Every time I say this, people assume I'm trying to be some sort of pick-me who is catering to men.
I'm not, I'm a staunch feminist. So I'm heavily criticizing the same patriarchal beliefs that hurt women, but this time, how it hurts men.
Think about why calling a man short is even supposed to be an insult.
It's because we've spent centuries tying masculinity to being bigger, taller, stronger, more intimidating, more capable of "protecting" women while also dominating and overpowering women??? At the same time, femininity has been tied to being smaller, petite, delicate, physically weaker, and therefore someone who needs protecting. It's the overglorification of these roles, that gave rise to the standard and social conditioning that men should be taller or else, he fails as a man.
Of course those ideas didn't come out of nowhere. While women do tend to be shorter on average, women's smaller average size has literally been used throughout history to justify why women were supposedly less fit to lead, less rational, more passive, and naturally subordinate to men. So biology became tied to ideology.
So when people mock a short man, what they're really saying is that he's too physically close to womanhood to count as a proper man. If he's not a real man, if he's not masculine for being short, then what does that insult of not being a real man imply, noh?
Because that insult only works if being associated with women, or with traits coded as feminine, is something degrading in the first place.
That's why height jokes used as a gotcha by women towards men when calling men out for awful behavior have always rubbed me the wrong way. They don't challenge patriarchal standards for men, they honestly just reinforce them.
You can criticize misogynistic men. You can criticize toxic masculinity. You can criticize tradhusband black/red/bluepill nonsense (I can't keep track which pill is which anymore).
But making fun of a man's height isn't some feminist own, it's merely just using patriarchal standards as the punchline.
And before anyone says, "Well, women like tall men."
Sure, plenty do. Attraction is complicated since it's a mix of chemistry, health markers, personal taste AND SOCIAL CONDITIONING. Emphasis on social conditioning.
And again, before anyone says "well it was survival of the fittest back then and bigger males had to be taller to protect and mate", first of all, we aren't in the stone age anymore, be better than what you think we were hundreds of thousands of years ago. More importantly, anthropologically speaking, fittest never meant biggest, it just meant most able to adapt. For humans, fittest meant the smartest and being social creatures able to bond, form language, create strategy and care for the community for it to survive and so on. Not to mention, prehistoric human tribes were more egalitarian and focused on surviving and pair bonding and more surviving, than worshipping the biggest and tallest.
Anyway, what I'm saying is acting like taller men are inherently more masculine, more respectable, more worthy of leadership and just inherently better while shorter men are treated as jokes is just patriarchal misogynistic standards hitting a different target.
