The Tall-Girl Diaries

The most recent entry in a personal-history subgenre I like to call “I’m not a freak, I’m an over-6-foot-tall woman!” was excerpted in yesterday’s New York Times (via):

Everywhere I go people stare at me. At the grocery store children gawk at me wide-eyed, craning their necks and pointing as they tug their mothers’ shirts. When I pass people on the street, I hear them mumble comments about my appearance.
I am not deformed or handicapped, I’m not a circus attraction. I have strawberry blonde hair and blue eyes. What makes me different is that I’m 6-foot-4, and I’m a woman.

Arianne Cohen, who’s got a book about height coming out in July, said much the same thing in Nerve in 2006:

To begin with, to be extra-tall is to be somehow more public than the average woman. Everybody sees me. Strangers on the subway peer upward and tell me about their childhood neighbor who was tall. Fellow grocery shoppers sheepishly request my help procuring items from upper shelves. Male passers-by mutter, “That was one giant woman.” Men seem particularly inclined to register one characteristic: tall.

And here’s a bit from my own take on life as a tall woman:

I’d add to that: Fratty dudes in bars will chant “6 footer!” or loudly make bets with each other about how tall I am. (Well, I’ve actually had restaurant wait staff and fellow wedding guests make bets, too, so maybe it’s unfair to pin that one on the bros alone.) People stare openly, all the time, everywhere I go. There are some days, namely those when I’m wearing whopping 1-inch heels, that I feel like I leave a ripple of height comments in my wake. Small children point and say, “Mommy! Look at the giant lady!” Women who feel insecure about their own height will often say to me, “I wish I was that tall!” No, honey, you don’t. Really.
But it does have certain benefits.

That post sparked a great conversation in comments about height and gender — and again and again women of all body types wrote about strangers walking up to them and commenting on their body. Guess that’s a pretty universal female experience in this country, no matter what your height. (And yet another reason why we’re feminists…)