"Consider the child," Hanson says, as if the Little Man is some sort of parable. "When his mother's angry, she's powerful. The child feels safe. So he grows up fixated on a moment in his childhood where he was anxious or afraid, staring up at the tower of Mommy. It's not uncommon for men to fantasize about being small. There's even a magazine, Giantess, for that population of readers."

It didn't surprise Hanson to learn how the Nebraskan's fetish started: how, at the age of 4, he earned the kind attentions of a neighbor lady after she accidentally pierced his hand with her heel, and how he was discovered a week later hiding under a table, trying to get his hand under her foot again. Hanson wasn't even alarmed when the hapless Nebraskan offered his life to her ("who would know," he said, "and who would care?") so that his flesh could be fashioned into shoes or a rug. She finds it all quite endearing.

So she walks the narrow road. Any variation on a fetish, a single added or missing detail, shatters readers' fantasies. If a nylon seam is crooked, Hanson receives irate letters from any number of impassioned readers: her man at the State Department, maybe. A roofer in Toronto. Leg Show men cross all boundaries. "I've made this magazine successful by listening to guys," she says. "I probe them for the subtleties of their lust, and often translate their ideas directly into layouts."

But fetishists, even with their ultraprecise tastes, are not without common ground. Hanson has a complex sexual theory that draws them all together: a mental Gesamtkunstwerk of perversity. To Hanson, sexuality in our culture is all about protrusion. "Women are concerned about their buttocks and their breasts," she says. "They never worry about their vaginas." Sex and porn are a simple function of flesh that sticks out, and the curve of the flesh, and the motion of the curve.

The fact that women don't generally fetishize, in Hanson's view, results from the culture's more intense scrutiny of males: "Fetishes begin when a boy is attracted to something shiny or soft, something that feels like skin. It might be the satin edge of a blanket or something silky, but it's perceived by adults to be feminine. So he's directed away from it, often sternly -- which fixates the boy on the object. His sexuality doesn't go away; it gets twisted. The realm of fetishism proves that, as a society, we're continuing to maim our children psychosexually."

"The moment a fetish starts," she adds, forever veering into new avenues of her Theory, "is usually the moment of anxiety and stimulation when the boy is made to feel that if he expresses sexuality -- if he breaks the rules -- love will be withheld from him. That's what I'd never have believed 23 years ago. Fetish pornography is all about the search for love."

In the odd metaphysics of Dian Hanson, that is possibly the oddest tenet: Everything she writes, every overripe metaphor and sordid Leg Show fantasy, is an expression of love. Sure, smut is easy to mistake for filth -- as a thuggish con, good for a quick buck. But Hanson insists that money is not what draws her to the trade. "The old Leg Show, before I joined the staff, was failing because it was contemptuous of its readers," she says equably. "What we do now, and what men enjoy, is love in the guise of contempt.

"My magazine is a seduction, an ongoing love affair," she insists. "That's the sad thing about the Internet. Smut online isn't glossy. You can't hold it in your hand or keep track of your favorite models. The Internet is a one-night stand. So if online porn replaces magazine porn, we may all find ourselves living in a more loveless world."

When Dian Hanson found Krafft-Ebing at 14, the lines of her life were drawn for good. She'd been raised, she says, by "right-wing eccentrics." Her father is the head of a Christian-mystic cult. He taught his five children to be vegetarians, occasionally driving the whole clan to his office for a colonic -- just to attain that extra measure of inner godliness. The religion was so secretive that Hanson's parents never even tried to include their own kids. "They probably thought we weren't worthy," Hanson says, nearly giggling. "My father was presented to us as a holy man: not only as a godlike father but as a fatherlike god. Imagine. Instead of threats, there was always a lot of karma bandied about: 'Do you want to be reincarnated as a leper in India?' "

The girl Hanson was a pariah in school -- so tormented by her classmates that she half wonders why she didn't come in one day brandishing a weapon. A photo from the time shows what her classmates scorned: She is 11, wearing a ratty straw hat and looking gangly. Crouching in the snow, she appears perplexed. Her feet are turned inward. One boat-size hand is feeling the ground, as if this were her first moment on earth. Hanson keeps this picture in her office, right between a photo of a man fucking a shoe and a (doctored) picture of Chelsea Clinton in the buff.

Hanson's schoolmates reserved their most exquisite derision for her height. In kindergarten, she was actually taller than the teacher, and she hit five feet ten by the sixth grade. She grew so fast that her frame outpaced her heart-lung complex. At one point, her arm span exceeded her vertical height. Doctors feared gigantism.

As a nongiant adult, Hanson has never wavered in her rebellion. Despite her vegetarian childhood, she's spectacularly carnivorous, and a good drinker. But she could never be mistaken for a pariah these days. There are many thousands of readers who hang on her every word, write paeans to "the Goddess Dian," and have even started up a club and a newsletter devoted to her.

She has also managed, quite by accident, to become a minor celebrity among media types: "It's very common, when I'm at a book party with Geoff Nicholson, to have a publisher sidle up to me and whisper, 'I just love Juggs!' " New York and L.A. are sprinkled with writers and artists who have, at some point, sought out a connection with Hanson. One of the few men who openly admit this, the German publisher Benedikt Taschen, says he wants to compile "a cool book of her writings." (There's even a Leg Show poster prominently displayed in the strip-club set of The Sopranos.)

Beyond that, Hanson has had long-term relationships with artist Joe Coleman and, more famously, the cartoonist Robert Crumb. It's probably no coincidence, one way or another, that Crumb's images echo Hanson's own muscular vision of female power. At dinner on the night they met, Crumb was asked how he'd like to get home and replied that he wanted to ride on Dian's back. Tourists in the Russian Tea Room snapped photos as he leaped aboard the woman and rode her off the premises. "Oh, her legs were even more powerful back then," Crumb wistfully recalls. "She could go for blocks and blocks!

"It's devastating how well Dian understands male sexuality," adds Crumb, who now lives in the south of France. "She caters to perversions with an expertise that's scary. She's like an Albert Schweitzer to pathetic foot-suckers, and she's pretty good-hearted about it."