Most Men Are Lying About How Tall They Are
The online subculture known as looksmaxxing claims to offer a set of newfangled solutions for men—many of them short, many of them incels—to increase their sexual and social status. On message boards and forums, TikToks and live streams, looksmaxxers trade strategies for sharpening their jawlines, adding muscle, and “ascending” into a higher order of man. The methodology for achieving such goals spans from the mundane (lift weights; eat healthy; take showers) to the deranged (smoke methamphetamine; smash your face with a hammer; inject high doses of anabolic steroids).
For men under six feet, looksmaxxing influencers suggest several solutions for increasing their “sexual market value”: stand on your tiptoes (“tiptoemaxxing”); wear platform shoes; perform spinal stretches; or, to truly ascend, undergo a limb-lengthening procedure that can add up to six inches of height. And men are indeed lengthening their limbs, flying to international clinics, having metal rods inserted into their bones, and then, after a brutal recovery process, relearning how to walk. In what serves as a sort of penultimate climax in the 2025 film “Materialists,” a stunningly rich and handsome bachelor, played by Pedro Pascal, reveals that he and his brother have both undergone surgeries to become taller. “Women just approach us and talk to us now, which never happened before,” he admits. “But you can also tell the difference at work, at restaurants, at airports. You’re just worth more.” The film makes the resonant if not heavy-handed point that the world, and women, favors taller people, that masculine value is enmeshed with height—an argument that the face of the looksmaxxing movement, Clavicular, extends to other self-mutilation practices that aim to make men more beautiful. Rhinoplasties, jaw surgeries, ab implants, limb-lengthening, whatever: these procedures allow a man to defy the biological hierarchy and remake himself into a towering, vascular Adonis.
Merleau-Ponty believed that “the shape of our body” carries with it an “ever-present principle of absent-mindedness and bewilderment,” a spatial and phenomenological experience we can never fully gain access to. Looksmaxxers and limb-lengtheners may disagree. With enough optimization and intervention, their argument goes, the body can be manipulated into becoming fully knowable, mastered, perfect. And, once they become perfect, they’ll never need to tell a lie again.
Some men are just born with it. The San Antonio Spurs star Victor Wembanyama, for instance, has become the most dominant player in the N.B.A. because of his totally anomalous combination of skill, agility, and, yes, height. There’s really never been a player, or a human being, like him before. By the time he was fifteen, he was more than seven feet tall. Three years ago, when he became eligible for the N.B.A. draft, he was regarded by some as the greatest pro-basketball prospect ever. Now, at twenty-two years old, Wembanyama is competing in his first N.B.A. Finals and is already the single best defender in the history of the sport. Listed at seven feet four, he can dunk without jumping, palm a ball with two fingers, and block shots with the ease of a parent playing against a toddler. And then, with the alacrity of a much smaller player, he can break down defenders off the dribble and take pullup threes from the half-court logo. He also appears to still be growing. On TikTok, fans have taken to conducting forensic investigations of photographs of him, attempting to calculate his height against any object in the frame—proof that even the tallest men in the world are not immune from the kind of scrutiny and careful height analysis that women so often engage in when judging a man on a dating app.
Another phenomenon from which basketball players are not immune: lying about their height. Across almost every level of competitive basketball, embellishing one’s height is so common as to be unremarkable. High-school and college players often add a few inches to their listed heights to attract scouts, or to appear more formidable to an opponent. So do N.B.A. players; for much of the league’s history, height reporting relied on hearsay. The Hall of Famer Charles Barkley, who played power forward, was listed at six feet six throughout his career, though he later admitted to being around six feet four—roughly the same height as the shooting guard Michael Jordan. Hakeem Olajuwon was regularly listed as a seven-footer, though it’s understood that he was probably closer to six feet ten. The examples are numerous, the lies incessant: J. J. Barea and Allen Iverson were likely under six feet tall despite being listed as such; big men like Draymond Green and Kevin Love have, in the past, added two to three inches. Paradoxically, some N.B.A. players preferred being seen as shorter than they actually were. Kevin Garnett is allegedly seven feet tall—or seven feet one, depending on whom you ask—but said he was six feet eleven to avoid being pegged as a center. So too for Kevin Durant, who, despite being a verified six feet eleven, marketed himself as six feet nine to maintain positional flexibility, and to avoid the reputation of being a power forward rather than a small forward. (In 2016, Durant told the Wall Street Journal, “When I’m talking to women, I’m 7 feet. In basketball circles, I’m 6-9.”)
