Being short
When I was in seventh grade, I was one of the tallest kids in my class.
The other kids kept growing. I didn’t.
So, for most of my life, I’ve been viewed by others as “short.” Not painfully short. Just short. And that’s been fine with me because I’ve always viewed myself as perfectly normal, confident in my own (short-sized) skin. At the same time, I can’t deny my short stature, with all of its attendant pros and cons.
Another writer, Mara Altman, recently put forth her own ideas on being short. In an opinion piece in The New York Times, Altman declared that “there has never been a better time to be short.”
Why did she decide to take up this particular cause? Altman tries to make being short seem to be somehow better by dredging up a list of positives as support for her claim. Quoting famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who was himself 6’8” and once said that our culture’s “favoring the tall” is “one of the most blatant…prejudices in our society,” she attempts to knock down that prejudice.
As someone who’s about the same height as Altman, I like her list of benefits. For example, I like her claim that short people live longer and have fewer incidences of cancer. Great news, if true. I’ve lived my life feeling pretty happy about being short, and anything that bolsters my general feeling of well-being is welcome. But I question some of her sunny conclusions.
First, Altman contends that being short benefits the environment. She cites Thomas Samaras (she refers to him as the Godfather of Shrink Think), who has calculated that if Americans were just 10 percent shorter, we would save 87 million tons of food every year, as well as trillions of gallons of water and millions of tons of trash. But where are the calculations that support these conclusions?
Altman also cites, Yuval Noah Harari, the author of “Sapiens,” who studied a population of early humans living on a small island. When the island was cut off by rising sea levels, “Big people, who need a lot of food, died first,” Harari wrote. But does this story of an isolated group of early humans really inform us in twenty-first-century America? For a more recent and more apt example, why don’t we look at Holocaust survivors? I haven’t researched this topic, but it seems to me that those who survived horrendous treatment in the Nazi concentration camps covered a wide range of body types. Everyone in the camps was desperate for food, disease stalked the camps, and survival depended on a number of things in the survivors’ lives. I have to question whether the “big people” died first.
Another bit of questionable evidence cited by Altman: The findings of a Dutch researcher, Nancy Blaker, who has studied “social status” and concluded that short men (not clearly defined), “counter to prevailing attitudes,” may “compensate” for being short by “developing positive attributes.” According to Blaker, short men aren’t necessarily “aggressive and mean” but “behave in smart strategic ways…that can also mean being prosocial.” Huh? Let’s be honest here. I’ve known a great many short (as opposed to tall) men during my lifetime, and I would never presume to generalize about them. Each man, like each woman, is an individual, subject to his gene pool and to a number of influences that began in their early childhoods. Each man, short or tall or medium-height, is the result of whatever has made him the way he is. Whoever said they were “aggressive and mean” in the first place? Ludicrous. All of them now behave “in smart strategic ways”? Some, maybe, but all?
I share Altman’s concern that some parents foolishly seek out expensive human growth treatment in an attempt to produce a child who’s bigger than nature intended. A Philadelphia endocrinologist, Dr. Adda Grinberg, worries that parents think height is the key to success and belonging. Grinberg disagrees with these parents. “There are some short people who thrive and do phenomenally well and lead fantastic lives, and there are some tall people who are miserable. It’s not the height that determines the outcome.” Well said. Truly caring parents should think twice before subjecting their children to an uncertain and possibly harmful treatment, hoping their kids will turn out taller. Altman confesses that her parents, concerned that she would be short, subjected her to those “excruciating” treatments for three and a half years. And those treatments apparently didn’t make much of a difference. She still turned out to be “five-feet-even” short.
I’d love to believe Altman’s claims that short people live longer and have fewer incidences of cancer. I sadly don’t find any citations of evidence for those claims. I similarly like her focus on environmental benefits, but her support there is also sketchy. If anyone can offer valid numbers to attach to these claims, I’m all ears.
By the way, I’d add one advantage Altman’s omitted: Being a passenger on an airplane. No matter where I sit on a plane, I always have plenty of legroom because my legs simply don’t require a lot of room. Taller passengers often look resentful.
But things may not the same on other forms of transit. When I would take a commuter train from home to downtown Chicago, I’d usually seek out the window seat on a two-seater bench. Time after time, a large overweight man would squeeze into my bench, leaving me little space to enjoy my chosen spot. Whenever I later told my darling husband about it, he wisely responded, “Of course! Those guys want to sit next to you because you’re so small.” He explained the obvious: These men were exploiting my small size by occupying the lion’s share of my bench.
So, being a short person hasn’t always been totally positive. I have a perennial problem reaching high shelves and racks in stores. Since the pandemic has cut my time in stores to a minimum, that problem has abated. But I still have kitchen cabinets and closets with high shelves requiring a stool to reach items perched there. But seriously, are those enormous obstacles to happiness? I don’t think so.
Overall, being short hasn’t been a big problem for me. As a child, I always felt perfectly normal. Both of my parents and my sister were also short, and I was never made to think that it was better to be tall. I’ve rarely felt excluded, because of my height, from any activity or pursuit I chose to follow, including attending law school at a time when women were generally discouraged from doing so. And I had a whole universe of men, from the shortest to the tallest, who were OK with dating me, while taller women may have attracted a somewhat smaller cohort.
Still, I’m not sorry that my delightful daughters have turned out to be about five or six inches taller than I am, reaching a height somewhere between mine and that of their much taller father. They light up my life in every way. But to be specific, they’re happy to grab items for me from those pesky high shelves.
I’m OK with being short, and I don’t feel a need to defend it. Nature intends us to be short or tall or in-between. Why should I pick a fight with Mother Nature?
susanjustwrites
Susan Just Writes 