By David Futrelle
In the Braincels subreddit, the main hangout on Reddit for so-called “involuntary celibates,” the regulars are once again bemoaning that “life is over” for guys who are a few inches shorter than the national average.
Naturally, most of those Braincellers who have responded to 86160’s thoughtful analysis of height discrimination not only agree with him; they also think that he is probably understating just how dire it is for short men, suggesting that he could probably raise his estimate of the Height Below Which All Male Life is Basically Impossible to 5’8″ (just one inch shorter than the average height of American men) or even 6′ (3 inches taller than the average).
Ah yes, because no man less than 5’5″ 5’8″ 6′ has ever succeeded at anything, or been respected by anyone, or gotten a kiss from a lady. You may recall how the musical career of the wee fellow who called himself “Prince” was derailed forever because he was only 5’2″ — and good luck finding anyone who thought he was cute, much less sexy.
And you’ve probably never heard of Peter Dinklage (4’5″) or Martin Scorsese (5’3″) or Paul Simon (also 5’3″) or Seth Green (5’4″) or Micheal J. Fox (also 5’4″) or Mel Brooks (also also 5’4″) or Truman Capote (also also also 5’4″). And there couldn’t possibly have been an actual professional basketball player (“Muggsy” Bogues) who was 5’3″, must have hallucinated that.
Looking over the course of history, there have clearly never been any short men with power or prestige or HAWT girlfriends or anything, I mean, obviously you’ve never heard of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (4’11”), Andrew Carnegie (5’2″), Beethoven (5’3″), Voltaire (5’3″), Gandhi (5’4″), Picasso (5’4″). It’s not like Genghis Khan — whose genes live on today in literally millions of men, making him the most genetically successful man in history — was a 5’1′ shorty. OH WAIT.
If I were to raise this arbitrary cutoff to 5’8″ I would have to include such notable male unsucccesses as Martin Luther King, Jr., Bruce Lee, Winston Churchill, Napoleon Boneparte, Rivers Cuomo, Robin Williams, Bono, Tom Cruise,
Thom Yorke, Al Pacino, Roger Daltrey, Daniel Radcliffe, Dustin Hoffman, Bruno Mars, Jack Black, Aziz Ansari, Jason Schwartzman, Jon Stewart, Elton John, Mario Andretti, Henry Winkler, Beck, Manny Pacquiao, Bob Dylan, Alfred Hitchcock, Spike Lee, Mike Myers, Steven Spielberg, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
J. R. R. Tolkien, Ralph Lauren, Alexander the Great, David Sedaris, Jesse Eisenberg, Gael Garcia Bernal, George Lucas, Isaac Newton, Sylvester Stallone, Elijah Wood, Billy Joel (to shamelessly steal names from a couple of lists I found here and here, as I did for the previous paragraphs as well).
I would include some examples of famous men less than 6′ as well except then I would have to list MOST OF THE FAMOUS MEN WHO’VE EVER LIVED.
Yes, dudes, it’s true that short men do face discrimination of various kinds. And yes, there are women who, all else being equal, prefer taller men to shorter men, just as there are some men who prefer women with bit tits to women with small tits. Because some people have preferences about such things.
But all you have to do to rebut the incel folk belief that “short people got no reason to live” (to quote a song intended to point out the absurd nature of all prejudice and not actually to rag on short people at all) is to get off the Braincels subreddit for five minutes and observe the world around you, in which you cal literally see with your own eyes countless short men living happy lives, some of them even with HAWT girlfriends and wives in tow.
I mean, I’ve literally seen HAWT women out there walking hand in hand with short men down the street within feet of my apartment, and I don’t even get out that much. I’VE KNOWN SHORT DUDES WHO ENDED UP DATING WOMEN I WANTED TO DATE GODDAMMIT, WHY AM I EVEN DEFENDING THESE LADY STEALING DUDES IN THE FIRST PLACE, DAMN YOU SHORT DUDES DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL WHY ARE YOU SO GOOD WITH THE LADIES
What was I talking about again?
I guess the moral here is that you can make yourself miserable about anything and maybe, just maybe, this is not a good way to live your life? Maybe a whole movement designed to convince dudes that they should be miserable all the time because of things that they don’t control and that … aren’t actually going to condemn them to lives of misery if they don’t let them … is a really bad idea?
Just a thought, fellas. I mean, seriously. What the hell are you even doing?
Yeah, Davy Jones and Mickey Rooney never had any success with women . . . Neither did Yul Brenner.
Oh lord, if I could list all the short guys I’ve ever loved or had a crush on…well, actually, I could, but the list would come out to longer than the height of the tallest of them. So I won’t. I will say that the list of TALL guys I’ve ever loved or crushed on has been much shorter, though.
Incels, you really need to get out more.
Really.
OP, loser, 5’4: 5’5 is the cutoff for success for guys, it’s not cos my personality is literally repellent to everything I want in life
Commenter 1, loser, 5’5: uhm, actually, 5’6 is the cutoff for success for guys, it’s not cos my personality is literally repellent to everything I want in life
Commenter 2, loser, 5’6: uhm, actually, 5’7 is the cutoff for success for guys, it’s not cos my personality is literally repellent to everything I want in life
Commenter 3, loser, 5’7: uhm, actually…
@Axe:
If I may generalize:
Commenter n, loser, (n+65) in: uhm, actually, n+66 is the cutoff…
I conjecture that this holds for all n in the set of integers.
