Q: American presidents are even taller. You wrote that over the last century, the average president has measured in at six foot one. But not all powerful world leaders have been tall. Lenin and Hilter were short. Last week, France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is five foot five, was caught standing on a footstool to appear taller behind a podium. Does it really make a difference?
A: Yes. Even more important than actually being tall is that the general population perceives you as being tall, which is why Sarkozy was on the platform. Politicians are masters at manipulating the image of their height. Campaign managers make sure their candidate is never photographed in the shadow of somebody else. You’ll see foreign dignitaries who go out of their way to be nowhere near Michelle Obama when there are cameras around. It’s just not a powerful image to be photographed under the first lady’s armpit.
Q: Do you consider Michelle Obama a great ambassador for tall women?
A: I am particularly thrilled with her willingness to wear three-inch heels and tower over the most powerful man on earth. That makes me extremely happy and I think it’s a powerful image to send out because before her, there really weren’t any tall female role models. When I was growing up there was a book called Sarah, Plain and Tall—except she’s plain and tall, and not tall and awesome. Let me tell you how non-inspirational it is to be a 13-year-old girl who’s projected to be six three andturn on the TV to find a male comedian playing Janet Reno, our former attorney general, who is six foot two.
Q: It would seem that tall men have it made.
A: That’s a huge misperception. I think many tall men are extremely self-conscious because to be tall is to be public and to walk around with a spotlight on you at all times and that’s a great boon if you’re a natural performer and the sort of guy who really enjoys attention, but a majority of personalities don’t enjoy it. Also, tall men have a harder time fitting. It is frankly alienating to not fit into basic furniture and clothing.
Q: But the dating world is much more treacherous for tall women, isn’t it?
A: Yes, our culture tends to confuse femininity with size and that is very, very tricky for tall women to navigate. If you grow up surrounded by the image that being feminine means being petite in relation to a man, it’s a little rough if you’re taller than 96 per cent of men, as I am.
Q: In your book, you say that junior high school dances were the worst.
A: Dances are created to highlight every single aspect of tall difference all at once. Boys won’t ask tall girls to dance.
Q: But the inverse is also true. Isn’t it just as tough for short boys growing up?
A: It’s true. There’s a kinship there between tall women and short men. They both understand what it’s like.
Q: You personally don’t “date down,” as you call it. Why not?
A: It sounds horrible to say, but it’s very true. Frequently when I walk into a room, particularly at a social event, I don’t even see men who are shorter than me. One of the things I’ve really worked on since writing this book is looking down from time to time because I realize that tall women have low birth rates. They have 0.7 children on average in their lifetime where average-height women have 1.4 children. The reason is very tall women want to date within their own tribe. They want to date up. For me, that really limits my dating pool. We’re talking 3.9 per cent of the male population. And when you add in all of my other ridiculous qualifications for any man I date, we’re talking about a minuscule percentage of the population and if I stick to that, I’m going to end up single.
Q: Is it true that you hate it when tall men date short women?
A: It drives me nuts. Honestly. It really does. It’s a personal hitch of mine. But it’s representative of the fact that tall men are the most successful dating population on earth. Most heterosexual people date somebodywho’s about an eight per cent height difference from them, which is about five inches. Tall men are really the only ones who don’t do this. Tall men date whoever the hell they want. They date, on average, someone who is eight inches apart from them. So when you look at the statistics, what you end up with again is tall women who don’t have partners.
Q: But are there not plenty of men who have a particular attraction to tall women?
A: My inbox is right now full of emails from men who fetishize tall women. Tall fetishes are about power dynamics—a man who wants to be enveloped by a woman if not dominated. Since the Second World War, there’ve been connotations in popular culture between tall women and dominatrixes and sexual aggression. Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. It’s something tall women navigate silently. I really would have appreciated knowing this before the time that I went on a date and he requested that I stand on a stepstool and that we make out. I didn’t get it.
Q: What’s the most extreme tall experience you’ve ever had?
A: When I was working in Cambodia as a journalist, I was the tallest person that anyone there had ever seen. I was taller than any man. I was taller than what they remembered of American GIs from the Vietnam War. I needed to get an emergency appendectomy in Thailand. They removed my appendix and took a MRI and came in and told me that my pancreas had a tumour on it. They showed me a picture of my pancreas and showed me where it was supposed to end and it extended five inches past that. It turned out that radiologists have a list on the wall of the range of organ sizes and that mine was more than double the typical Thai person and it was all just a funny misunderstanding. I spent a week in a Thai hospital thinking I was going to die of pancreatic cancer. Then the doctor tells me, “No dear, you are just tall.”
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