Why Are Tall Women Obsessed With Feeling Smaller? | How The Internet Glorifies Smaller Women's Bodies

Tall women are less likely to fit into the traditional image of femininity. It's common for us to be called masculine because of our height and naturally larger features, since being tall and being larger is associated with being a man and being masculine. And then on top of that, it's a bit of a struggle to physically present ourselves in a feminine way, meaning with clothes, when dresses or shoes or skirts are really available in our size or length. But that's a different topic for a different day. However, a very common thing we hear in the tall girly community, whether or not they like their height, is that they want to be or feel smaller. Some outrights say they wish they were shorter, Others say they want to feel small and petite and protected next to their male partners. Either way, it all ties back to wanting to feel or be smaller. So in today's episode, we're going to be talking about the obsession with wanting to be smaller, how that ties into femininity and the fact that some tall women desire to be smaller because they desire to be feminine. So, without further ado, let's get into it. Good morning, everybody, you are currently listening to a Tall Girls podcast hosted by a tall girl named India. I hope everyone who's tuning in today is doing super fantastic. Before I get to this episode, I do want to say, make sure you're following me on my socials at a Tall Girls podcast on Instagram, taketok, and picture so that you can stay up today on all of the latest podcast episodes and catch a glimpse of my everyday life. Also, feel free to leave a review and let me know how tall you are. I'm genuinely curious. I also have the monthly newsletter, make sure you subscribe to that. Everything is going to be linked in the description. Hope everybody is doing super fantastic today. I am a little under the weather. I mean, I feel fine, but it's kind of one of those things where your voice is not fully there and your throat kind of hurts. So hopefully that gets better over time. But if you hear a difference in my Voices episode, this is why. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about the obsession with being smaller, the obsession that many women have with being smaller, Being small or at least what's pushed out in the media and We're also going to touch on this obsession and how it pertains to tall women and how it affects their mental health, their self esteem, and their confidence within themselves and their height. So I want to start off by asking, are there any tall women here who wish that they were smaller at some point in their lives? This can mean wishing you were shorter, or wishing you were thinner and wanting to lose weight. I would think that that's kind of common, especially when we're younger, because it's often pushed on to us that women are supposed to take up less space. If you answered yes to that question, you are not alone. Okay. Many tall women, including me, have, at some point in their lives wish that they were shorter or more petite. I would say it's definitely more common to hear tall women saying that they wish that they were shorter, whether it's in their younger years and they want to fit in and fit in with their peers and so forth, maybe get bullied less or even in their adult ears in terms of like practicality, like fitting into clothes or not wanting to hunch over everything. It's Meg and Margaret, y'all, don't want to be timimore. I want to be sure. I want to wear the cute little kids comfort. I can't fit those. My legs too long. I may look at it as an adult medium. If it's been everywhere else on the arms, not the legs, I could run through floodwaters right now. My pants wouldn't get wet. I want to be short. Where's my tall people out? Y'all know what I mean. If it fits us in a waist, it's way too short on our legs. Y'all know what I'm saying. Y'all short people got it made. I want to be short. I probably shouldn't be seeing devil if it is one seene I would want to change about myself. It's my heights. Like I wish I was fun size. I wish I was five three or five five, Like if too much? Well, is I mean? Like I would be so cute if I was like need so and then I don't know. I just think it's really, really, really really cute. And another perspective has come to light over the past few years in terms of weight and all women wanting to weigh less and feel smaller in that way. I am five eleven and I have absolutely hated the experience of being a tall girl in life. It always shocks me when I hear comments in person online of people being like, oh my god, you're so lucky you're five eleven. I've always dreamed of being that tall, because I'm over here, like, I have not enjoyed this experience whatsoever. It has not been fun for me. I am not one of those tall girls that embraces my height. I do not like it. I've never liked it. I think a lot of people realize how weird people can be about tall people. I think I started disliking being tall from a very young age just because, like I felt like I was always like larger than my peers, and I became very like overaware of my body. And I think a lot of my body image issues I dealt with growing up really stems from being like abnormally tall compared to girls I grew up with. During girls say like, oh I'm one hundred and ten pounds, I'm one hundred and fifteen pounds. I will never even be one hundred and forty pounds, Okay, So I feel like that played with my mind a little bit growing up, Like I feel like that's where it started, and then now as a grown adult, I'm five eleven in my fiance sixty six, the things people will say to us in public is diabolical. Maybe they mean it as a compliment, but it never sounds that way. Like people will literally just walk up to us and be like, oh my god, you're so tall. Are there any other tall girls who grew up with an ED because you were so tall? Like I'm six feet tall. I grew up I was tall my whole life, and I hated how objectified I was because of my height everywhere I went, like it was just always about my body, always about how tall I was. So I developed an ED because I wanted to get smaller in the areas I could control. I had it for a good ten years. I'm luckily past that point in my life and I've healed since then. But I know I can't be the only person who's tall who probably had an experience like. That, and either way wanting to be shorter, wanting to be smaller, weighing less, and so forth. It's much deeper than what it is at face value. If that makes sense. I mean, yes, it's also about wanting to fit in and wanting to fit into close practicality, as I said before, being uncomfortable with being seen and perceived all of that stuff. But there's an even larger, in my personal opinion issue where we're conditioned that being small and being means that you're feminine. I think some tall women desire being smaller and shorter because on some level they associate being small with being feminine. Were often shown that it's ideal for a woman to be dainty and petite and delicate. So for some tall women, wanting to be smaller may actually be about wanting to be connected to those ideas of femininity. I have never been described as petite, and I never will be described as petite. Okay, I'm five ten, I'm pretty tall, And what that has meant for me growing up is that I really really struggled with ever feeling feminine, just simply because I was in a bigger body than a lot of my friends growing up. And I feel like a lot of social media and especially