At The Atlantic, Philip Cohen finds a difference between the height gap between randomly selected men and women and the height gap between heterosexual couples:
But the safer bet is just to match up according to the height norm. A new study from Britain—which I learned of from the blogger Neuroskeptic—measured the height of the parents of about 19,000 babies born in 2000. They found that the woman was taller in 4.1 percent of cases. Then they compared the couples in the data to the pattern found if you scrambled up those same men and women and matched them together at random. In that random set, the woman was taller in 6.5 percent of cases. That means couples are more often man-taller, woman-shorter than would be expected by chance. Is that a big difference? I can explain.
Cohen continues and conducts his own similar analysis:
Now we can see that from same-height up to “man 7 to 8 inches taller”, there are more couples than we would expect by chance. And below same-height—where the wife is taller—we see fewer in the population than we would expect by chance. (There also are relatively few couples at the man-much-taller end of the spectrum—at 9 inches or greater—where the difference apparently becomes awkward, a pattern also seen in the British study.)
Via The Atlantic, Philip Cohen
To put numbers on it, in his random sample, 7.8% of pairings had a wife that was taller than the husband. In the actual sample, reverse dimorphism existed for only 3.8% of couples. So we see that the size of the gap in the US and in Britain are very close and in the same direction.
At Jezebel, Tracy Moore accepts all of this but casts the implications aside as both “no big deal, why does anybody care anyway?” and with a nod to social constructionism. The former is a self-defense mechanism in case her latter theory doesn’t pan out:
Individually, this can be chalked up to taste, but on the whole, it can be chalked up to cultural constructs. Why does having a dude be six inches taller feel so romantically right? Why are we still hung up on six inches of height difference? Are men more hung up on it, or women?
Either way, it’s because we’re still hung up on old notions of femininity and masculinity, and what they mean. In other words, men are bigger and stronger, and women are smaller and more petite, and we’d prefer our romantic relationships reflect that.
Cohen seems to buy the social construction argument as well:
What difference does it make? When people—and here I’m thinking especially of children—see men and women together, they form impressions about their relative sizes and abilities. Because people’s current matching process cuts in half the number of woman-taller pairings, our thinking is skewed that much more toward assuming men are bigger.
The animal kingdom and, more precisely, primates would seem to hold the key to this argument. Feminists and sociologists ignore that possibility because even though evolution is a real thing and you’re stupid if you don’t believe it, somehow the preferences and choices of other animals can’t tell us anything about ourselves.
Are the actual body mass differentials – a better comparison for animals than for humans since our bipedalism emphasizes the height differential over other dimorphic expressions – between male and female chimp or gorilla or bonobo pairings larger than we’d expect by random chance? If so then there is a mechanism, a force, compounding on the existing mass gap. And that force would be something different than what feminists and sociologists call social or cultural construction. This all gets back to the alpha/beta dichotomy and the dreaded evolutionary psychology. Other human societies probably also exhibit this skew towards a preference for an extreme height gap.
I’ve looked for analyses similar to Cohen’s used for non-human primates or other animals but didn’t come across any. If anyone has knowledge on this subject or relevant links, please share.
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I have a question:
What about where a woman is fatter/heavier than her man? There’s a lot of those couples in the USA right now. I’m not talking an obese woman (aka a land whale or a beast). Just a cute chubby woman with a slim man. LOL
it’s because we’re still hung up on old notions of femininity and masculinity, and what they mean.
Oh yawn. Yes, everything that people believed about men and women for thousands of years is casually tossed out the window and relegated to “old notions” of gender. Everything normal must be made suspect, everything decent made somehow unclean (you know, “under the surface” — it’s there even if you can’t see it!), everything healthy made into an excuse for some malcontent’s disaffection.
A couple of questions:
1. I’ve noticed you’ll see black guys with taller white women moreso than shorter white women, irrespective of weight. Does the likelihood of interracial dating change with height difference?
2. I’m thinking you’re more likely to see evenly matched (looks, status, income) couples at the heart of the distribution, and unevenly matched ones at the extremes.
3. how does the height difference change if you focus on age of female at marriage? I’d assume if an older female accepts a suboptimal partner, that his height is also likely mismatched.
Chuck quotes Moore: Individually, this can be chalked up to taste, but on the whole, it can be chalked up to cultural constructs.
This sentence doesn’t make any sense to me. It implies the status of the whole is something other than the sum of the individuals’ choices, which is impossible.
“Everything normal must be made suspect….. “
Hey! That’s merely the business imperative driving the field of ‘academia,’ and surely you’re not anti-business, right?
Sorry, Man, You’re Too Short (Am I A Bad Feminist?)
http://msmagazine.com/blog/2010/05/27/sorry-man-youre-too-short-am-i-a-bad-feminist/
The idea that this is “socially constructed” is a rediculous cop-out… most social constructs have biological bases.
Just a cute chubby woman with a slim man. LOL
Nikcrit likes ‘em big.
:-O
If the taste of a (female, anyway) individual that you personally know is OK, but the collective taste of a bunch of individuals you don’t know is labeled a social construct and thus must be deconstructed, you’ve got integrity problems. Paging the hamster, cleanip on aisle three…
The influx of border-jumpers to the US will surely close this gap over time by spreading their short people genes. Although this is just my personal observation, I’ve noticed that the Indios of Latin America seem to have much less difference in height between male and female – both sexes are short and squat, without much muscle or length of limb. From what I can tell, it’s also exceedingly rare to see an outlying tall Mexican (above 6 feet).
