I tend to find short women especially attractive so I’m not sure your view that being a 5’1" female hasn’t negatively affected your life is a fair comparison.
Thinking back to my high school days, where female shallowness abounds, there was a particularly short and not terribly intelligent acquaintance of mine. He did poorly with the ladies until he started lifting hard and got ripped. He may have even been using steroids; we weren’t close. After that he had no problem and bedded several attractive ladies in the grade above and the grade below him.
In retrospect he reminds me of Barney Rubble who landed Betty so it certainly is something which can be overcome.
Perhaps if you want to be picky the saying should be “the plural of anecdote is not remotely likely to be useful data”.
You ask: “What is a poll except 1000 anecdotes?” A poll is (if it is to be useful) 1000 answers to carefully chosen questions, collected carefully from carefully chosen persons, so as to avoid bias.
An anecdote is pretty much by definition has major biasing factors. For a start, anecdotes are recollections by someone who wants to relate that recollection, by a person in a position to give the recollection. Straight away one has two grounds for strong bias.
The chances that you can lump a bunch of anecdotes together and get a useful data set are close to nil.
I still think it’s all just preferences. What if I don’t care about pimples or a bit of facial hair, but I’m only attracted to women who wear a size 4 or smaller? Am I a bad person? As long as I’m not letting it determine who I hire or promote, how is it wrong?
If we go down the path of telling people who they should be attracted to, we’re into some weird homophobic, heterophobic, incel type territory. It’s not fair, it’s not nice, but I think the alternatives are even worse. Particularly when I was younger and actively trying to date, I was very disappointed that most women prefer taller men, but I didn’t blame them; I just kept looking for those women who didn’t care about my height.
Agreed. Physical attraction is what it is. My wife had no problem with my being … vertically challenged. She, as she tells it, fell in love with my head of thick curly hair.
As you can see from my self-portrait avatar - she bemoans false advertising now … but four now adult kids later no take backs!