Stephen S. Hall - Size Matters: How Height Affects the Health, Happiness, and Success of Boys--and the Men They Become

Houghton Mifflin Company BOSTON NEW YORK 2006

Copyright 2006 by Stephen S. Hall
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hall, Stephen S.
Size matters : how height affects the health, happiness, and
success of boys and the men they become / Stephen S. Hall.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN -13: 978-0-618-47040-2
ISBN -10: 0-618-47040-9
1. Stature, ShortPsychological aspects. 2. Stature, Short
Social aspects. 3. Human growth. 4. Body image in men.
5. Body Image. 6. Puberty. I. Title.
QP 84. H 35 2006 612.6dc22 2006007304

Printed in the United States of America

Book design by Victoria Hartman

MP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Portions of several chapters have appeared, in
different form, in the New York Times Magazine.

For my nurturers past (Delores and Bob)
and present (Sandro, Micaela, and
Mindy), who still help me grow
every single day

It matters greatly to the soul in what sort of body it is placed; for there are many conditions of body that sharpen the mind, and many that blunt it.

C ICERO, The Tusculan Disputations

In regard to bodily size or strength, we do not know whether man is descended from some small species, like the chimpanzee, or from one as powerful as the gorilla; and, therefore, we cannot say whether man has become larger and stronger, or smaller and weaker, than his ancestors. We should, however, bear in mind that an animal possessing great size, strength, and ferocity, and which, like the gorilla, could defend itself from all enemies, would not perhaps have become social; and this would most effectually have checked the acquirement of the higher mental qualities, such as sympathy and the love of his fellows. Hence it might have been an immense advantage to man to have sprung from some comparatively weak creature.

C HARLES D ARWIN, The Descent of Man

The period of growth and development occupies more than a quarter of the average person's lifetime; yet, surprisingly, one searches in vain for a detailed description of the bodily changes in form and function which occur during it.

J AMES M. T ANNER, Growth at Adolescence

Introduction

PART I THE LITTLE ONES

1. "Chunky"

2. "Longitude" and "Pondus Absolutum"

3. A Brief Interruption for a Bicycle Accident

PART II "MY, HOW YOU'VE GROWN..."

4. The Invention of Childhood

5. The Bully Inside Me

6. Runts, Sneaks, and Dominators

PART III THE SPURT

7. "To Grow Hairy"

8. Belittled

9. The Prussian Curse

PART IV TIMING

10. Timing Is Everything

11. "Man in His Perfection"

12. The Emperor's New Medicine Cabinet

PART V STATURE AS METAPHOR

13. College and Beyond

14. The Tallest People on Earth

15. Final Height

Epilogue

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Anatomy is destiny.

S IGMUND F REUD, The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex

W HEN 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 againwith 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 starteda 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 dieof 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.