While blues and jazz lyrics have long equated sexual prowess and manhood with penis size, this musical form has proven far more generous in its embrace of body types and sizes. From Skinny Minnie to Short Fat Fanny to Long Tall Sally, and from Fat Daddy to Shorty George to Long Tall Papa, blues and jazz celebrate all body types of all ages and rejoices in the sexuality thereof. Perhaps this is because, having experienced racial bigotry at first hand, the culture out of which blues and jazz emerged assumed that tolerance of physical difference was a good thing.

In particular, insofar as my point today is concerned, blues and jazz songs periodically celebrate men of short physical stature. There's even a song by Don Redman and His Orchestra (circa 1934), sung by the redoubtable Don himself, titled "Why Should I Be Tall?" Indeed, a number of these songs suggest that when big men, in their vanity, take their women for granted and ignore them, short men reap the benefits by filling the gap, so to speak. In fact, I myself have profited at least once from such a situation.

(There's a wonderful scene to that effect in an otherwise silly film, Revenge of the Nerds. In it a cheerleader, mistreated by her insensitive football-jock boyfriend, in a fit of pique grabs a member of the nerd crew and takes him to bed -- where he promptly goes down on her, inducing a screaming orgasm. When she revives, she tells him that no one had ever done that to her, and asks him how he knew what to do. He replies that guys like him don't get to spend time with girls, so they spend a lot of time reading about them, and thinking about them, and imagining how to please them. Which is true, in my experience. Too bad that few teenage girls -- and not that many more grown women -- realize that.)

Redman's is not the only pop song to have tackled the matter of physical stature, but most that address the issue certainly approve the tall over the "vertically challenged." That's the cultural bias, after all, and though we can point to the occasional exception (Bob Hoskins, Dustin Hoffman, Michael J. Fox) it's a unidirectional rule. As a test, consider a pop song such as Randy Newman's "Short People" and ask yourself if the reverse version could conceivably work -- a song with the title and repeated refrain, "Tall People (Got No Reason to Live)." Of course it couldn't; it makes no sense. The humor here depends on the narrator voicing, and merely taking to an extreme, a belief quietly shared by the dominant culture: that short people, and their lives, are somehow deficient because they don't "measure up."

In a literal as well as a metaphorical sense, no one looks down on tall people. They're the butt of no jokes. No body of folklore or amateur psychoanalysis* has accrued to them. No one proposes that there's a "tall man's syndrome" in which they compensate in a compulsive way for their exceeding the height norm. Aside from "How's the weather up there?" -- hardly derogatory, though I'm sure it wears thin -- there's nothing I can think of that's even a common comment made to the tall.

However, there are real, tangible compensations for height beyond the average -- certainly for men. Money and power, for starters. Surveys of men in the U.S. consistently show that when all other factors are equal -- age, race, educational level, schools attended, grades, family background, class, etc. -- taller men earn more money than shorter ones, get promoted faster in their occupational environments, and benefit in many other ways. (According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, presently the average height of the U.S. male is 5'9.1".)

In other words, it's not only a man's world; it's a tall man's world. Which is what makes the Randy Newman song both funny and insightful (and thus less offensive to real live short people); it's the narrative of a bigot -- another of Newman's cast of odd characters -- who patently doesn't have the stones to pick on people his own size, but who also doesn't care to hide his disdain for people he has no reason to envy.

Even the language we use daily reflects this bias: You can get "short shrift." You can demonstrate your "shortcomings." You can find yourself "short-changed" in many ways (but you never get "tall-charged" -- you get "over-charged"). "Half-pint" is derogatory, whereas "a tall drink of water" is admiring. The worst connotations of tall come in "tall story," which signifies stretching the truth, and in "tall order," which merely means a lot to ask or a tough job.

And since money and power come more readily to those with physical stature, and since all three attract women, and since it's not entirely unreasonable for women to assume that, at least statistically, the bigger the guy the bigger the cock, should we be surprised that women go for tall guys (all things being equal)?

So the observation that short people (especially short men) are frequently compensating for something with their behavior neatly elides the fact that this compensating is actually necessary, given the cultural bias towards height and the unmistakable social advantages of the tall. About all the conventional wisdom offers for consolation to those of us noticeably under 5'9" is the assurance that "Good things come in small packages." Cold comfort, that, let me tell you.

Not only does penis size affect one's sex life, therefore, but physical size - especially height -- does too. The latter affects the number of women who will find a man attractive, and what they will assume about him on every level from the psychological to the physical. The former affects the way a woman perceives and responds to a man once they begin to get intimate -- again, on every level from the psychological to the physical. Not necessarily something to bemoan if one is short, or even short-cocked; you play the hand you're dealt. But pretending it isn't so doesn't make this hard truth go away.

To be continued . . .