As a little girl my greatest wish was to be tall. As a teen, I was called a ‘tall bitch’ by a guy who’s advances I’d rejected on the train home. I’m not quite sure why I was so fixated on the idea or what drew me to the conclusion that being tall was for the best. I distinctively remember being around 7 or 8 and looking up at the year 6s in all of their glory. They were taller than me, larger, stockier. They had an air of importance surrounding them, and their presence in the school was strongly felt. I befriended a group of year 6 girls who all seemed to tower over me. I thought it was very cool, speaking to this innate itch for largeness as a child that proves how grown you really are. Physical markers of development were seemingly all the rage. The only way to prove status. Being tall, regardless of gender was everything then.
I knew the odds were very much in my favour when it came to growing up tall. Whilst my mum’s height is the average for a woman (5ft5), and her mother was quite small, my Dad is 6ft3. My brother also made my dreams of towering stature seem more tangible since he was very tall from his early teens. I was watching my fate unfold in real time, and I was happy. It was incomprehensible that he grew to be tall, and I’d remain small and physically unremarkable by the end of my adolescence.
When I started secondary school, my height steadily grew. Unintentionally, most of my friends around the early years of secondary were also above average in height, if only by an inch or two. Perhaps I subconsciously chose them because of this. Surround yourself with what you want and maybe you’ll achieve it. The majority of us were 5ft6 by the time we were thirteen.
Atmospheric rivalry pervaded my group of friends for the coveted title of tallest. Puberty was my greatest ally. I’d assert that I was the second tallest, feeling meagre with my then 5ft7 frame. I reached 5ft8 by the time I was in year 11 and I was chuffed. Picking up new friends along the way, I now had the title of tallest (albeit shared with one other), and my best friends were 5ft8, 5ft6, and 5ft7, respectively.
The coveting of male attention coincided with my newfound insecurity surrounding matters of vertical length. At 15, I had gone from being proud of my stature to, frankly, being embarrassed of it. My greatest asset had rapidly depreciated in value. Once attention from boys became increasingly important, being tall as a girl was no longer a complimenting attribute, but rather an ailment of sorts to be looked past if a guy really liked you, and/or was tall himself. It was something to be concealed but instead revealed itself rather loudly.
Me at 18, with the girls
An odd, slightly older boy who my best friend was talking to on Facebook at the time, had once messaged her saying he had seen both of us walking home “looking cute in our uniforms” and proceeded to refer to us as dinosaurs because of our height. We reread the message a few times. After digesting the insolence and sheer cheek, too naïve to acknowledge the tactic of negging, I said “he must be tiny because you’re only 5ft6”. He was.
At once my greatest wish to achieve, my acquired height became the bane of my existence as a teen. The common consensus was that being tall as a girl, as a woman, was something undesirable and at times, gender negating. Much of these feelings whittle down to insecurity at its all-time high thanks to pubescence. My late teens were a very awkward time when it came to how I felt about matters of the body. Outside of teenage angst, I was also aware that hegemonic femininity was about being a cute and petite little kitten, a slender dot in comparison to the bulk of an overarching man. The physical manifestation of our inherent subordination. I felt as though I’d be eye level with each man I’d encounter, as if I was world’s largest woman. It was another hurdle to jump over in the realm of dating.
I reached my final height just before I turned 17. I was either the same height, or an inch or two shorter than my male friends. Many tall men however persisted at my 6th form, and each time I’d pass one in the corridor I was reminded of how nice it felt to be loomed over. In a girls school I was up there with the tallest, now in a mixed-sex 6th form, my size seemed much more in proportion.
With age my insecurity ebbed, and I thought about it less and less. Perhaps it was dismantling preset ideas about gender stereotypes and decentring male validation that is all so rampant amongst girls throughout those teen years. Perhaps it was largely due to making it out the other side of puberty. It was likely a harmonious combination of the three.
Though my insecurity shrunk with time, I still swore off heels for a considerable amount of years even in my early twenties, hiding my insecurity behind my adoration for trainers which could never be diminished by a high heel. As I came to being neutral about my height, I was also learning, or rather, returning to loving it.