like mainstream media, portrayed like femininity and like female beauty as this like almost if you're not this one size, then it doesn't apply to you. And I really really struggled with that. And so for a lot of years. I just never thought that I could like feel feminine, so like, even things like wearing earrings and necklaces and skirts and things like that that are kind of more like, I guess, like traditionally feminine, I kind of stray away from because I didn't feel like it was my place to wear it, because I was struggling to feel feminine, if that makes sense. And it wasn't until literally probably about like this time, maybe a year ago or two years ago, that it all kind of hit me. Like I didn't realize that I was struggling so much with this until I kind of like reflected back on my life and I was like, huh, you're right. I guess I haven't ever really properly felt feminine because I'm used to being like kind of the biggest in the room and things like that. And especially the time I think that I was struggling with this the most, I was also quite overweight. And yes, we often hear things like oh I want to be shorter and I want to be smaller, but we also hear things like, oh, I want a man, I want a boyfriend. I want a male partner who makes me feel tiny and bite and small and feminine. But again that part is also a discussion for another day, And I kind of want to bring two attention a couple of ideas and trends that kind of play under the theme of as a whole women's obsession with wanting to be smaller. The current obsession with women wanting to be smaller is a little scary. It's like this desire to be petite, this desire to be the smallest possible version of yourself. But for tow women specifically, seeing trends like this can be unhealthy because many of us struggle with feeling like we're too big. We see trends like the Skinny Society, right, that was a huge thing. What was it last year or two years ago, where there was basically this group of women who were talking about, yeah, we're empowering each other to be our healthiest versions of ourselves. But really they were promoting restrictive eating and getting smaller and losing weight in that way because according to them, being skinny means that you're hot and you're feminine, and you'll get anything you want and desire in the world. We also had the oz epidemic, and now we have this whole GLP one thing where many people are using it as a way to quiet down their food noise, I guess, and suppress their hunger so that they don't eat as much and lose weight rapidly that way. And some of our favorite celebrities and influencers have lost so much weight recently with that really showing what's going on behind the scenes, and you know, a couple months later or guests before their transformation, they show up on the red carpet and then pictures and on social media being extremely thin and having lost a lot of weight, and a lot of people are like, whoa where when did this happen? They look like completely different people. Some of them look unhealthy. That's just my opinion, Like we're literally seeing outlines of like bones that we probably shouldn't be seeing or at least like I didn't even know existed, Like that's how thin they are. So we have all of these trends kind of happening at once. And then for tall women specifically, you're pairing that with being masculinized, male centered shorter women trying to compare heights and body sizes and saying all of these weird things to us. People misgendering us and so forth. We have all of these things kind of playing at once, and all of this affects how we see ourselves and see our height and see our weight. And that's the thing because a lot of this stuff is pushed out in social media on television, we see all of these GLP one commercials, and we see these celebrities pictures on social media and so forth. Skinna talk literally had its own whole community on social media, and people were talking about it on social media, like we see these things regularly if we're like in touch with pop culture or even just having social media itself. And it's like, at what point does it affect our confidence and self esteem so much to where we start doing extreme things to kind of fit into this ideal. This thinness culture and this fear of appearing too big as a woman is what's getting into our heads. Yet is being promoted as oh the feminine ideal, Oh what's attractive, what men find attractive, this standard of beauty. Yet it's extremely unhealthy what we're seeing nowadays. And here on this podcast, I try to talk about how like the weight situation, for example, how tall women naturally weigh more because they have more body because they're and so that means they need to eat more and they need to eat more calories in order to sustain that. So stop comparing it to other people and so forth. But I have a small podcast, like I recognize that my content. As you're reaching like hundreds of trillions and billions of people, there's like so much more out there about oh, you need to stop eating so much, and you need to lose weight, and this, that and the third and the number on the scale is what defines you. Yet there's not a lot of talk and content about, hey, you need to do what works for you and your body type. What you're seeing when you're hearing is unhealthy. You need to age, of course, speak with your doctor, but also do what feels good for you in a healthy way. And there's really not that much talk about the things, the good things about like trying to embrace ourselves and trying to let people know, hey, this is the reality of things, like you have a bigger body. You cannot compare yourselves to these people who are already so thin on social media and on top of that shorter than us. But when we do things good for us, like let's say exercising, going to the gym, and eating what we're supposed to be eating and so forth, we're masculinized or masculinized, we're compared to I guess, like in a negative way, and it's like we're doing what we're supposed to be doing for our bodies, and our bodies present itself in that way. Then that's a bad thing because of this thinness culture and what we're seeing so much online. And then on top of that, even trying to get to how these people on social media are is like it's practically impossible for tall women. It's very important for tall women to understand that they may never be the smallest person in the room or be considered feminine in a traditional sense, and we'll probably always stand out, but that doesn't mean we can't be feminine or there's something wrong with us. Maybe it's time to stop trying to make ourselves smaller and accept the fact that we're meant to take up space. All right, I'm gonna end it here. I don't know how much my voice could take right now, or my throat could take right now. So I think we got some good stuff in this episode. Thank you for tuning in. I really appreciate it, and I appreciate you of course as always, free to hit me up on my socials at a toll Gross podcast and let me know what you thought about this episode. What do you think about currently this then this culture, the ozon pandemic and all that stuff, and what we're seeing and what's being flooded in the media and how that affects tall women. Has that affected you as a tall woman, Like, what are your thoughts on that and what you're seeing and so forth, Let's have a conversation about it. And yeah, you can hit me up with my social set a told Gross podcasts or link below And until then, I will catch you guys in the next one. Good night and goodbye.