if i had a penny...

for every time someone told me (implausibly, yes), "you could be a model" ...

people have a funny relationship to height, especially on women, and it's natural that as a result we have a funny relationship to ourselves. shmuli wonders aloud about it. what follows is not a specific response to his specific wonderings, hence its being here, not there, but i had the following to say about the articles he sends us to:

the suggestion that different social patterns for tall and short women has to do with hormones is not immediately plausible to me. the easier explanation, i believe, is social:

taller women, especially if they are tall their whole life, are treated differently than average height women.

a - they are generally better at sports by virtue of their height, but less good at looking cute in an age-appropriate way (it's hard to dress like a cute third grade girl when you can't buy children's clothes or shoes anymore due to your size), which is a lot of how traditional feminine values start getting instilled, i think - people see cute little girls and treat them all girly.

b- in general, strangers tend to expect tall children of both genders to behave and think as maturely as their heights suggest, and this carries over well past the time when height stops being an actual indicator of age. (most girls stop growing in early high school, yet i would consistently hear that i looked older "because you're tall" until i was almost 20.) this expectation of intellectual maturity may carry over into ambitions in non-maternal directions.

c- tall men, i believe, tend to be more "successful" than their shorter, though equivalently qualified, counterparts, at least by some meaures. (i'm actually not sure if this is statistically ot only anecdotally supported.) i see no reason to assume that the same would not be true of tall women - the theory seems to be that people respond to stature by giving it authority/power, at least sometimes. if tall women have more options in terms of non-maternal success than shorter women, maybe that explains their relative "ambitiousness."

one way to compare the hormone vs. social hypotheses might be (depending on what the hormones invovled actually do) to compare women who are tall from childbirth (more likely to experience -a- and -b-) vs. women who are tall b/c they keep growing longer than their peers (have a non-average puberty experience, more likely to be linked to hormones?).

another support for the socialization side is that i like chocolate as much as any woman ;)