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Now, I want to be clear that my purpose in making this post isn’t to mock the titular Tall Girl, Jodi (although her long-suffering attitude makes her eminently mockable). There is a grain of truth to the idea that tall women and girls are often made to feel bothersome/lesser/taking up too much space because of our height. And yes, I say us because, though not as tall as Jodi, I, too, was a “tall girl” in high school (I’ve been 5’9” / 175 cm since I was about 13, which is well above the average height for women both worldwide and in my country). And while it was mostly a non-issue, I did get a few irksome comments from busybodies about how I should wear flats to make boys feel better/should slouch to look more “normal.” In any case, teenagers have angsted over much stupider things.
Instead, I want to examine why I think this movie got made in the first place. And I want to start with the idea that these movies aren’t just about tall women and girls—in a sneaky way, they are actually about centering and validating short men and boys (the “manlets” in the title lmao).
Now, obviously, there is nothing inherently wrong with being a short guy, just like there is nothing wrong with being a tall girl, and some short men are lovely. But I think most of us on .org are already very familiar with the antics of entitled, insecure “short kings.” These men often complain about women not being attracted to them or wanting to date them, and if they do get with a woman taller than them, they punish her in small ways, because they are jealous of her height and angry that she effortlessly makes them feel insecure and emasculated.
Now is the perfect time to mention that the main writer for Tall Girl, Sam Wolfson, is 4’11” (150cm). When I learned this, a lot of odd choices in the movies suddenly made sense, and I saw them in a more sinister light.
First, Jodi’s overblown (by any reasonable standard) concerns about being tall begin to feel like a neg. Yes, the movie seems to be about positivity on the surface, but just by constantly being bringing up Jodi’s height as something it’s “relatable” and reasonable to be embarrassed about, the movie pathologizes being tall. (I mean, think about it. There’s no “Tall Boy” movie, because that would be ridiculous.) The movie, like most Netflix romcom offerings, is aimed at teenage girls, who are hypersensitive to the idea that they need to fix their bodies to have snatched waists/thigh gaps/no hip dips/whatever. My intuition is that constantly telling these girls their height might make them feel embarrassed is likely to introduce a new insecurity where none may have previously existed. This may be the point—or possibly Wolfson, believing these girls are already insecure, is simply getting an ego boost out of portraying that in his movies.
Now that Jodi’s (and our tall female viewer’s) self-esteem has been undermined, enter the knight in shining armor: Jodi’s friend Jack, a certified Manlet who probably uses the term “friend zone” unironically, and who asks her out constantly, despite her never giving him any encouragement. (She’s not attracted to him because he’s short.) If that weren’t enough to set off your alarms (it should be), in the first film alone Jack tells Jodi she has no right to her standards (“I just think it's crazy you won't go out with me just 'cause what? You think that at any moment some taller-than-you, funny, intelligent, nice, perfect guy is just gonna walk through that door? I mean, that's, come on, that's crazy,"), utters a bizarre neg about how her potential babies with rival love interest Stig would have to be birthed via c-section because they’d be so big, sabotages her relationship with Stig, and, oh yeah, watches her sleep and tries to touch her hair without her consent. But hey, it’s ok because he loves her for who she is! He bought her a pair of platform heels! He carried around a milk crate so he’d be taller than her if they ever kissed!
(Which, side note, is just hilarious to me. Why can’t he just kiss her while she’s leaning down, if he’s so accepting?) Bask, Jodi, bask in his magnanimity!
Instead, I want to examine why I think this movie got made in the first place. And I want to start with the idea that these movies aren’t just about tall women and girls—in a sneaky way, they are actually about centering and validating short men and boys (the “manlets” in the title lmao).
Now, obviously, there is nothing inherently wrong with being a short guy, just like there is nothing wrong with being a tall girl, and some short men are lovely. But I think most of us on .org are already very familiar with the antics of entitled, insecure “short kings.” These men often complain about women not being attracted to them or wanting to date them, and if they do get with a woman taller than them, they punish her in small ways, because they are jealous of her height and angry that she effortlessly makes them feel insecure and emasculated.
Now is the perfect time to mention that the main writer for Tall Girl, Sam Wolfson, is 4’11” (150cm). When I learned this, a lot of odd choices in the movies suddenly made sense, and I saw them in a more sinister light.
First, Jodi’s overblown (by any reasonable standard) concerns about being tall begin to feel like a neg. Yes, the movie seems to be about positivity on the surface, but just by constantly being bringing up Jodi’s height as something it’s “relatable” and reasonable to be embarrassed about, the movie pathologizes being tall. (I mean, think about it. There’s no “Tall Boy” movie, because that would be ridiculous.) The movie, like most Netflix romcom offerings, is aimed at teenage girls, who are hypersensitive to the idea that they need to fix their bodies to have snatched waists/thigh gaps/no hip dips/whatever. My intuition is that constantly telling these girls their height might make them feel embarrassed is likely to introduce a new insecurity where none may have previously existed. This may be the point—or possibly Wolfson, believing these girls are already insecure, is simply getting an ego boost out of portraying that in his movies.
Now that Jodi’s (and our tall female viewer’s) self-esteem has been undermined, enter the knight in shining armor: Jodi’s friend Jack, a certified Manlet who probably uses the term “friend zone” unironically, and who asks her out constantly, despite her never giving him any encouragement. (She’s not attracted to him because he’s short.) If that weren’t enough to set off your alarms (it should be), in the first film alone Jack tells Jodi she has no right to her standards (“I just think it's crazy you won't go out with me just 'cause what? You think that at any moment some taller-than-you, funny, intelligent, nice, perfect guy is just gonna walk through that door? I mean, that's, come on, that's crazy,"), utters a bizarre neg about how her potential babies with rival love interest Stig would have to be birthed via c-section because they’d be so big, sabotages her relationship with Stig, and, oh yeah, watches her sleep and tries to touch her hair without her consent. But hey, it’s ok because he loves her for who she is! He bought her a pair of platform heels! He carried around a milk crate so he’d be taller than her if they ever kissed!
(Which, side note, is just hilarious to me. Why can’t he just kiss her while she’s leaning down, if he’s so accepting?) Bask, Jodi, bask in his magnanimity!
