Tall Women On Height Shaming — Never Shrink Yourself

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Six women talk about how they deal with the experience of being height-shamed on a regular basis.

Kristy Narkunas, 37, 6'5

I was recently in the queue at the shops and I saw someone step up next to me and just stand there looking at me. When I looked to see why this person was standing with his face less than 18 inches from mine, an 80-year-old man, approximately three inches shorter than me, asked How’s the weather up there? I glanced at him and went back to my transaction. He continued to stand there and then explain to me why he asked that, as if I missed the point of his question: Because, you see, I was hoping to get a forecast. I just took a moment to stare off into the distance and find a sigh from about three miles deep into my body.
Kirsten Campbell, 33, 6’1

As a tall child, strangers were brutally rude, there was no filter. It was common to hear people around me loudly debating if I was too tall, or how they were glad they weren’t my height because it was too big for a woman. School was the stereotypical battleground you’d expect for a gangly, tall girl. I remember one time at a school dance there was a brief moment where I’d forgotten about my height for a nanosecond and relaxed; an acquaintance chose that second to pull a chair over to stand on, to jokingly ask me to dance.

Several years ago, while I was sitting on a kerbside in Paris, a stranger saw me sit down, walked over and proceeded to loudly tell the café that I was too big – to my surprise the Parisian diners surrounding me shouted him down and corrected him, by calling me tall.