It’s Hard Out Here for a Short Guy
Welcome to the tyrannical world of beauty standards, men!
The most powerful thing a man can be in our modern society isn’t a government leader, or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, or a celebrity with a friendly enough disposition to score a Capital One deal. It’s not a dog influencer with 7 million Instagram followers or a former Succession cast member three-quarters of their way to an EGOT (though the latter is close). The most powerful thing a man can be is 6-foot-4 on a dating app.
Can you imagine? Possessing a physical form societally deemed so ideal that you feel no need to exaggerate or alter the facts in any way, even when given the opportunity to do so on the internet? Sure, any man between 6 feet and 6-foot-3 is in a strong strategic position in our constantly commodified, transactional dating landscape … but they’re not 6-foot-4. Those lucky few are in the rare position of not having to weigh any moral consequences from lying, any social consequences from revealing themselves to be less than ideal, or any personal consequences from limiting potential matches. They simply type out their honest height, knowing that they have struck genetic gold, while their less vertically inclined single brethren have been put in a much trickier spot.
With increasing intensity since the advent of Tinder in 2012, the dominance of apps like Bumble and Hinge has cemented certain inescapable beauty ideals by reducing hopeful singles into virtual playing cards, images coupled with a handful of factual and physical statistics that ultimately determine their market value. And after a millennium or so of the patriarchal tyranny of beauty standards, in just under a decade, these apps have managed to establish a beauty stigma for men that rivals the unjust physical demands long placed on women. In our deeply human search for love and companionship, we’ve judged long enough, swiped hard enough, and disrespected one another’s humanity thoroughly enough to force a height requirement on men so oppressive that it’s driving them to break their femurs and lengthen them a millimeter at a time using a—WAIT! I’m so sorry, WHAT have we done to our short kings in this pursuit of dating optimization? Why are they breaking their legs?! This can’t possibly be the internet’s fault!
In Celine Song’s new movie, Materialists, Dakota Johnson plays Lucy, a professional matchmaker, a very real job with very real consequences and a totally reasonable New York City salary of $80,000 before taxes. After reciting her salary upon their first meeting, Lucy tells her potential-client-cum-love-interest, Harry (Pedro Pascal), that, as opposed to making her feel like God or Cupid, being a matchmaker is much more akin to working in a morgue. In addition to having a way with words, Lucy is a documenter of the human form, assessing people by their most basic metadata: white, Black, Asian, skinny, fat, 5-foot-6, 5-foot-11, 6-foot-4 (if she’s lucky), and the list of stats goes on. Through colorful montages, we hear Lucy’s clients list off nonnegotiables for the “high-value” matches they expect. For the women: nice men over 6 feet tall who make six figures. For the men: fit, nice face, younger than they are.
More on ‘Materialists’
Lucy tells Harry that matchmaking—and dating itself—under these conditions and qualifications takes effort, trial and error, risk, and pain. Then she asks for a Coke and a beer at the same time, and it’s absolutely never explained in what order or by what method she plans to drink them. (I think she combines them???)
Materialists is strange! It has a way of making the viewer feel as off-kilter as one feels dating in an environment where someone knows your job, your physique, and what kitchen appliance you would be before ever actually meeting you. But all of that has become not just our new normal, but basically old hat at this point. Materialists is more a reenactment of a thesis about modern dating than a reflection of the act of modern dating itself. The film rarely addresses app dating, opting for the much more glamorous world of matchmaking, but its themes and characters are clearly a product of all that Tinder hath wrought.
The original intention of Tinder, as it swooped in to disrupt old-fashioned online dating, was to offer less personal information while driving more immediate matches than compatibility-based dating sites like eHarmony and OKCupid, which used fully fleshed-out profiles. But Tinder wasn’t meant to feel like a matchmaker—it was meant to feel like a game. Do you remember the first time you swiped on Tinder? And swiped and swiped again, as face after face repopulated, each with a handful of the most basic details? With an entire marketplace of potential partners now available inside our pockets, the inventory felt endless but also strangely devoid of meaningful details.
Well, this guy is a human rights attorney who says he’s 5-foot-10—but THIS guy is named Xackkk, and he looks like two of the Little Rascals stacked on top of each other in a trench coat … and oh look, he’s asking whether I’ll [redacted] [redacted] [redacted].
Theoretically, with all this opportunity and organized data, we could select precisely what we want in a potential partner: the right job, the age, the educational background, the look, the height. Tinder created the idea of the optimized future partner, with almost no infrastructure around how to approach them like a human being. Which has—spoiler alert—been sort of a disaster for the current state of heterosexual dating. And while it’s easy to blame these kinds of social shifts entirely on the tech that disrupted our social norms, we also can’t ignore the way we pushed these dating apps to their limits with our demand for more, more, more; now, now, now; hot, hot, hot. And please welcome to the stage a not entirely new but an entirely more in-demand desire: tall, tall, tall.
