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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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As with many things in life, men have the burden of performance, including Doing the Bare Minimum of being tall and not being short.

Calling 5'2" Harris "Little Kamala" would just be perceived by normies as somewhere between a weird non-sequitur and just plain mean-spirited, even for what they view as Trump's standards. After all, Hillary is/was only three inches taller than Kamala and it wasn't an issue at all. In contrast, calling 5'9" Marco Rubio "Little Marco" on stage basically ended Rubio's Presidential campaign. There was tremendous compass unity in laughing at "Little Marco" getting pwned.

Despite the average Burgerland heights of women and men being 5'5" and 5'10", respectively, a 5'2" woman is just a woman. At worst called "petite," which can even be a positive. Most women like feeling smol, even if they don't like openly admitting it. A 5'9" man may very well find himself in manlet territory and mocked accordingly.

From recollection, studies on the height premium in the workplace (e.g., compensation, CEOs, or CEOs and compensation) tend to show a materially... higher... height premium for men than women. One way academics have tried to cope with this is to claim that African Americans are More Affected:

There’s also a gendered component. Research conducted by Inas R Kelly, professor of economics at Loyola Marymount University, California, revealed marked differences in the effect of height on mean income by gender. “White men face a much larger premium for each additional 10cm than white women,” she says, and that gap is even more pronounced for African Americans.

Or that, secondly, if there's less of a height premium for women, it's because male insecurities and female internalized misogyny punish tall women:

This links into the idea that women can be too tall, and that tall women face discrimination in a way tall men don't. According to a study of tall female college students, their above-average height resulted in ‘unintended intimidation’. “If there’s a woman towering over others, they might view her as a threat … As a woman, if you show dominance, it’s considered aggression. It could be problematic,” says Pritchard.

Men Judged Harshly for Their Height (or Lack Thereof): Women, Minorities Hardest Hit.

and it wasn't an issue at all.

Except the whole losing thing

In my Emotional Truth, Hillary won in 2016, Federer won in 2019, and it was The Berenstein Bears the whole time *crosses arms and turns away*.

The question is, would she had been better off being a 5’10” man in the 2016 campaign? It’s a definite no for me, especially since she could had then easily gotten dabbed upon with a “Little Hillary” like Marco did. It’d be even for worse for Kamala to be a 5’7” man.