“The influx of border-jumpers to the US will surely close this gap over time by spreading their short people genes.”
Not true, according to recent reports; I’ve seen the info from the below link echoed on various cable-news reports as well.
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2012/04/12/america-is-losing-as-many-illegal-immigrants-as-its-gaining/
(@Chuck: btw, IMHO, the above link would make for a fairly intriguing future post).
“Nikcrit likes ‘em big. “
fyi: my girl is 5’6″ and about 135 —— and I’d love it if she went up to 150! lol!
Cam, you still going after your dream girl Julie? Maybe she’s dropped Russell Simmons and is finally available to pursue? lol!
Apparently there’s a relationship in the animal kingdom between the average weight disparity between male and female, and the average harem size. (I believe this excludes unmated males, otherwise the average harem size would equal the sex ratio.) The expected human harem size is 1.1. I can’t remember where I read this; good luck tracking it down.
From what I’ve seen around me, chubbier women prefer more substantial men, at least in part out of vanity – a chubby woman with a beanpole looks *even fatter*.
When is a underqualified lib pundit cornered and afraid, right here: “Tracy Moore accepts all of this but casts the implications aside as both “no big deal, why does anybody care anyway?”” Howard “Wife Slapper” Bryant said the same thing about women’s tennis pay rates, and just about every other PC kool aid drinker when the numbers show an unfair situation artificially created by their rules.
I’d expect a larger height differential in the real world was actual height differentials due to the use of heeled shoes. Anecdotal, but I’ve heard many women mention wanting a guy tall enough to allow her to wear heels and still have her be the shorter one. This kind of applies to build as well, as no woman wants to date a guy she thinks appears thinner than her. Women want men who are bigger and can be protector. It’s like men sleeping on the side of the bed closer to the door.
Great follow up questions from Ohiostater. Imagine if a journalist or academic was half as curious.
” it’s because we’re still hung up on old notions of femininity and masculinity, and what they mean.”
I guess that’s why feminists don’t want to sleep with unemployed cheetos-eating WoW players any more than non-feminist women do, because they’re still hung up on old notions of sexual attractiveness and what it means.
C’mon feminists, go sex up those nerds. Prove that sexual attractiveness is a social construct. You don’t want to be a bad feminist, do you?
And you just gotta love it when someone spends a ton of money on a study to prove something that everyone with half a brain already knows. The taller a man is, the better his chances of finding a mate, overall.
It’s why you see so many short man/fat woman couples. The least attractive of each gender tend to pair off with each other.
I guess this proves that the Patriarchy has been around well before the hunab species evolved, perhaps as long as the animal kingdom. I wish this study couls be performed on dinosaurs. If it proves my theory, then all the affirmative action in the world can’t atone for this. Summon the firing squads.
Has anyone done a cross-cultural study showing any people anywhere where short men or tall women are preferred by the opposite sex? If so, I’m sure it would be an odd historical outlier.
Cam, you still going after your dream girl Julie? Maybe she’s dropped Russell Simmons and is finally available to pursue? lol!
Oh, do you mean Julie Henderson? Remember the idiot from Guy White’s site who tried to tell me that she was “average”?
Like the other HBD know-it-alls at Half Sigma’s site, I guess all of Guy White’s blog contributors were each sleeping with 3 super models… at the same damn time, of course.
@phillyastro,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781963/
Reference to a study on the Hadza tribe in Tanzania. I didn’t look at the methods, but they found no preference for a male taller norm.
As a background, our family visited with a Hadza tribe. We foraged for honey, dug and baked roots, pounded baobabs . These people are diminutive, with adult males weighing maybe 120 pounds. They smell bad, do not use cell phones, and high tech means using plastic paper bags.
“C’mon feminists, go sex up those nerds. Prove that sexual attractiveness is a social construct. You don’t want to be a bad feminist, do you?”
They’re perpetually washing their hair that night, right up until they get that second and third cat. Besides, they can just vote in the government to take the nerd’s money without actually putting out.
I was a groomsman at a friend’s wedding and the second question I was asked after “can you help me out bud, the other guy can’t make it” was, “how tall are you? The bridesmade you’re escorting wants to know what size heels to wear”.
i thought liberals love science? you know natural selection and evolution? what about when it goes against their religion of egalitarianism? psychometrics ? nope that must be racism not science
small chicks rock!!!
tall womyn, let the PUAtards have ‘em…
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There also seems to be an attractiveness penalty for men who are, relatively speaking, too tall. One wonders if that 5-6″ height gap is the sweet spot for maximizing size of male children while minimizing difficulty in childbirth (waist-to-hip ratio is important, but so is the absolute size of hips).
There’s also male mate choice to consider, which could have an evolutionary basis. Another question: do shorter women tend to be closer to the 0.7 waist-to-hip ideal?
This is one of those things people will have trouble admitting. It’s so obviously a biologicaly programmed imperative, it takes serious contortions to twist it into something socially constructed. You need to be a True Believer in social constructionism, and even then, it’s a stretch, because their deepest suspicions are that it’s biology.
Delusions only have so much power.
And it’s when they’re weakest that the believers fight the hardest.
Height is just one part of the puzzle. Not all of it.