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Size Matters: How Height Affects the Health, Happiness, and Success of Boys - and the Men They Become - Hardcover

Hall, Stephen S.

 
9780618470402: Size Matters: How Height Affects the Health, Happiness, and Success of Boys - and the Men They Become
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0618470409 ISBN 13: 9780618470402
Verlag: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

An award-winning journalist tackles the hot topic of male body image and shows how physical size during childhood affects our psychology, social status, relationships, and income as adults.
With a mix of fresh research, incisive reportage, and bracing candor, Size Matters traces the surprising history of society’s bias against shortness and reveals how short people can and do thrive in spite of this insidious bigotry. Drawing on his own childhood experiences (he was shorter than 99 percent of boys his age), Stephen Hall explains the evolution of the growth chart, the biology of childhood aggression, and the wrenching phenomenon of bullying. He explores the factors that determine why one child’s small stature may lead to anguish while another short child develops an emotional resilience that will enrich his later life. Weaving together recent findings from the fields of animal behavior, psychology, and evolutionary biology, Hall assesses the role of physical size in mating success and argues that the alpha male may not be king of the mountain after all.
Hall also pinpoints the social forces that create and cash in on our anxieties about size, from bulked-up superhero action figures to pharmaceutical companies selling growth hormone to increase a child’s height -- at a cost of up to $40,000 a year. He introduces us to families who have agonized over whether to make that huge investment. He explains new research showing that a person’s height as a teenager has lifelong psychological consequences. He even tracks down kids he bullied in elementary school and kids who bullied him in high school to show that these childhood encounters have lasting effects on our adult lives. Along the way, Hall builds a persuasive case against societal attitudes that make size (or any difference) matter and argues forcefully that being short has psychological, social, and biological advantages. Size Matters will raise the consciousness -- and the spirits -- of any short male and anyone who cares about him.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

STEPHEN S. HALL is the author of Merchants of Immortality and three other acclaimed works of science reportage. He writes frequently for the New York Times Magazine, Discover, and other magazines. He is 5’53⁄4” and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his 5’9” wife and their two average-size children.

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INTRODUCTION "Squirt"
Anatomy is destiny.
— Sigmund Freud, The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex

