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A guest post from Arianne Cohen, author of The Tall Book: A Celebration of Life From On High.
At every public appearance I make, someone raises his hand and says
something like, “It’s much harder to be a tall woman than a tall man,
right?” This point of view was echoed in the current issue of The New Yorker:
A story about the director Nora Ephron opens with a quote about being
tall from Meryl Streep, who is playing 6-foot-2 Julia Child in the
forthcoming movie Julie & Julia. "I mean, it's like having club foot ... it was a handicap of sorts, certainly in the world where she was born," Streep says.
Yes, being tall has its challenges. I know, I'm 6-foot-3. But at its
heart, the constant struggle of height is that to be tall is to be
public, the constant sense of walking around with a spotlight on you.
There's no place to hide, and that's genderless. Tall men are every bit
as self-conscious as tall women.
Tall women’s struggles are more subtle. You’re not aware of this
unless you’re tall, but there’s a vortex of silence around tall female
public figures, and a total dearth of tall female role models. Sure,
there are lots of very successful tall women out there. But you
probably don’t know ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)