Just when I thought I'd cycled through every issue of twentysomething angst, along comes a personal crisis that I never anticipated. I'm shrinking.

I discovered this in the wood-paneled warren of my new "primary-care physician," an exceedingly old man who could hear almost nothing below a shout. The doctor's ancient spouse worked as his receptionist. A young woman, possibly their great-granddaughter, was his assistant and took my measurements before I went to the doctor's mahogany desk and belted out my medical particulars.

I was shouting something like, "I recently had a mole removed!" when the assistant reported that I weighed 174 pounds and stood 69-and-a-half inches tall. It took me an extra second to double-check the math, but there it was: I'd shrunk an inch and a half. I was too stunned to object or demand a re-measure.

It was one of those moments when you question everything. I'd been "almost six feet" for more than a decade. It said as much on my driver's license and countless other documents. I'd claimed this height in front of hundreds, if not thousands, of different people -- when buying clothing, renting mountain bikes, registering for team sports. Could it be that, for all this time, I'd been lying to everyone?

Admittedly, I'd always associated "body issues" with young women preoccupied with their weight, often dangerously so. I knew that men could be plenty vain, but I believed most men knew their bodies weren't perfect, and they were cool with that. For years, I'd never given my height a second thought. Now, however, I began obsessing over it.

I'm going to pause and say here what you may be thinking: five-foot-nine isn't short for a man. No, it's not. It's just above the US average. I learned this from the "Height Analyzer," which I found at www.shortsupport.org. It was introduced with the morbidly tempting query, "So, you are a short man. But how short are you?"

In the end, it wasn't so much my new height as my sudden loss of stature that made me identify with the travails of the short man. You see, while tall guys don't fully appreciate the impact of height on male self-esteem, short guys (and shrinking guys) sure do.

Many shorter men claim that tall men are more often excused for coarse behavior, admired for their disregard of small matters and "small" individuals, and easily forgiven for things like accidentally knocking you down or hugging you too vigorously. A short man, by contrast, is often in the position of proving everybody wrong -- proving that a short man can achieve, a short man can take command, a short man can reach up and change that light bulb.

And it's not all in our heads. As reported in their book, Stature and Stigma (Lexington Books, 1987), psychologists Leslie Martel and Henry Biller asked several hundred university students to rate men of varying heights on many different criteria. Both men and women respondents (short and tall) rated the short men (between five-foot-two and five-foot-five) less mature, less positive, less secure, less masculine, less successful, and less capable. Furthermore, according to a 1999 British study, men under five-foot-six have incomes about 10 percent below those earned by men about six feet tall, while the shorter men were also seven percent less likely to be married. These and other statistics reflect what short people, short men in particular, call "heightism," the prejudice that nobody takes seriously.

I'd never subscribed to the chest-thumping "tall man take short man's woman" theory of masculinity. But there are countless other, more subtle height-and-masculinity intersections that I began to consider: being called upon to reach a high shelf; moving back the car seat after a woman has been driving; the unspoken understanding that I would probably eat more than my woman companion at any given meal.

To be fair, I counted a few advantages of being a shorter man, including more comfort in airplanes, less chance of bumping low ceilings, and a greater ability to hide. But none of it was convincing. I also imagined being a professional athlete in a sport not dominated by men over six feet tall, such as figure skating or horse racing. Yet, I knew that if I ever saw myself on TV in such a competition, I'd flip channels in search of taller men engaged in more interesting sports, like basketball or football.

It wasn't just inches that I had lost. In a way, the whole world I'd known BS (before shrinkage) seemed irretrievably altered. References to height appeared everywhere. Taller men abounded. I began confessing my shrinking to everyone, perhaps seeking an explanation, if not a solution.

Most listeners were kind and laughed away my worries. But one female acquaintance, who happens to be a doctor, questioned me in a clinical manner. "Have you been running for exercise?" she asked. Why yes, I had been. "It could be spinal-cord compression," she ventured. "Have you been sitting a lot?" Uh-oh. I asked her if there was any remedy. "Sorry," she shrugged. So that was it. I was shrinking, and there was nothing to do but shake my wee fists with impotent rage.

I took to reading "short power" manifestoes and playing depressing statistical games with the aforementioned "Height Analyzer." Then I re-read Jonathan Swift's masterpiece, Gulliver's Travels. I pored over the descriptions of Gulliver among the tiny Lilliputians (he saves the day by urinating on a palace inferno) and his years with the giant Brobdingnagians (he is tormented by the queen's jealous dwarf). Finally, Gulliver reaches a conclusion, one that I've tried to adopt as a way of regaining my perspective. "Undoubtedly," Swift wrote, "philosophers are in the right when they tell us, that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison."

True enough. I'll try to remember that when I pull on the two pairs of wool socks I'll be wearing to my next physical.

n

Chris Berdik, who is still taller than 57 percent of American men, can be reached at cberdik@hotmail.com.

Issue Date: August 9 15, 2002