When I was eleven years old, attending the sixth grade in a small mill town in
Massachusetts, the boys would gather in the schoolyard before classes
started to play games and work off energy, much as schoolchildren do today.
The play sometimes got rough, especially when we engaged in a brutal
Darwinian contest of survival sometimes known as British bulldog.
The rules, as best I can recollect, went like this: all but one of the
boys lined up at one end of an outdoor basketball court, while the remaining
boy stood in the middle of the court. At an agreed-upon signal, the mass of
boys dashed toward the opposite end while the lone boy in the middle
attempted to grasp, tackle, snag, impede, trip, dragoon, or otherwise wrestle
to the ground one of the dozens of boys barreling across the court. Once a
boy was tackled, he joined the growing group in the middle attempting to
tackle the remaining participants. With each rush from end to end, more and
more boys would get tackled and wind up in the middle. When there was no
one left to tackle, that round of the game ended. And then it would start all
over again — with the first boy tackled in the previous round standing alone in
the middle.
The distilled, stylized aggression of this game resembled a
minimalist football game in which there were only fullbacks and linebackers,
all colliding and scrapping and plowing through the snow.
In retrospect, I realize that this brute-force exercise crystallized for
me the parlous transition from boyhood to manhood. Like many games, it
informally codified the cultural insistence on physical aggression (even
violence) for boyhood "success." It ritualized, and elevated to mass
entertainment, the serial ostracisms of the One, for each round of the game
established the lowest-ranking member in the physical (but also, inevitably,
social) pecking order. It thrived on the animating tension of isolation and
exclusion, singling out one boy for ignominy (and thus inadvertently
accentuating the loneliness many boys feel on the cusp of adolescence).
And of course this daily rite of passage was built around a mindless set of
rules, legislated by children and enforced in the absence of adults. It was
also, I hasten to add, a great deal of fun. Boys do like to collide.
But the game always left me feeling chagrined for a completely
different reason. The fundamental lesson I learned on the playground, rightly
or wrongly, was that size matters.
Children are acutely aware of who among them is "bigger." In
earliest childhood, this instinctual grasp of social hierarchy primarily involves
age (that is, who's older), not size. But for most of childhood, and especially
during puberty and adolescence, this consciousness evolves into self-
consciousness, an excruciatingly diligent examination of differences in
physical size, pubertal maturation, shape, strength, and appearance. I
remember this elementary school gauntlet-of-the-fittest so vividly because in
this particular school population, two boys were notably smaller than the
rest, and consequently were always the first to be tackled. Indeed, they
usually took turns trying to tackle each other when each new game started —
a kind of inside game of humiliation and desperation that satisfied the
demands of schoolboy aesthetics, which call for entertainment seasoned
with cruelty.
One of the boys, Albert Destramps, was much smaller than all the
other boys, with almost delicate, doll-like features. He endured the usual
razzing, names such as shrimp and shortie, and I confess I probably lent my
voice to the chorus of insults a time or two. His size, however, didn't seem to
diminish his zest for participation or the stream of acid, often witty insults he
habitually spewed.
To be tackled by Albert on this particular playing field was the
height of preadolescent humiliation, and the desperation on the faces of
those in danger of being brought down by this diminutive motor mouth
remains etched in my memory still. The terrorized boys who found
themselves even partially in his clutches had the look of farm animals striving
to escape a burning barn, wide-eyed, thrashing, as if they were about to
die — of embarrassment. An inability to tackle Albert, conversely, became
an empty-handed trophy of failure. Thus are echelons of respect and fear,
hierarchies of dominance, and psychological strategies of behavior
incorporated into the deepest marrow of boyhood. It's a particularly intense
form of emotional education, and each day's lesson was completed before
the bell rang for the first class.
It became something of a ritual in this primal exercise that Albert,
because he was such an easy target, would always be grabbed, tackled, and
smothered at the start of each game (if he wasn't in the middle himself) by
the next-smallest boy in the school. That boy was me.
Albert was the only kid I could pick on, the only kid over whom I
could exercise even a nanosecond of physical mastery, and so, without
regret and indeed almost with relief, that's what I did. I wasn't the only one to
pick on him, of course, but I should have known better. Albert and I
tormented each other down there on the lower rungs of the pecking order —
and believe me, he gave as good as he got. But it was our shared destiny
and bad fortune to be physically smaller than the rest of the boys at a time in
male development when size becomes a prominent, even dominant, factor in
status and self-esteem.
The fact that I so vividly remember the casual humiliations of
those frigid Massachusetts mornings after more than four decades attests to
the raw power of such childhood encounters. Many male friends to whom I've
mentioned my interest in size, including the tall ones, have unburdened
themselves of similar tales of size-related tribulations (if not traumas), which
suggests that a child's experience of size disparity — and the sense of
otherness it cultivates in the developing mind, the feeling of involuntary and
unwanted citizenship in a despised land — is enduring, resilient, deep,
almost universal. The playground, the lavatory, the cafete- Introduction | 3 ria,
the locker room, the hallways: to children during their formative years, and to
boys in particular, these are fields of random cruelty, corridors of fear,
chambers of dread. They are makeshift arenas of physical confrontation,
where incidents we forever remember from our childhood and adolescent
years become incorporated, like knots in tree bark, into the adults we will
become. Wherever boys play games, as on the playing fields of nature,
where predation and aggression have shaped animal behavior for tens of
millions of years, sheer size makes a difference. You won't find that fact in
many textbooks, but it may be the single most important lesson of
unsupervised schoolboy existence.
The way those feelings of beleaguerment, insecurity, and
behavioral adaptation live on in adult psychology has been insightfully
captured by the cartoonist Garry Trudeau, the creator of Doonesbury. In a
lovely 1996 essay called "My Inner Shrimp," Trudeau admits that "for the rest
of my days, I shall be a recovering short person" with "the soul of a shrimp."
Trudeau, unlike some of us, benefited from a delayed but explosive growth
spurt that propelled his final height to over six feet. But it's the feelings he
experienced at age fourteen, when he was the third-smallest kid in his high
school class,...

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Verlag
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Erscheinungsdatum
2006
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0618470409
ISBN 13 
9780618470402
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
388
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