be my sign for Trans Pride next year as well. [Elle laughs] It's also particularly relevant because like you guys, we are also going to be heading into an election year next year as well. So like, yeah...
Elle Largesse
I admire your bravery on that. Best of luck.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I mean, I mean, I know. I kind of almost want to become like a figure of hate for the right-wing press at this point--
Elle Largesse
Kind of like if you're if you're a figure of hate for the right wing press, then you're doing it right.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Yeah, basically--
Elle Largesse
You're standing for something. Yeah--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
But like, I don't know-- On that point as well, because I've just noticed we are coming up to five o'clock--
Elle Largesse
Oh, there we go. Yes.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Um... I will say like, as I said in my original email, I do have some stipends from the project--
Elle Largesse
Oh, right.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
--to offer out just your time for today. So like, of course, like, please take advantage of that. If you don't, I have to give that money back to the government and I do not want to give that money back to the Conservative Party. Like, I'd much rather you have it.
Elle Largesse
I promise I'm going to spend it on commissioning size art. So let's put this back into the community.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
And I've been putting this offer to everyone else I've interviewed. And of course, like, Katharine took me up on it. I also want to send some of the printed writing I've already made as well, because I have my own risograph press here, so I can create my own like the zines and chapbooks and things. And I'm also planning to print my own book once it's done as well.
Elle Largesse
Oh my gosh, I have mad respect.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
So like, if you fancy having some actual sort of like physical media from me, feel free to drop like an address or a PO Box or something my way as well. And like, I will make sure if there's anything that I... like whether it's physical, whether it's digital, if there's anything I can think that might be kind of triggering... I don't think there's that much, but I'm also... Like the piece that I kind of referenced in one of the documents I sent you, like as I say, there is some description of-- like, kind of violent descriptions of like how trauma feels, but I can, like... I'm willing to kind of mark those off and just like actually sort of content-warn the very sections that like actually do mention those things if you need to skip them.
Elle Largesse
That's really kind of you and I appreciate it and that sounds amazing. So I'll respond in an email with like a PO box to send that to.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Like an address you feel comfortable with me having basically.
Elle Largesse
Thank you.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
As I say, like, whatever happens, any kind of material that comes of this, I would of course want to run by you first just to make sure I'm not sort of exposing anything that you wouldn't want anyone knowing basically.
Elle Largesse
Thank you.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Because I don't know if I mentioned this in the email; I don't think I did. But... as much as like the interview material, I want to feed the non-fiction side of the book that I'm creating, which will be kind of years in the pipeline; I'm planning on turning it into a PhD project eventually. So it might be a solid, like, three, four years, maybe more before it's actually fully manifest.
But I have been invited to take part in an event at a space called the Wellcome Collection in central London next month, which is a... it's a gallery space, library, research space that's entirely devoted to the body, medicine and public health, basically. And I'm going to be taking part in the event there for kind of like, zine makers and self-publishers to show their work. I do want to sort of turn some elements of these interviews into like little, like, chapbook zines for that event--
Elle Largesse
Oh, cool!
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
--like, share at least some of the stories and experiences I've been able to have just so far in the few interviews I've already had at the beginning of this project. So it's something that I'm going to try and do. And but yeah, if I do, I will share anything that comes from that with you just to make sure I'm not kind of... saying anything that you wouldn't want anyone to know.
Elle Largesse
Thank you and please do. And I forgot to mention that one of the things that I have a small hope -- don't put this on yourself, I don't want to put this on you -- but I have a small hope that if, when your book is published, we can cite it on the goddamn Wikipedia page for Macrophilia because there's somebody guarding that page who refuses to believe that it's a kink for anyone but cis men. They think the kink is all just men who get off to giantesses and that it couldn't possibly involve any other genders, and nobody else would be interested. And we keep trying to update it and this person was like, "We need a citation from a book and that's what Wikipedia says," so we're like, "Who can we get to publish in a book just saying, like, 'Women exist in this kink. Trans people exist in this kink. We get off to it too! I like being a giantess!'" Like so I have a tiny little hope that maybe we can quote you and cite your book.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
That's the aim to just publish something about... I do say that this is, I think is why I want to do this as a PhD. I was having a big discussion about this yesterday with... So I actually hired someone from my old uni to sort of act as a supervisor for the duration of this funding pool. And I was just saying that, like, I feel like it's... I've thought about doing this outside of the institution, that's kind of appealing the freedom I'd get for that. But also if I publish this as someone who hasn't sort of done it as a PhD project, just not having those three letters off of my name. It's just like--
Elle Largesse
Yeah--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
"Oh, this isn't someone who's got a doctorate and is clearly devoted time and genuine resources to do this, and has had the backing of an institution. This is just a dickhead with a BA in Fine Art who's decided to self-publish a book.