I recognized very little love, laughter, or human emotion as I know them in Materialists, but I did recognize much of what I’ve learned in the dating app trenches. Lucy’s is a worldview that’s easy to take on when, in place of romance, everyone is just exchanging the same sets of data, day in and day out. Lucy is never not John Nash–ing the social value of a new person in her mind, assessing what height can be traded in equal measure for what income, which deficits match with which inadequacies. “He’s a 5-foot-7 depressed novelist,” she says about the now-engaged roommate of her ex John (Chris Evans). “He couldn’t do better—it’s just math.”
Song has clearly taken a great deal of inspiration from Regency-era Jane Austen works like Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion. As those novels capture, marriage has always been a business transaction, an opportunity to alter the equation of one’s own socioeconomic and social status by drawing on the value of someone else’s. Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, and their ilk gave single people the power to become their own matchmakers, their own companionship mathematicians. With entire cities of singles distilled down into digital Rolodexes on our phones, we were—if you’ll forgive me—both the mortician and the corpse in Lucy’s analogy. The assessor and the assessed, looking to make a match, build a life together, or have some casual sex. Whichever came first.
But after 13 years of app dating, the process has gotten completely out of whack. We’re no longer trading around cows and dowries, but app dating has everyone consistently putting the business-transaction cart before the love-finding horse. Sizing up each other’s market value before a first date is even on the table has made us cynics about something that really must be pursued with optimism. We’re clinical about attraction, convinced that a few inches in height or on a waistline could be the reason we won’t fall in love with someone.
And so I guess I see why men were so outraged when Tinder recently debuted a height filter. Unlike the distance or age filters, height is a physical characteristic by which users can now narrow down their prompted matches. Because somehow, over the course of commodifying and codifying our dating app sets, many women seem to have settled on one firm, physical expectation of men to deem them romantically viable: that they be at least 6 feet tall. (The average male height in the U.S. is 5-foot-9.)
You might say that this is such an obviously ridiculous and unrealistic expectation of the physical form that it’s almost on par with the oppressive beauty standards hurled at women throughout history. Unfortunately, despite this slight balancing of the scales and despite the feminist agenda, women are still socialized to blame themselves for any perceived physical inadequacies in the eyes of men …
And men are also socialized to blame women when they feel undesirable. That’s how incels are born! It’s also why men on dating apps often disclose their height by saying, “6 feet, because apparently that matters,” as though they are answering a question that you’ve asked instead of willingly opting into a system that they allegedly don’t agree with (because apparently that matters). It’s also why, in response to such an unrealistic expectation of their bodies, men under 6 feet often seem to inflate their height on dating apps. Because any woman who dates men on apps can tell you three things for certain:
- There is something in the male psyche that wants—nay, needs—to take selfies exclusively while sitting in the driver's seat of a parked car. (The seat belt stays.)
- If a man has a photo of himself holding a fish, he will post a photo of himself holding a fish; if a man has two photos of himself holding a fish, he will post two photos of himself holding a fish; and so on.
- The most fundamental truth of them all: There is no such thing as a 5-foot-11 man on a dating app.
Any man who is actually 5-foot-11 will almost certainly say he’s 6 feet tall. Any man who says he’s 5-foot-11 is probably anywhere from 5-foot-7 to 5-foot-10. I’ve heard that 5-foot-11 men exist in the real world, but I’ve never technically met one. And as a 5-foot-9 woman, I’ve definitely met a lot of purportedly 5-foot-11 men who have looked me directly in the nose as they asked me where I grew up.
And really, that’s fine. Judging someone by one of their physical traits is no way to live, and for the oppressed party, the perceived injustice excuses the lying. Neither thing is great, but app dating creating more impossible standards of beauty instead of fewer is clearly an example of breaking an already broken system.
Ultimately, Materialists is not so much a rom-com as it is a film about the modern state of relationships and heterosexual partnering. And it’s looking pretty dire out there, folks! But the one moment that really got a laugh in theaters is an unexpected twist at the end of the second act—set up with Chekhov’s mention of height-alteration surgery in Act 1—revealing that Harry had both of his legs broken in a not entirely novel but not entirely common procedure to make them 6 inches longer. Taking his total height from 5-foot-6 to 6 feet—from filtered out of the apps and almost any of Lucy’s verbal matchmaking sessions to a stone-cold unicorn. It was an investment in his value, he tells Lucy, who offers that she also invested in herself, pointing at her nose and her chest.
