#height preferences

[alwaysbewoke]

wow but this is not news. we know how women are. this is why i smile whenever i see a short guy with their woman because i know it's not easy for them and i'm happy to see the ones who found someone special.

[liskantope]

Here is another way of explaining the spirit of the frustration I've been trying to express recently.

Early in high school, I was in a jazz band class. The below quote was taped to the wall of the band room; I specifically remember one time the band director had someone read it out loud to the whole class but I also remember just seeing it every day on the wall for a year or so. Remarkably, Google almost completely refused to produce this quote for me, but I finally found a version of it sloppily tucked into a high school band syllabus posted online apparently a lot of years ago and attributed to no one (I guess it's a sort of "folk quotation", perhaps more popular 20 years ago than now?). After a little cleaning up, it reads as follows:

Because you can understand that a person can’t play well, or forget their reed, or doesn’t feel well, or overslept, or didn’t have a chance to practice, or has sticky valves, or lost their music, or couldn’t get a ride, or is having a bad week, pretty soon you have a whole lot of understanding and a terrible band.

I remember being very annoyed at that quote when I was 14, a period of my (and most people's) life in which authority figures endlessly seemed to be lecturing us kids / "young men and women" along these lines. And I can't really recommend it as necessarily a very effective form of preaching at children or young teenagers. But obviously enough essence of that particular quote stuck with me persistently enough that I was able to remember enough approximate phrases to google it tonight, two decades later. And increasingly over the past year or so, it's kept coming back and back into my mind because of a certain harsh truth it reflects.

The main utility of acknowledging one's own disadvantages or disorders/conditions or less-than-ideal circumstances in assessing one's failures is to prevent one from being hard on oneself in a way that is on the net unhelpful and destructive, and to help with setting realistic instead of unreachable goals, etc. There are other advantages as well that I think of as sort of "second-order" (for instance, being able to name one's disability can be extremely helpful in figuring out how best to deal with and get around it). But all of that is true, while at the same time something else is true: being understanding of your own challenges in the end amounts to nothing more than a whole lot of understanding and you still don't get to your goals.

In my case, I see a place in life that I desperately want to reach which involves a permanent professional position that I can do well in and actually feel efficient enough at that I can balance it with owning a home, being a good partner and family member, and possibly being a parent, a relationship for life, preferably with someone wanting and able to have children with me, and being able to feel like a truly cemented part of some meatspace community. It may be privileged of me just to be able to wish for these things, and I have to acknowledge that I do already have many of the most sought-after things in life (e.g. better-than-basic health and financial stability), but it doesn't seem unreasonably entitled of me to want the rest.

I could spend all day dissecting the conditions and circumstances which have played a role in making it hard for me to attain these things that I want: obvious neurological issues that affect both my social and work performance, a career lifestyle that involves relocating every few years and going through a particularly strenuous job application process even more frequently, the backdrop of a turbulent job market through much of my adulthood, moderate-to-severe acne from teenagerhood all the way through my early 30's, hell, even my lower-than-average height, etc. And to a certain extent I've needed to be able to step back and acknowledge these things and view my shortcomings in that context. But I'm in a state of fierce rebellion against the temptation to sink into all that understanding because the moment I do, it feels like I'm going to fall into an abundance of understanding and I won't be one inch closer to the place that I so badly want to be in. At the end of the day I can't allow myself to lose sight of the fact that I want to get the actual concrete things I want, goddammit. I feel like if I take my eyes off that, I ultimately lose and that a ton of sympathy for myself is a crappy consolation prize. And I react badly to a certain type of online culture because it seems designed to lead me (and others) astray from keeping my eyes on that hard and unbending truth.

Like with most things, this is about finding the right balance of perspectives and partial narratives. I would be writing a very different kind of rant if Tumblr and my social bubbles seemed deeply immersed in another set of cultural values, the ones that were dominant until very recently and still are dominant in more traditional parts of society today. But as it is, my deep fear is that a massive social movement is relentlessly creating a whole lot of understanding and a terrible band.

[smashing-yng-man]

Being "only" 5'9" has never stopped me from achieving anything, lol. Besides, when has being 6'+ ever actually reciprocated a personality? 🤔

[liskantope]

It’s pretty widespread knowledge that women tend to like tall men, but in my experience of scrolling through hundreds of women’s dating profiles it’s a bit incredible to me just how strong and pervasive this preference is.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen this preference expressed by a woman who herself is short. Apparently, a major component of androphilia for many, many straight women is to be able to look up at his face, or at least not to have to look down at him, I guess? And a lot of these women seem pretty insistent not only that they shouldn’t have to look down to meet their guy’s eye but that he be noticeably taller, not just “at least my height”, or in some cases that he be taller than the average male height. A few months back I binged a bunch of bad-date-story videos of a particular female YouTuber (it started because I was browsing reviews of Hinge on YouTube but I quickly became fascinated with how foreign I found her subculture/experiences and how overtly oblivious she was to her privileges) who refuses to date a guy less than 6′ although she’s only 5′7′‘ because she doesn’t want to risk that she might have to look down on him should she be wearing high heels when out with him.

It’s interesting to me that so many women (who typically seem decently non-superficial) feel fine with putting things on their profiles like “If you’re under 5′10′‘ swipe left please”. I get that it doesn’t really seem offensive in our current culture, unlike, say, specifying preferred body types (I don’t see women ever doing this, and I would be surprised if more than the occasional man does this). But I almost wonder why it isn’t. For a long time I’ve thought it odd that out of literally thousands of dating profiles I’ve seen, I don’t think a single one has said anything like “No bald guys please”. And that should be no more offensive than demanding no short guys (if anything, men might have slightly more control over the thickness of their hair than they do with their height). I’ve even seen a couple of profiles that specify a preference for penis size, but never anything about baldness. Maybe this has something to do with the relatively young age that’s still in my online dating pool, but it’s getting to be not that young anymore. Overall it still suggests that women on average care a whole lot more about not having to look down on a man than about how full his head of hair is.

Maybe the reason I’m so taken aback at this is that there doesn’t seem to be any kind of height preference prevalent among men who are attracted to women. If I think about it, I suppose all other things equal I’d rather date a shorter woman than a taller one, but I think a lot of that is insecurity arising from my being a shorter-than-average man and my awareness of how strongly women prefer not to be the taller one. With that out of the equation, I guess I do like the feeling of being able to cradle a partner’s head below mine, but otherwise I really have no preference about height at all? And I’ve been privy to plenty of guy locker-room-type talk over my years as an adult who’s hung out with lots of straight guys, and I can’t remember ever even once hearing anyone express a height preference about women. And the only expression of appreciation for women of a particular height that in media that I can recall right now is in the alternate ending to Breaking Bad where Walt-woken-up-as-Hal describes Skyler as a “tall, beautiful blonde” and Lois says, “Keep dreaming, pal.”

[crowslunasidhe]

Okay, so I just want to get this out there. If I'm going to date someone they CAN'T be shorter than me. I will feel so bad about being taller than them. I had a crush on someone shorter than me and I knew that they were insecure about their height. So rule is. For women cis and trans, same height or taller. Trans men, same height or taller. Non binary people, same height or taller. Cis men however, just got to be taller. No exceptions. These are my height preferences.