What?! I have big feet - size ten, to be exact, but I’m also six feet tall. I think that my feet are proportioned to my body and I don’t mind it at all (except for those moments when I first open the shoe box and think, wow, this shoe looked so much daintier in a tiny little six). If my feet were more ‘attractive’ I’d be falling down a lot and mincing around. Personal preference is one thing - you seem to like small women, but we’re not all 5’4’’.
I think people are mostly proportional. Some people seem to be too leggy, others too long-waisted. I’m really long-waisted and sort of leggy (34" inseam), so I’ve been a (n unintentional) midriff-barer for years.
Sorry to disappoint, but my feet are not the length of the inside of my lower arm. They are about an inch shorter actually, and my feet are a size 10/11. Like aurelian I’m 6 feet tall.
Women have smaller feet than men so they can do the “3 steps from the wall” trick[1].
Also they’re inherently lighter than men, since sugar and spice weigh less than rats and snails and puppy-dog tails, so their feet can be smaller and still allow them to maintain lateral stability.
[1] Stand directly against a wall, with your nose touching it. Take 3 steps backwards, exactly the length of your feet, i.e. your toes and heels are touching as you take them. Bend over and allow your forehead to touch the wall. Now try to straighten up without using your arms. Never met a man who can do it, never met a woman who couldn’t.
shijinn :- I don’t think it’s a short person thing. I’ve seen 5’3 men with very pear-shaped (i.e. classically female), thin bodies and tiny feet unable to do it…and I’ve never seen a woman unable to do it, even 5’11" semi-pro swimmers with a docker’s shoulders. I don’t think it’s body shape related at all. I think it’'s just some aspect of pelvic muscle development or even existence that differs between the sexes.At least part of that belief is because I was originally shown it by a myologist[1].
When I taught anatomy, one of the labs had students measure and establish ratios of length for various body parts. As I recall, there were about 15 different parts involved. Parts were measured using bony landmarks so that soft tissue difference did not skew the results
Ratios rather than raw lengths were used so that we could (as an example) compare the nose lenght to the length of the face. Students were surprised when they found that not only were all idividuals proportions pretty much the same, but a small difference (say 5% by actual measurement) would result in a preceived perception of great difference…as in “Wow! he has a really big nose”
The part that had the most differences in proportions between various persons was the thumb. There is a gene which causes some folks to have shorter thumbs than the majority…and the majority have thumbs of pretty comparable lengths.
BTW, my foot is about 1 inch longer that the distance from my wrist and the bend of my arm. I am such a freak!
I understand that as a general rule across the sexes, taller people tend to have proportionately larger feet.
This makes a lot of sense, because as height goes up, weight goes up much faster (double the height, keeping all proportions and mass goes up by a factor of eight), so you’d want bigger feet (proportionately) to support that weight.