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I can tell you this with absolute certainty. As a much above average man in height, but still on the short end of my extended family, I have experienced absolutely zero in social benefits, moral stature, recognition or anything else on the basis of how tall I am. A lot of people I meet seem to go around thinking this, but it simply isn’t rooted in fact at all.
I always tried having a lot of moral consistency and integrity because I was raised that way, but it doesn’t pay off try to remain a pious and morally upright individual who was built for 1950s America, when that culture has been dead for 70 years. Cruel life experience has taught me that overtime, and even as of recent. “No good deed goes unpunished.” I don’t think I’ll ever understand the mentality of the mass of people I meet in today’s world. Maybe that’s for the better, because there’s definitely no logic to what they do.
One undeniable conclusion I’ve come to though is that most people are completely horrible judges of character. I mean it. Straight up. They’re just very stupid people. I’ve had people say I’m too serious. Others say I’m too immature. Others who can’t detect the most obvious red flags and other shit in people they come across, etc. In reality I’m just an ordinary person.
“It isn’t a measure of health how well adjusted someone can be to a profoundly sick society.”
Or more likely you have experienced all of those benefits, and your life would really suck if you were 5'5".
That's the problem with both privilege and discrimination, you can't know the counterfactual. The privileged can't know how bad their lives would be without their privilege, and imagine they would be about the same. The victim of discrimination imagines that their lives would be perfect were they privileged, but that's rarely the case.
This reminds me of a joke/meme I saw on /r/AverageHeightDudes, which the Reddit algo recommended to me for a bit when the Minnesota shootings were a hot topic (even Redditors were doing some mass Noticing that progressives were not so body positive when it came to trying to denigrate ICE agents as chubby manlets). It went something like:
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If someone wants to tell me I have they’re welcome to prove it. To date I see ‘zero’ from it and nobody even willing to try. What advantages are you suggesting I experience solely on the basis of height? I’ll be honest if you’re right or not. I may not know the counterfactual but I can approximate it very well based on how others get treated. If I attain some kind of ‘benefit’ I would be treated the way X is treated. I am not treated the way X is treated, therefore I am not benefitting from it.
If you want to say I can’t know the counterfactual then you can’t know whether I’m benefitting either, because these are all relative value judgments. All I can do is compare experiences. And experience tells me I’m ‘not’ getting treated the same way others are on the basis of height. Yes I get treated very well by some groups of people, but ‘none’ of it is related to height. Zero.
Today I went to BJJ, there were four of us at the 6am open mat, and we rolled for 45 minutes straight of 5 minutes. I rolled with a guy from the local SWAT team, he's 165, and he dog walked me despite my having 30 lbs on him. So clearly size and strength doesn't matter for jiu jitsu! Or maybe it was that he was a college wrestler, and has been training BJJ twice as long as I have, or maybe I'm just not that athletic or coordinated. There's a ton of factors that go into it, so just being big isn't going to tell the story, but ceteris paribus the bigger guy will normally win.
The advantage to height, about 1% lifetime earnings per inch, is one of the best studied theories in economics. The advantage to height in romance is well known and obvious, even if you assume there's no return to attractiveness it's inarguable that the vast majority of women prefer a man taller than they are, so it's pure increased pool of prospects for every inch up to 6'3" or so.
I can't know whether you have a good life or a bad life, a hard life or an easy life, but we can say that your life has likely been easier as a result of being taller than it would have been had you been shorter. No one is saying that everyone over 6' is on easy street, but it's clearly an advantage.
So how you do you figure you haven't had any advantage? No woman has ever admired your height? People don't physically look up to you? You aren't any good at basketball or volleyball?
Among the hardest truths to accept as a human being is that I am both extraordinarily lucky to be who I am, and that I'm nothing really special.
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I really don't think you can be "absolutely" certain about this one. I.e. you don't and can't know how worse your life could've been if you weren't tall.
I remember reading a chart a long time ago, probably in /r/blackpillscience, from some dating page, that showed ratings of men sorted by their and the woman raters. The was a mild positive correlation, but the important part was that the ratings fell catastrophically if the woman was taller. Basically the entire half below the diagonal was red. There's some pretty demonstrable assortative mating going on, the number of couples where man is the shorter one is much smaller than what you'd expect is people paired up regardless of height.
Anecdotally, I know a guy who successfully scored himself at least one girlfriend basically by towering over near her at a concert, then bending down to ask her something face to face. He didn't even mean to hit on her :D It helps that he also has a striking face, I don't want to doxx him but he looks very much like Yuya Fungami from JoJo part 4 anime, minus the tattoos.
(Also he was a founder of /r/UNBGBBIIVCHIDCTIICBG/. Small world.)
I may not be able to tell if things would’ve been worse for me, but I can observe everyone else around me who ‘isn’t’ me. And based on what I see, there’s zero evidence to me that suggests I incur some substantial advantage over others based on 3 inches, a foot, or whatever you want to say. I’m typically not into the content you’re referencing but I think you can cherry pick experiences any way you want to have it. Considering there are people much worse than me in the height department that seem to fare just fine, if height is the only variable you’re controlling for it doesn’t prove very much to me in my own experience. Yeah if I wasn’t as tall, things would not be as good for me as they are, but the presumption is that shorter people in general aren’t doing as well. And that straight up is completely false. I see it every day. If you want to say there’s ‘other’ things going for certain people that validate why that’s the case then that’s almost certainly true. Height isn’t a defining feature of why though.
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