Still on the subject of size, I read a recent article saying that short people, particularly men, are more prone to jealousy. And jealousy leads to all sorts of problems. Crimes of passion have mostly been committed due to jealousy.

So this “shortness” issue deserves to be in the short list of problems that authorities should tackle since the list of its negative implications to society is not really short.

According to the British weekly New Scientist, a study showed that “the more vertically challenged the man, the greater his feelings of jealousy.”

But the study did not mention horizontally over-endowed people and if they, too, have a tendency to be jealous. Come to think of it, this could also apply to fatsos: The wider the girth, the greater the feelings of jealousy, since if you’re horizontally challenged you’ll naturally be envious of curvaceous babes, perhaps even if the curves are implanted.

The study on vertically challenged people was conducted in the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and University of Valencia in Spain. It asked 549 Dutch and Spanish men and women to rate how jealous they felt, and to list the qualities in a romantic competitor that were most likely to make them ill at ease.

Men generally felt most nervous about attractive, rich, strong and taller rivals. Taller men are most successful with women, the study said.

I don’t know why some women prefer taller men. Don’t they risk suffering from stiff neck just from looking up at their mate’s face? Maybe they could afford to risk neck injury for some other considerations. I wonder what could that be.

For women, what counted most in jealousy was the rival’s looks and charm, but these feelings were less intense if the woman herself was of average height, the study said. Women of medium height enjoy the best health, fertility and popularity with men, it added.

Medium height for women could be 5’2” for Asians and 5’6” for Caucasians, perhaps? I’m just guessing.

“Taller women are more dominant and have greater fighting abilities than shorter women,” says the study, which appeared in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

That’s quite understandable, since taller women would have a tendency to look down upon people, both literally and figuratively. Since they consider themselves physically superior to shorter people, they would tend to be domineering.

But take heart all you shorties (including myself I guess). We should not let the giants of this world rule our lives. We should assert that even if we’re vertically challenged, our mind, our abilities, our powers are the same as those of the walking skyscrapers among us.

People are people regardless of their size – my own variation of the theme in “Horton.”

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