2024.08.13

Is it women tho? Or is it men telling other men they aren't good enough again?

It’s like this is the major thing american women look in a man.

My sister did the Tindr circuit back in the '10s, and she regularly passed on anyone who was shorter than 6'. Some of this might have simply been that all the men and quite a few of the women in her family were at least that tall, but she capped out at 5'3".

She struggled with dating for years, because a lot of the guys she went out with were either fuckbois or work-a-holics or otherwise unfun people to be around. Eventually, she got two requests in one day - one dude who was 6'1 and another who was 5'2". At this point, she was getting burnt out and felt a bit bad about not even giving the 5'2" a chance.

The date with the 6'1" guy was predictably awful. She didn't even bother suggesting another.

The date with the 5'2" guy was incredibly. The immediately clicked. She totally fell for him. He fell for her. A couple years later they got married. Now they've got an adorable little girl and we're all joking about how it would be funny of my sister's tall-family genes take over and she's towering over her parents in twenty years.

Every time I see memes about hight I ask myself why are americans so fixated on that. It’s like this is the major thing american women look in a man. Never seen that anywhere else.

Really great question in which I have spent a decade, maybe two, pursuing the answers for, among many other absurd social issues. This comic alone represents a very real phenomenon that didn't exist in the US prior to the rise of social media.

Left to its own devices, social media would have made this kind of thing a non-issue. Without outside interference, social media broadly would have become a reflection of our society in many ways, the less relevant voices would have been drowned out by people ignoring them or talking over them. Contention would be drowned out by more reasonable voices.

Then I read the KGB handbook for destabilizing democratic nations and states and a lot of things became clear. The idea that you can get your enemy to welcome you in and open the gates for you without firing a shot. The tactic of getting an enemy state to dissolve from within as the people start fixating on each other instead of actual threats.

The tactic is simple and it's been being used on the USA since as soon as large numbers of people started browsing the interwebs every day. Get a busload of people together, pay them and get them laptops and celphones just like you're setting up a call-center type scam operation, but instead of fishing for money, you pay everyone to make accounts all over American social media and forums, find every single post or comment that has any level of social controversy or division, and then you amplify the most extreme views on both sides of every goddamn thing.

Argue against yourself on two different accounts, playing up both how much women "hate short men" while at the same time play short men who are toxic and irate and hate women and make them start a sect of equally hateful men. But of course, not at all limited to height, basically anything that men in particular feel sexual insecurity about gets ramped up in overdrive, because this makes "ground soldiers" and every fascist movement in history has started with sexually insecure young men feeling frustrated and joining forces. Do all this while playing up how dangerous and threatening these angry men are, make people feel unsafe, make people push back with equal vitriol and threats of violence. Logs on the fire. Gasoline all over the structures of democracy. It eventually gets so bad that people tune out, they stop taking sides about anything, they stop paying attention to news stories because they don't know who to believe, they default to doing whatever the state tells them to do because they don't have better answers for anything and just want stability. They stop participating in democracy.

It's not hyperbole, it's something I watched from the earliest days of Somethingawful banning their low-effort image posters and those people going on to form 4-chan and the insular cult-like, society-shaping force that it became, and I was there watching all the demons whispering in people's ears. I modded huge forums and subreddits over the years, I've seen the bots and the armies waiting to subvert every place where people talk. They're not just russians, but they all have the same goal and the USA was not at all prepared for this kind of attack. Parents told their kids "it's not real, don't believe anything online" as more and more of life moved to the internet and people stopped socializing in person.