Born To Be Short: How My Height Is Challenging Hegemonic Masculinity

By Martín Akamine-Alvarez | Photo by Lizzy Morearty

If you are a person who is alive and doesn’t live under a rock, you can feel something shifting. The faint dangling of a carabiner… the matchaflation… women being unable to get tickets to Clairo shows. You can feel the echoes around the CAS hallways. Yes folks, it's time to be scared of men again… but in a different way. Men are wearing selvedge denim jeans, thrifted tees, wired headphones, spilling matcha all over themselves because they wanted to get with the cool art hoe at Pavement and not come off as a scary guy. But let's be real, you can’t have it both ways. A tote bag is their version of a pushup bra. But it won’t work because we already know what they are. 

“What should I do about this, Martín? How do we fix this?” I know you’re saying those exact words right now. The answer is simple. Men need to shrink. That's what I’m doing.

I’m 5’8 proper. Personality to match too. A tinge of Little Man Syndrome, and a head that's disproportionately bigger than the rest of my body. Not 5’7 and ¾, not in shoes. I’m 5’8 fair and square. But I'm working on making myself smaller.

How am I doing this? Well, thanks to some help from my Sargent friends, I found out that if I sit on the singular seats facing inward on the greenline, the bouncing and waning of the train actually helps to shrink your body. Both the shaking of the train car and the crushing feeling of having no one to sit next to leads to the hormones in your body making you tinier. Since I began this regimen, I’ve already shrunk 2 inches. “But 2 inches is not that much Martín!?!” That's not what your mom said last night. 

Why? Why am I doing this? Because we, as men, don’t deserve it. Call it integrated feminism, call it performative, I don’t care. I’m doing my damn part in the struggle against the patriarchy. After all, Marx did say we must reach a “stateless, moneyless, heightless society” and I don’t play about Big Karl.  

The way I see it from down here, men used to be like wolves, and not in the cool “ooo cool I’m a wolf” way but in the “he’s misogynistic and might kill you” way. But performative men have become something worse: a wolf in sheep’s clothing, pretending to be harmless but actually will still post revenge porn of their ex girlfriends. However, if you follow my lead and decrease your height, the absolute worst you can be is a nuisance. Oh you pissed off a 5’6 man at a party? The worst he can do is take his anger out by pawing at your legs like a jack russell terrier. But piss off a lumbering giant? Your fighting chances just worsened. In order to counteract this, I’m also on a strict diet to reach victim weight for anyone around 5’2 and above. 

“But this is a terrible idea, I don’t want to be short, people won’t want me!” Boy, put that Clairo down, and grab you a seat. Never in history has it been more socially acceptable to be short. If I existed in the time when circuses did freakshows, people would be paying top dollar to see me at the towering height of 5 '6. But now, look at the discourse on short men. “Short king!” “Short king with a face card!” “Aww he's so cute I want to impregnate him.” Do you not feel the love? It's our time to shine, it's our time to have our moment in the Sun, because before, we were overshadowed by the tall overlords of the world. Your jeans- I mean genes are perfect. You were born this way, and it's time to embrace that.