In my teens I exclusively bought trainers, but as I reached 20, I diversified and got into boots. I acknowledged there was sometimes an occasion that demanded non-sports related footwear, no matter how cool the crep. In my early twenties I found an increasing adoration of heels stir within me, coinciding with the first time I watched Sex and the City, but also with the broadening of my fashion horizons.
I’d save pretty vintage Cavalli heels on my Pinterest board and browse through the heels section of various online outlet favourites. I envisioned what pieces in my wardrobe the daydreamed heels would complement and elevate the look of. A dedication to style outweighed the initial ‘setback’ of extra inches to my frame, and wearing heels ceased to produce unsavoury feelings.
Though I had bought my first pair of heels for my school graduation at 16, they were purchased purely out of obligation to the cause of sophistication, and I didn’t like them much. I bought another pair of open toe velour block heels that fasten around the ankle for a wedding in 2021 for the same reasons. They did the job, but stylistically, they weren’t very me, and I wouldn’t have bought them otherwise.
Still waiting for their debut! ASOS
I now gleam at my petite collection of heels (four and counting!) and actively look forward to occasions where I can wear them. To 15 year old me who wished for nothing more than to shrink down in size, betraying my child-self’s hope for altitudinous proportions, this is unfathomable. She’d think me unbecoming. I like the way heels influence my gait, the magnetism of their click-clack, and how they make the muscles of my legs protrude.
In your typical heels I’m 6ft1, in a heeled boot I’m between 5ft11-6ft depending on the size. If I ever dared to don six inch heels (I’m not sure my ankles are able), I’d be 6ft3. They’re fun and they’re flirty, and no one has ever looked worse in heels. There are also no drawbacks of having increased height. You’re optically privileged, easier to spot out in a room (so lost friends can locate you and attractive men can catch sight of you in a crowd), and because of the heels design, you’re biomechanically forced to strut. Wisdom acquired through age has taught me that real men love long legs. This much will always be true.
A lost screenshot from 2022 during a particular period on Hinge. I wonder if we matched. Surely.
I now stand at 5ft9.5 (the half inch makes a world of difference). In Lidl, an older woman who I heard through my headphones beckoned me over to reach 4 tubs of Greek yogurt for her. “You’re tall” she insisted, with a look of despair at her inability to reach them. Admittedly, I still had to go on my tip toes to reach them, but it made me smile that I’d been able to be of good use and at the irony that this essay was bubbling in my head moments before she’d asked me.
The camera angling of this is everything. Sex and the City S3 Ep2
I admire my height, and I love my legs. Indeed, my infatuation with the latter has increased since going to the gym, perhaps to the point of reaching vain proportions. Though when I think about my appreciation for them, it comes back to the reason why I strived for tallness as a child. When you are young, height and being physically bigger represented strength and power. This can be said of admiring muscle growth, it is the growing strength I feel within my body that is then reflected physically that I enjoy. In our early youth, growing was always the goal, it was the promise of growth that our parents tricked us into eating vegetables with.
It is in adolescence that as girls, through our gendered socialisation, we lose sight of this. As a teen, when I quickly learned that the best thing for a woman to be is small, suddenly I no longer desired physical representations of strength. Growth was no longer the prize. Rather, everything was to decrease in order to demonstrate my worth and heighten my desirability. I placed my value on a specific definition of beauty framed around constricting ideas of femininity only rewarded externally by others. As I aged out of teen hood, reframed my thinking, and in doing so became much more self-assured, I fell back in love with the thing that as a child I was right to admire in the first place. It is strength within the body that we should admire most (and that truly highlights all of its wonder), not the size.
Like all prior insecurities that we always eventually overcome, I look back and wonder how it ever could have been a site of contestation in the first place. The time we waste. Retrospection is annoyingly comical like that.
Here’s to all my fellow women of the long leg!
Like Mother like son, Rumi too loves a good heel.
Queencoc0 Talks 
Leave a comment