Men who draw the short straw

‘‘Nah, babe, dump him,’’ said my friend, waving an accusatory paper straw in our other friend’s face, ‘‘He’s too short.’’ My other friend, who’d been showing us pictures of her new 1.7m boyfriend, looked crestfallen. No, that’s an understatement. One moment she’d been glowing brighter than a David Jones Christmas tree. The next, her lights had blown out, she’d toppled over, she’d smashed all her baubles and was now being mauled by the family dog.

I bristled. Firstly on behalf of all the great guys I’ve dated who’ve been shorter than me.

Secondly, because what kind of monster deliberately tries to destroy someone else’s happiness like that? It’s like purposely trying to run over your neighbour’s cat.

But mostly because our friend then sat back, stabbed her straw through the heart of her ice coffee and gave an unconcerned slurp. See to her, she hadn’t said anything wrong.

And in a way she hadn’t. It’s perfectly socially acceptable to openly critique men’s height. No-one thinks there’s anything wrong with it. Well, unless you’re a bloke under 1.83m. Then you’re tired of a lifetime of loudspeaker commentary on your body, like you’re everyone’s least favourite horse at the Melbourne Cup.

Casually height-shaming men has been bothering me for a while. See, to me, calling a man too short is the same as calling a woman too fat.

The good news is we all have mostly realised how deeply uncool fat-shaming women is. If you try suggesting at brunch that a mate’s girlfriend was too fat to date ...well, you’d get slapped back to 1999 where your attitudes still clearly are, dick.

And yet it’s perfectly OK to height-shame guys. And to infer every man under 1.83m will have the temperament of a bad-tempered chihuahua.

Doesn’t this smell faintly like a double standard to you?

Now look, unclench your butt cheeks. I’m not about to start a sentence wit, ‘‘men have rights too, you know . . .’’ I’m just aware that as a feminist, I’ve spent a lot of time pointing out double standards that disadvantage women. And we’ve also just fought hard for a body revolution in how we discuss women’s bodies. So isn’t it consistent to extend this to men’s height too?

Iknow it’s difficult to have much sympathy for guys getting body-shamed. No one finds it easy to be empathetic about something they’ve repeatedly endured. We get all ‘‘wellI-suffered-through-worse-and-this-ain’t-nothinglike-it-so-quit-your-wailing’’ gunslinger about it.

But conversely, shouldn’t our own experience of this as women make us more sympathetic?

We know how infuriating and exhausting it is. We get it every day. Last weekend, a punter at one of my burlesque shows said I was good, for a fat chick. And I wanted to both cry and rip out his greying chest hair using my nipple tassel glue. So if we know how casual shame stings, why do we then do it to short men?

Is it revenge? If so, I understand that, but it’s still not ethically consistent with this revolution we just fought so hard for. Or is it because men do it to each other? Blokes call each other a short-arse without even blinking. (But I’ve always seen that as part of that emotionally constipated man-thing guys do when they all insult each other because it’s the closest they can get to ‘bonding’. And that really isn’t something we want to emulate.)

But I don’t think there’s any deeper reason we do this. It’s just us being lazy, bitchy and thinking that shorter men are fine with it . . . because, well, actually, we didn’t think about it.