“I know that might sound a little patronising but I do enjoy being the big spoon to keep someone feeling safe,” he adds, admitting that he feels almost compelled to “protect” short guys.īeing tall does have its cons, though, Charlie said, and he wishes he was a little shorter. That, or they like my height simply to access the top shelves in their homes.” “They like the feeling of me towering above them,” Charlie says “or they like to be held. He knows that a lot of men are drawn to him for his tall stature. The 33-year-old, a project manager in Bristol, has never met someone taller than he is, and he is the first to admit his height gifted him with an unfair advantage in dating. The great unknown of upper shelves, door frames and shower heads is his domain, standing as he does at a mountainous 6’7″. The sex is always better with the height difference.Ĭharlie is used to looking down at people. Many were expressing “a preference for smaller partner height differences than they actually experienced”, in other words, tall tops looking for short bottoms were often actually choosing partners closer to their own height. Moreover, men who described themselves are preferring a more “dominant and ‘active’ sexual role” preferred shorter partners, while men who preferred a more “submissive and ‘passive'” role liked taller partners.Īnd interestingly, there was a “discrepancy between what men preferred, and the actual heights of their partners”. Generally, researchers found, tall men prefer shorter partners, and vice versa. Men who top tend to prefer shorter men, and bottoms go for tall men, researchers have found.īut rather than height predisposing sexual roles, it’s all to do with the idea of tall men being dominant. In much the same way that the binary of tops and bottoms reflect misogynistic tropes of men and women, short and tall narratives in same-sex dating often place the tall as the dominant top and the short as the submissive bottom. These heterosexual, patriarchal norms around height have been carried over to the queer community. Throw in evolutionary biologists’ findings that height is associated with sexual attractiveness and fatherhood, and you seemingly have justification that if you were born taller, you are more powerful. This is, as academic Laure Butera wrote, because of “ the mythology of tallness“. Since men are generally taller than women, tallness has become tied with strength. As Reductress once said: “Is He Cute or Is He Just Tall and White?” Multiple studies have shown that height is considered one of the most appealing physical attributes a man can possess to women. “And that’s something straight short guys definitely experienced as well: that we’re adorable, ‘so adorable’, but not really a serious prospect.” I’ve had several guys over the years say: ‘if only you were taller/shame you’re so short/if only you weren’t so short, then we could…'”Įven before he came out, as a teenager, he was treated by girls “as a sort of sexless stuffed toy animal”. “But that’s just online, it’s in person that it gets hurtful.
On rare occasions, he finds his height is fetishised: “‘Oh my god, I love pocket gays!’ – that might not be as harmful, but it does make me feel uncomfortable.”
“It does feel like a dirty secret I’m disclosing,” he adds.