Midgets

Factual Questions
1

I am shocked, shocked at the dearth of midget information in the S.D. archives.

Do midgets (yes, I know little people is more PC but isn’t midget a subset of that?) have proportionally small peni?

2

There is a difference between midgets and people born with dwarfism (no offence intended but I don’t know the official medical term). People born as midgets have their bodies in proportion, whereas people born with dwarfism don’t (they will have larger heads and chests, etc).

Some info here:
http://kidshealth.org/parent/medical/bones/dwarfism.html

I am sure a general internet search will find more information for you.

I saw a very sad documentary on the plight of people with dwarfism in the UK, and how hard they found it to find work. Many of them only ever manage to work the three-month panto season at Christmas in things like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The world we live is in barely accessible to them, yet because they can walk, we don’t tend to think of them as disabled in the same way we do people in wheelchairs.

Both “dwarf” and “midget” aren’t considered PC terms any more, btw.

3

>Both “dwarf” and “midget” aren’t considered PC terms
>any more, btw.

Of course. I cannot think of a single term describing a physical defect which has not become un-PC and replaced and you may bet that whatever term is considered “correct” now will be replaced yet again. It’s as though changing the term will somehow make the condition more palatable. Thus, we go from “crippled” to “handicapped” to “disabled” to “challenged” and “deaf” or “blind” to hearing or sight “impaired.” It’s rather stupid.

4

Evidently it’s not so stupid to the people who are themselves so affected, since they are usually the ones leading the opposition to the older, and often insulting and degrading, terms.

5

The correct term for people of extremely short stature is “little people”.

I’m surprised that they seem to have such an employment problem in the UK, istara. I’ve seen a number of documentaries on little people in the U.S., and most of them seem to live fairly normal, well-adjusted lives, hold regular jobs, etc. One is even mayor of a city in Texas. I see a number of little people headed to work each day in the financial district where I work.

filmteknik - Terms such as cripple and midget have been rejected because they have a long history of being used as insults. OTOH, blind and deaf are perfectly sensible terms which are still used by blind and deaf people. Calling people by terms which they don’t find hurtful isn’t stupid, it’s polite.

6

But there isn’t anything insulting about “midget”; it’s the proper term as opposed to all the truly insulting epithets you could come up with. It’s their paranoid, defensive attitude that makes them assume that people mean to insult them when they use the term.

I’m suprised that “little people” is the preferred term. One would think they would find it rather, uh, belittleing. But filmteknik’s point is that, in 10 or 20 years, they probably will.

7

That isn’t stereotypical? Somebody tell me it isn’t…

8

Little people prefer to be called little people because that term does not have the unfortunate, stereotypical connotation that “midget” does. This doesn’t mean that every person who uses the term “midget” is trying to be insulting, it only means that little people would be preferred to be called by a term without an unsavory history.

The Little People of America use the term “little people” to refer to anyone of short stature (under 4’10") and “dwarfism” to refer to a number of medical conditions that can cause short stature. If “little people” came to be used as an insult, or if people started telling offensive “little people” jokes, the little people would probably try to find a separate more neutral term.

From the LPA FAQ:

The FAQ includes a lot of great information about dwarfism, but unfortunately does not answer the question posed by the OP. Since there are more than 200 kinds of dwarfism, some caused by genes and others caused by hormones, it is probable that that answer is not the same for all little people.

9

Let us not have a debate in this forum about whether political correctness is good or bad, because there are no factual answers to that question. I feel dirty saying this, but let’s stick the question of how big their penises are.

biblophage
moderator GQ