# How tall (or short) is too tall (or short) for you to find attractive?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-tall-or-short-is-too-tall-or-short-for-you-to-find-attractive/723796>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [June 29, 2015, 5:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-tall-or-short-is-too-tall-or-short-for-you-to-find-attractive/723796 "2015-06-29T17:34:44Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 48

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**Author:** ![Senegoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senegoid/32/6606_2.png) [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)\
**Post date:** [June 30, 2015, 12:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-tall-or-short-is-too-tall-or-short-for-you-to-find-attractive/723796/48 "2015-06-30T00:11:09Z")

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A bit more thoughts on this, from an earlier-cited thread (emphasis added):

> [@Women: would you date a short guy?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-would-you-date-a-short-guy/682227/1):
>
> **I always assumed it was more difficult to date if you are a short guy, but according to this [cite](http://nypost.com/2013/12/08/short-men-dont-stack-up-with-nyc-women/) it is damn near impossible.** OK so maybe its not the best cite, it is the NY Post quoting a study done by a dating site. But it is a good jumping off point.

That sort of thing is pretty blatantly extreme on dating sites, that being the place where, y’know, dating allegedly happens (although I’ve heard to the contrary). It’s like saying the reason money gets stolen from banks is because that’s where so much of the money is.

There’s absolutely nothing new or unique to dating sites, that the females there all want Paul Bunyan and nothing less. It goes at least as far back as the stone age, before Internet, when newspapers published personal ads in their classified section, and all action was done by U. S. Snail Mail. Y’all know the old jokes of the day: Farmer ISO wife, must have horse. If interested, send picture of horse.

There were even whole regional publications (similar to Classified Flea Market) devoted just to personal ads. In the S. F. area, it was Lifestyle.

You know how help-wanted ads always list 30 column inches of experience requirements, more than most prospective applicants could accumulate in a typical 40-year career? Dating ads were indistinguishable from that. Every ad contained two _lengthy_ lists of unbelievably superlative adjectives (USA’s), one self-describing the advertiser, and one describing the advertiser’s ISO.

Even then, ONE adjective (including some synonyms or similar phrases) stood way out as being _by far_ the most prevalent: “tall”, in ads by females describing the males they wanted.

I always wanted to get my hands on an electronic, computer-readable copy of those publications. I wanted to write a program to scan the ads, and build a catalog of all the USA’s in all of them, and build histograms of their usage frequencies in four categories:  
[ul][li] Males’ USAs describing themselves;[/li][li] Males’ USAs describing their ISOs;[/li][li] Females’ USAs describing themselves;[/li][li] Females’ USAs describing their ISO.[/ul][/li]It was quite clear that “tall”, in the last category above, was _by far_ the most frequently-appearing USA of the whole lot.

ETA: Females also often mentioned themselves as “slender” or any of dozens of synonyms, and occasionally as “heavy” or any of a dozen or so euphemisms. But IIRC, males rarely listed “thin” or any such term as an ISO requirement. Oh, but that’s just because all those males are _desperate_, y’know, right? :dubious:

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