But when Harry pouts, “It's hard to feel like this isn’t about the legs” while being broken up with, it is, hands down, the funniest line of the movie—but it’s difficult to say whether it was meant to be, considering Pascal’s downtrodden delivery. Not to mention: It is hard to feel like it’s not about the legs when Lucy literally chooses to reveal that she’s not in love with him and never will be moments after finding out that he willingly broke his femurs and his shinbones. (“I did the full 6 inches,” he says, in an equally Eeyore delivery.) It’s a pretty timely approach to the war on men’s height that’s happening in the real world, and it’s interesting that so many people have found the twist funny. (OK, that may be because of how Pascal squats down like a chicken to show Lucy Harry’s original height.) I wonder how the many real-life men who huffed and puffed on Twitter, “OK, SO WHEN DO WE GET A WEIGHT FILTER, SO WHEN DO WE GET A WEIGHT FILTER, WHAT ABOUT A WEIGHT FILTER THEN, HUH,” in response to Tinder’s height filter might feel about Materialists. (I do not expect that many of them went to see Materialists.)
And I understand their anger, I really do. Men’s height shouldn’t matter in dating any more than women’s weight (and what they mean is body size), and thanks to time and technology, men are being pushed into a society where it’s seemingly the only thing that matters. But fellas—the world is a fucking weight filter for women. You don’t need to worry about that. We have been well and fully judged for the size of our bodies since we were old enough to google “green tea fat burner pills.”
Anyway, that’s what the pictures are for. Or what they’re supposed to be for. I could accurately clock a man’s height within an inch from 100 yards away, but if a man could ever successfully guess the weight of a 5-foot-10 woman whom he believes to be “fit,” I would give him the millions of dollars I’m going to make from my new app: Blue Checks Guess a Woman’s Weight for Men’s Rights to Lie About Height on Dating Apps, It’s Very Important for Equality!
The option to shop for bodies, gamify human avatars, filter and swipe until your qualifications for a future partner are just “tall and has a good job” has created a lot of terrible social ramifications, but worst of all for shorter men, it’s cemented a beauty standard that was much easier to ignore when we still met in bars and grocery stores. And yes, I agree that isn’t fair! But that unfairness is familiar. And I really don't want to be the woman sounding the patriarchy alarm on the internet—that’s no more pleasant a position than trying to perfectly showcase your body in six carefully selected slides, only to still receive a stink eye because you somehow look different than your date expected.
Women are put in uncomfortable positions all the time, and it’s important to recognize in times like these that the patriarchy betrays us all. Men lying about their height on dating apps may get them treated unkindly on a first date or ghosted afterward. And women lying—or even being perceived as lying—could get them killed. But I’m not really here on Celine Song’s internet to give the “It’s literally impossible to be a woman” speech. (New episodes of We’re Obsessed come out on Fridays!) And I’m definitely not here to tell anyone to stop lying about their height on dating apps. I’m here to remind short men (and women having their quarterly moral crisis about whether to keep getting Botox) that this is precisely how they get us. The internal battle over whether to comply with or resist a system we don’t agree with or benefit from, knowing that it will come at a social cost.
But systems that seek to oppress us will always take a toll. Stigmas exist to isolate us, distract us from our own commodification, and keep us putting money into the pockets of anyone who benefits from our compliance. Tinder isn’t just rolling out a tool so that women can filter out short men. It’s rolling out a tool on Tinder Premium so that women can filter for tall men—a standard of beauty that the app itself helped solidify!—for the price of $29 a month. Finally, women have harnessed the evil powers of the internet to shift the burdens of the patriarchy, but for what? Our dissent is too trivial! We’ve merely brought small men into the trenches with us by bowing down to capitalism and allowing this technology to exacerbate more unrealistic expectations that we’re now complicit in reinforcing.
I just can’t help but feel like this kind of commodification and objectification doesn’t have anything to do with finding love anymore. And it might be time for a new solution. In between the strange drink orders and the goofy undercover outfits, I think that’s what Materialists was getting at.
Because when you’re several decades into the partnership you’ve chosen for yourself—when you’re the sole keeper of the knowledge of her blood type because she can never remember it herself, and she’s taking a photo of your rash to send to the dermatologist because you never learned how to use that new hologram phone—it will not matter how tall anyone is or whether they came from a prestigious family. As Lucy discovers, love cannot be solved by an equation. We do not have to balance out our deficiencies with our perks to be worthy of love. What gives us value is our humanity. And if we’re lucky, our partner simply makes that all a little easier to see.
