I am 5’10” and have always been tall. I never got to sit in the front row for class pictures, I tower over my friends, finding jeans that are long enough is a nightmare, and I had to check with my prom date to make sure my two-inch heels wouldn’t make me taller than him. I never really questioned being tall; with a mom who is 6 foot and a dad who is 6’2” it’s not like I could have been any other way. Yet it has affected nearly every aspect of my life, and, while talking to my 5’3” roommate about perceptions of beauty in pop culture, I realized how being tall has affected my perceptions of beauty.
I never thought I was beautiful—I think most girls feel that way. I never really thought I was particularly ugly either, but I always felt extremely awkward because of my height. When I was little, it was cool and made me good at basketball, but once I got older, I became much more insecure. I hated that I always stood out in pictures because I was a head taller than my friends and that I had to bend down in order to hear people clearly. I never wanted to wear heels, because I didn’t want anything to make me taller than I was. I even had to go to the chiropractor in my last year of high school because I had back problems from never standing up straight and hunching over all the time. I never owned being tall, because I thought it made me stand out – and not in a good way.
I’ve always known that models are generally pretty tall, but I never associated height with beauty, the way my much shorter roommate did. I thought conventional beauty was a slim body, perfect hair, blemish-free skin, but never especially tall. I assumed that the woman seen in pop culture who many consider conventionally beautiful were much shorter than they were. Of course, there is actually a mix of heights among conventionally beautiful women in the media. But because I was so tall and had always been insecure about that fact, I assumed that all of these women who I considered beautiful were much shorter than I was. Interestingly, my roommate had the opposite reaction: she thought that they were all much taller than she was. The fact is, neither is true. A woman can be beautiful whether she is 5-foot or 6-foot, and, further, she can be beautiful whether she is a size 0 or a size 18.
Girls are raised to aspire to very over-represented, conventional standards of beauty. When inundated with edited photos of perfectly styled women who have professionally done makeup and hair, we tend to assume that we will never be as beautiful as they are. But think about the women in real life that you consider beautiful. I bet that they all have different body types, and I bet at least one of them is built similarly to you. We all are unique in our bodies, but that isn’t something we should shy away from. Embrace your “abnormalities,” whether it’s being tall, being short, having curly hair, having straight hair, or anything else. It can be hard to own your natural beauty, but it will give you a much more positive outlook on yourself if you do. I know I’ll start trying.
Image: photocommunity.de