This is an idea I had about small people, short men in particular.
If sex and violence are two of the most popular themes in human experience, why don’t we see more small people, particularly men. There seems to be a bias toward bigger men in both areas.
Look at boxing revenues and you see people generally prefer the heavyweight matches. Maybe the bigger guys are more intimidating? They’re harder hitting, and get more knockouts. Most spectators watching a heavyweight boxing match realise that as a “normal person” they couldn’t go toe to toe with a heavyweight boxer. But with the lighter class boxers, spectators might feel they could hold their own against that guy (even though they couldn’t).
So watching the lighter classes of fighters isn’t as compelling (unless you’re an aficionado) because they’re perceived as not intimidating like the big guys are. When Mike Tyson was describing his life before it spun out of control, he said something like, “If there’re seven billion people in the world, think how you feel when you know that you can beat anyone of them in a fair fight.”
And consider mass market porn, and you’ll see the stature of the men tending to be bigger and taller. There don’t seem to be many shorter male porn stars.
For men, pornography is about sex. Whereas for women, romance trumps sex. But in both pornography and romance novels, the lead male character tends to be handsome, confident, and tall.
Visual pornography is generally catering to the evolved sexual preferences of men for low-investment sex with different partners. Romance novels cater to the evolved sexual preferences of women, the sex happens later in the book, after building tension and a “getting to know the partner” has occurred.
I guess you could make the claim that really tall men aren’t being represented in boxing and pornography. But there’re fewer really tall men than there are short men.
I was just wondering.