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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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False symmetry. Height is a masculine trait, and its absence is a feminine trait. The counterpart to short men isn't short women, it's tall women - short men and tall women are both wrongly-heighted. The counterpart to short women isn't short men, it's tall men - short women and tall men are both superbly-heighted.

The point I was making is that women can be afflicted with a particular trait which presents no obstacle to their socially flourishing (autism, being short) but the same trait can often be ruinous if a man is afflicted with it. Maybe tall women have a rough time of it, who knows - the parts of the internet I frequent seem to actively fetishise them in an only half-joking way, many unusually tall models and other female celebrities are widely considered sex symbols (e.g. Taylor Swift, Claudia Schiffer, Famke Janssen, Elle MacPherson, Brooke Shields, Sigourney Weaver, Uma Thurman, Nicole Kidman, Gisele Bündchen, Rebecca Romijn), and I'm not aware of any equivalent to complimentary adjectives like "Amazonian" or "statuesque" for short men.

Do women mock other women for being tall? That could be the source of any reported rough time.

I've heard tall women essentially complain that it narrows their dating options. It's a reasonable desire for her partner to be taller than her. Luckily, most men are taller than most women. Short men can date slightly short-er women.

A 5'2" woman expecting any partner she has to be 6'6" is an unreasonable desire. She's allowed to have that preference, but her having difficulty finding a partner isn't some grand injustice, it's self-inflicted.

I'm not aware of any equivalent to complimentary adjectives like "Amazonian" or "statuesque" for short men.

I believe they've started calling them "short kings," but I'm not convinced it's complimentary.

Oh, to be clear, I didn't mean to imply that tall women are precisely equivalent to short men, or that tall men are precisely equivalent to short women - different sexes are different. It's just closer than the other way around.