Back in the days, seduction gurus claimed that “looks don’t matter”, and, according to them, neither did height, race, and penis size. This was the biggest tell that this industry was a complete sham. The backlash against the seduction community, in the form of the black pill community, is maybe a bit too extreme with its inherent defeatism, but by and large not even the worst hucksters in this niche today try to claim that your height is irrelevant. It is clear as day that women prefer taller men, and to know this we did not have to wait until the advent of online dating. Anybody who ever managed to leave their cave and spend a short amount of time in public can notice that you hardly ever see a woman with a guy who is shorter than her.
Overall, I think the primary reason for women wanting taller men is simply due to evolution. Men had to protect their family, and a taller man tends to be stronger than a shorter man. The same basic reasoning applies to all attractive features of men and women. Just as women would, ceteris paribus, not pick a shorter or poorer man, so would men not go for an older and less attractive woman. In addition to the obvious evolutionary implications of height, there also seems to be an environmental aspect, which I had been completely oblivious to.
A few days ago, I wanted to meet up with a friend. A few hours before our agreed upon time, he messaged me, telling me that his girlfriend got busy so he needs to watch his five-year old daughter at home. This sounded like a pretense for cancelling, yet in a follow-up, he asked me to drop by his place. There, I got the chance of watching him and his daughter interact with each other. At some point, she came over with a book in her hand and asked (told?) her father to come to the sofa to sit down so that she could rest her head in his lap.(Article continues below.)
Break: To show your appreciation for this article and ensure the survival of this blog, please consider making a donation.
When asked about how he and his daughter interact, he revealed that she sometimes views him almost as some kid of object, climbing over him when he’s doing push ups or sometimes sitting down on him so that he has to carry her on his back and on all fours through their apartment. (I did not point out what this may convey to his daughter.) This guy is in pretty decent shape and about six feet tall. Considering how his daughter interacts with him, he simply sets the standard for other men. Surely, once she is older and looking for a boyfriend, she will not want a guy who is shorter and physically less imposing than her father.
Based on this experience, I can’t help but wonder how much of an effect early-childhood interactions with their father have on daughters. Presumably, any girl growing up in a healthy family environment will spend much more time with her dad than any other man. It strikes me as implausible to assume that this will have no effect at all on her. In fact, it’s most plausible that when replacing her father as the key male in her life by her future husband she wants both someone who is at least as impressive as her father and someone who meets the evolutionary criteria mentioned above. Thus, I would not be surprised if daughters of taller men place a higher premium on tall men than daughters of shorter men who may simply want a guy who is at least as tall as their father as well as taller than they are themselves. To put it differently, if you take all women of a certain height, it may be the case that daughters of taller men want, on average, a taller man than women of the same height whose fathers are short.
This blog depends on your contributions. So, share your view and comment on this article (comment policy). Then, to ensure the survival of this blog, donate. If you haven’t bought Aaron’s books yet, buy them, all of them. Lastly, if you want tailored and honest advice, book some one-on-one consultation sessions.
This is definitely not a valid counterargument, but two of my cousins, whose father is very short, who is short themselves, just go for very tall men.
Alek Novy made an observation that short women desire tall men even more than tall women.
What do you think of this observation? I think it is quite true.
Of course, this doesn’t mean to say that tall women don’t like men who are taller than them. It just means that tall women are more tolerant when it comes to slightly shorter men. It is definitely not the case that you often see tall women with significantly shorter men anyway.
Aaron,
“…he simply sets the standard for other men. Surely, once she is older and looking for a boyfriend, she will not want a guy who is shorter and physically less imposing than her father.”
“…when replacing her father as the key male in her life by her future husband she wants both someone who is at least as impressive as her father and someone who meets the evolutionary criteria mentioned above.”
Would this also be the reason why a certain type of women (sex workers, cluster B) tend to prefer thugs who are violent, have criminal records, have been incarcerated, and tattoos because of their fathers? And in essence, women seek out men who remind them of their fathers?
I think your assumption is correct. Of course, it would be good to have a proper study conducted on this issue to have some verification, but I don’t think anybody doubts that strippers and hookers disproportionally come from broken homes. They basically copy the fast-life trajectory of their parents. As this is genetic, it does not matter much if the father has been wholly absent.
Aaron,
On a final note, do women’s preference for a certain type of guy remain the same long-term? For example, if a woman is into preppy guys or thugs, will this remain steady long term?
I think that, indeed, female preferences are relatively static. The obvious counter-argument would be wall-hitters who are looking for a walking wallet to leech off. Yet, those women would still rather bang Jamal and Tyrone. It’s just that their EBT-powered lifestyle does not quite afford the middle-class existence she is dreaming off after having shared an apartment with three other women for 15 years.
Please don’t think I’m being overly facetious. There are a lot of strong and independent women in substandard living arrangements out there. In big and expensive Western cities single women in their 30s and 40s may live in dingy studio apartments or have room mates. This may be fine if you are a student and need to make ends meet (in the US, it’s more common to live in a dorm on campus), but I’d imagine this getting really tiresome after a few years. Yet, women who are stick in b.s. careers never get out of it. I’ve even heard of women in their 50s who live in shared apartments. Likely they will die in those. Of course, they would still denounce women who marry and have kids for perpetuating the patriarchy.
It’s complicated to explain height in humans. I think it’s simply a modern hyperstimulus, not quite evolutionary. If you look at human height closely, we grew extremely tall only in the last two hundred years. With almost no changes before that time. In the 1800s Native Americans were taller than European people. Why did that change? Also, why do we grow proportionally, although women prefer taller men and men prefer shorter women? Shouldn’t men grow taller and taller and women shorter or stay at the same height if being tall for men is an advantage?
I think rulers were always tall, or at the very least more often than not significantly taller than the average. The middle-age ruler Edward IV of England was 6′ 3″ when the average height was probably a solid foot below that.