Elle Largesse
Right? Oh, my God! Well, um, I have a dream that I would... I literally daydream about surveying, like doing a full research, like, survey of the community to figure out who the fuck is in our community. And I would love to do that, but I don't want to just pop it on, like, SurveyMonkey and like send around a link. I want to work with someone where we've published and like citable, and--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Like, I do know that the SizeCon community did actually do something similar to that. But I don't know-- like, again, it just depends how like... I did also notice you did reference in one of your blog essays, like,a piece of research from a researcher at the Kinsey Institute, like, into kind of--
Elle Largesse
I don't remember doing that. But yeah. [laughs] Good job, past me! But yeah... For a while, I actually tried to look into places where we could like non-profits or places that are already doing research on kink and sexuality, thinking like, is there some lonely grad student who needs an idea for their senior project that could just do some research on the size kink community just to prove that we're here?
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I mean, if I did end up sort of like going into an institution and doing this, that's... I'd basically want to do that. Like I'd want to try and hook up with some people who are like... depends which kind of department it would be, whether they'd be like... I don't know exactly what it would be, if it'd be like necessarily my department anyway, as like someone who's like, who's approached this from a sort of like creative-slash-that-slash-anthropological sort of, like, standpoint, but it's something I've thought about. honestly.
Elle Largesse
If it's something that you end up doing, I will absolutely be the community mouthpiece to like blast it across every part of the community I know, and use my social contacts to be like, "Can you submit this to the gay male community on CoiledFist? Can you submit it over here to this community? Because SizeCon self-selects. It selects for people who are wealthier, who are able to travel to, you know, so SizeCon isn't going to be a good litmus test for the community.
Anyway, sorry.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I feel like I might take you up on that offer at some point in the future. And like, I... yeah, I don't know... I'm getting the same sort of emotion that I have my spoke to Katharine, and that like, I've, I've found like another academic soulmate during this talk.
Elle Largesse
I need introduce you to Taedis. Have you talked to Taedis?
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
No.
Elle Largesse
Oh my gosh! Oh, oh my god! They run the, uh, the Size Kink Library and Museum and, and they're, um, oh, I think they're bigender. Um, and they're one of the elders in the community and so they have so much history. Why did I not think to introduce you to them?
Okay. Ha-ha. I know you need to go--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
And I feel like, I mean, if you have these connections, it might be useful just to like, if you're able to write some, like, intro emails and everything and just copy me in, that might be-- [Redacted for privacy/safeguarding reasons.]
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I mean, do you know anything about the timings of [the 2023 SizeCon Micro Size Ladies’ Social] because I feel that might be just an Interesting thing to pop into if I can pop in on like one or two things--
Elle Largesse
Yes! Hang on we're-- okay, I have this bookmarked for this year and I'm going to look at the... Size Ladies Social with me is going to be Saturday November 11th at 11 p.m. Eastern time, which is... crack of dawn for y'all, right?
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Like, that's like 4am, I think.
Elle Largesse
Just have a nice little social hour at 4am while you're recovering--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I mean, I mean... I feel like, yeah... If I'm somehow working that night, that I could just theoretically just get home at like 1am and just go through the night because I'm not, I'm like...
Elle Largesse
Don't do that to yourself. I mean, maybe you like to be an all-nighter person, but don't do that to yourself if you can't.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
I mean, I feel that that's like close enough that I could, like... because I am often awake until like at least 2am. Like that's just because of the fact that...
Elle Largesse
Because I will be one of the facilitators in that--
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
Still...
Elle Largesse
Because I'll be one of the facilitators in that particular social, I can make sure, like, to ask questions like, "Has anyone done research about size kink?" You know, and then, yeah... [Laughs] But we've gone way over time and feel free to reach out.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
[Inaudible]
Elle Largesse
We're kind of breaking up, but feel free to email me anytime you need anything.
Abigail Jacqueline Jones
It'll be so-- [Inaudible] Okay, thank you anyway for today!
Elle Largesse
Yes, thank you. It's lovely to meet you!