Aside from their much easier-earned gains in the gym, short men have generally had a pretty hard time of it, feeling obligated to make themselves look taller using style hacks or carefully curated clothing choices… until now. It seems the tide could be turning as ‘short king spring‘ is set to bloom.
While being tall used to be a prerequisite for dominating the dating pool, a recent tidal wave of shorter men finding massive success in Hollywood has sparked a long-overdue renaissance for the sub-six-foot man. Jeremy Allen White, Barry Keoghan, and Kieran Culkin are unintentionally pioneering this movement, to which short kings around the world owe a great deal.
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The trend has resulted in a slew of ladies taking to social media to expound their newfound love of short men, with one revealing a particularly interesting feature she identifies in shorter men that more than makes up for the inches missing up top…
While your mind may have optimistically gone to somewhere a little dirtier, this feature is actually a long-undervalued character trait: self-confidence.
‘Barry Keoghan has a confidence that can be found only in short men.’
X User
Another did a roundup of their newfound pinups:
‘Barry Keoghan, Jeremy Allen White, Kieran Culkin, Timothee Chalamet… it’s short king season and I’m here for it…’
X User
Another’s list was even longer…
‘I don’t PLAY about my short man agenda Kieran Culkin, Changbin, Barry Keoghan, Oscar Isaac, Kim Hong Joong, Andrew Scott… I don’t PLAY.’
X User
New York-based ‘VIP matchmaker’ and dating coach Thalia Ouimet cites one particular celebrity couple as being the point of origin for this wider trend: ‘As a matchmaker and dating coach, I noticed a shift when celebrity couple Tom Holland and Zendaya started dating.’ Holland stands at 5ft 10 while Zendaya towers at 5ft 10.
According to data gathered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the average height of men in the US is 5ft7, a fact it seems women are finally accepting and embracing.
The science supports short king spring even further, with a 2014 study by Dalton Conley — a sociologist at NYU — and PhD candidate Abigail Weitzman found that men under 5ft9 make better long-term partners, do more housework, and are far less likely to get divorced than their taller counterparts.
According to psychotherapist Dr. Jenn Mann, the movement has also resulted in men embracing their heights with far more ease, often for the first time in their lives:
‘They are also rejecting the outdated concept that women need to be shorter than a man they are dating… Short kings [are] embracing their self worth and seeing themselves through new eyes. Men are moving away from measuring their value based on height.’
Dr. Jenn Mann
If you’re a short king, we want to hear from you: do you feel that the tide is finally turning on long-held prejudices against short men? Or is this a phenomenon that only effects the already rich and famous, yet to trickle down to the so-called ‘little man’?