@Laugher at Bigots
I see your set, and raise you pseudocode
My first thought was of Peter Dinklage. Sexy. Married. Famous. Probably financially decently off, what with Game of Thrones and all that. Very short.
He probably has killer canthal tilt and thicc wrists though, which explains it.
Adding Patrick Stump of Fall Out Boy to the list of famous short dudes-he’s somewhere between 5’4″ and 5’5″, with a voice incredibly disproportionate to his height.
It’s weird about height and social expectations, though. My parents always told me that my first pediatrician expected baby me to top out at five-eleven or six feet. (I am a cis woman, for context, so this would be pretty tall). It was a running family joke, since at my tallest, I was five-six.
What my mother told me recently for the first time, though, was that the pediatrician, and to some extent, my parents, were actually pretty worried about the prospect of my being tall, because tall girls aren’t dainty and feminine, and have fewer men they can date. This was in the early 1970s, too.
“…because tall girls aren’t dainty and feminine, and have fewer men they can date.”
So the Victoria’s Secret Angels are actually paragons of masculinity? /sarc
Peter Dinklage is pretty hot, and GOT does an *excellent* job of capturing his sex appeal.
Speaking of GOT, another famously short uggo loser who would never be able to marry a gorgeous woman whose family owns a castle.
Anyway, who wants to bet all these guys who whine on incel forums about being too short to get a girlfriend are also the same type of guys who expect their girlfriend to be a perpetually 18 year old lingerie model who was a virgin but will act like a porn star only for them? How many of them put “no fat chicks” prominently on their dating site profiles?
“Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to get laid despite being under 5’8″.”
(cue Mission: Impossible theme)
@Podkayne Lives:
X-Men: Days of Future Past!
(baffled look)
The hell?
I used to date a guy shorter than me (I am 5’10” and female, so somewhat tall). I have dated several guys shorter than me, in fact. Some of them had decent personalities, and I went out with them more than once. Others hit the scrap heap shortly after they opened their mouth.
I ended up with a man who is 6’3″, but that’s because he’s a librarian who likes to read constantly, likes cheese, likes medium point pens, and is quite enthusiastic about going to see live theatre every week. It’s not his height, it’s the fact that he’s perfect in so many ways! (I almost got engaged to a short guy, too, 3 inches shorter than me, and I was a head turner back then. He sort of blew it when he started abusing me in an alcoholic rage. Sorry. No go.)
@Podkayne lives:
Actually (I just had look at pics of him to check), he’s got the wrong canthal tilt too according to these morons’ theories! Because their theory says that no woman will want you if your eyes droop downwards a little at their outer corners, and Dinklage’s eyes totally do. So he’s super short with the wrong canthal tilt – but from pics where he’s wearing a t-shirt, it does look like his wrists are pretty thick compared to the rest of his arms. So…. I guess that’s the whole explanation of his popularity! Thick wrists! Although you’d think that in order to outweigh his short stature and negative canthal tilt, his wrists would have to be thick as an elephant’s thighs…
My best friend once complained that her boyfriend was too short (about 5’5″). Then she married and had a kid with him anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Interestingly enough most of the people who give short men shit for being short are….men.
You will never be happy…You will never be respected by society…You will never be loved by a woman…
Lordy, these guys sound like 3 AM Jerk Brain. Why would anyone hang out in this sub?
And how are they planning to rise up and flourish in a postnuclear hellscape when they can’t even cope with being 5’5″?
I recently came across a gentleman opining that if a man’s height started with a 5, they were clearly a manlet, whatever one of those was. I got the impression that his height was literally the only feature he possessed that he perceived as positive.
I’ve been catching up on the TV series Elementary recently and just watched an episode with an enjoyable scene involving a Black Pill incel forum moderator. Spoiler: the writers do not try to be balanced or understanding of incels
I can’t find the clip online I’m afraid, but did anyone else see it?
I’m about 5’6″. I met a former colleague for a coffee a few years ago. She’s about 6’1″. I was on a german racing bicycle size XS. She was riding a largish men’s bike because she has difficulty getting women’s bicycles that are big enough.
As we chained our bikes together outside the café she remarked that somebody would walk by, see these two bikes chained together and conclude that a tall, handsome bloke had gone to the café with his short, sporty girlfriend.
(When were still working together, she used to amuse herself by sneaking up on me from behind when I was getting coffee, leaning over and resting her chin on my head …)
Tall successful women. We can look at GOT again for an example: Gwendoline Christie. Or do I just have a thing about women in armour ?
All good examples, all good points, but this one doesn’t sit well with me. Yes, he was successful. But he did an awful lot or RAPING to be “the most genetically successful man in history”. Kind of inappropriate I think. Not the sort of success that needs to be lauded.
I have a history of preferring shorter men. I’ve liked several guys shorter than me. (5’4” – and we are one of the tallest nations in the world, so there are very few of them around! I am rather short for a woman here, my bf nicknamed me “Tiny” at first until I threw a tiny feminist tantrum about it. Now he calls me Cheeseface.) But I don’t really get attracted to men taller than 6′. Never managed to figure out any rational reason for it, it is not very conscious. Maybe it is bc tall guys’ faces are literally out of my view and due to neck problems I don’t want to look up for extended periods of time 😀
Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson was not only 5’4″ but also was a pale slender wristed manlet. He once chased a polar bear.
I am 2cm taller than 5’5″ ? victory!