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I decided to post this here, as women's revealed preference for men taller than themselves is culture war fodder to an extent.
Do there happen to be statistics about the growth in the average height of male and female elementary and high school students after 1945? Either in the US or anywhere in the West? I’m asking because I think it may be possible that whatever level of average height difference there used to be between young men and women has decreased in the past few decades for whatever reason, which may also contribute to female hypergamy getting increasingly frustrated.
Height is something that everyone has that you can't change. So anything mentioning height will get rage-engagement in the Internet attention economy. Race-bait, gender-bait, height-bait, they can all be taken as personally as a generic "your mom" insult.
It's not that great to be tall; I still spent most of my life painfully alone, with women often being performatively afraid of me.
I've been tall all my life as well. Still waiting for the heaps of women I was promised
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Being taller is one of those things I'd basically take 100% of the time up to probably 6'4-5 or so. It's not a cure-all, but it's like being richer in the sense that it's virtually all upside. That's not to say you can't or don't have other downsides that vastly outweigh it; I wouldn't take being incredibly rich if I were also a paraplegic. Nor would I be made incredibly handsome if I gained agoraphobia as a result.
But if I could get a height boost, a handsomeness boost, or a big pile of money for free I'd take it without reservation.
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How tall are you?
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I'd say it's pretty great but some people seem to think it's like being able to fly, which it's clearly not.
It's a positive attribute in most circumstances buts it's only *one* attribute.
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The average height in the US has fallen over the past several decades due to immigration, but I know of no mechanism by which the gender height gap could be closing except in cases where girls start off more malnourished than boys because of parental favoritism, as they do in a few of the poorest parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
Testosterone in men has been in steep decline for decades. Surely that has an effect.
Testosterone causes the closure of growth plates. So, surprisingly, lower testosterone might lead to taller heights.
Eunuchs in China were notably taller than men who were whole, and it's been known since antiquity that castration results in larger male bodies (Aristotle: "As a general rule, mutilated animals grow to a greater length than the unmutilated").
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Average adult height in US men peaked for those born in the late 70s, but the decline from there to the 1996 birth cohort was less than half a centimeter, and there was a similar decline for women. I suppose it's possible that there was a rapid male-specific decline in cohorts born in the decade after 1996, but it seems unlikely.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-height-by-year-of-birth?country=~USA
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