Tall people don't grow up bullied by the short throughout childhood and adolescence. They don't find that bullying carrying over into their adult lives, both physically and verbally, privately and publicly. (In the '90s a columnist in a New York newspaper regularly and viciously referred to Ralph Lauren as "the wee haberdasher.") The psychological assumptions and behaviors that their unusual height engenders go unquestioned. No one, not even in France, talks about the existence of a "De Gaulle complex" as a logical counterpart to the supposed "Napoleon complex." (De Gaulle, by the way, who stood well over six feet tall, once acknowledged privately to an equally tall diplomat that he always distrusted short people.)

Short creatures -- when larger versions of them exist, as in the case of dogs -- are perceived as at best endearingly cute, at worst silly and frivolous. Particularly short humans -- dwarfs and midgets, those who refer to themselves formally as "little people" -- are seen as cute at best, but the more fearsome folkloric association with trolls, gnomes, and other malignant underground figures competes with Santa's elves and Disney's seven dwarfs for priority in the popular imagination.

Probably the best-known unusually short person in the western world today is Danny DeVito; the character through whose portrayal he gained his fame -- Louie, the vicious, callous, tyrannical expediter on the sitcom Taxi -- milked the Napoleon-complex stereotype for all that it was worth, allowing him only an occasional moment of vulnerability or kindness to alleviate what otherwise appeared as relentless malevolence. He has reiterated that stereotype in any number of variations since (even playing an actor who played Napoleon in one movie.)

If it seems that I take this personally, that's because I do. I grew up extremely short for my age, so much so that I was under five feet tall when I arrived in high school as a sophomore. All the way through eighth grade, the numbnuts who ran the public schools I attended demonstrated an inexplicable preference for visual order over alphabetical order. They manifested this by insistently lining us up in what they called "size places." (Do they still do this? I think not.) Which meant the shortest person first. Invariably this resulted in my standing at the head of the boys' line and -- what with girls getting their growth before boys -- often being clearly the shortest in my class of thirty or so.

At that time (the early to mid-Fifties) our cultural environment wasn't as sexualized as it is today, so in grade school and junior high most of us were less aware of the opposite sex in an eroticized way than the average kid today. I found out in retrospect that I had a few friends who had sexual experiences during those years, but they were few and far between. Even petting parties were rare back then -- and I lived in a comparatively liberal urban community.

So I wasn't thinking about sex at the time, exactly, though I knew it existed and had an inkling it was upcoming in the near future. But by the time I left junior high I was certainly conscious of girls. Needless to say, the same control freaks who'd lined us up "size places" in our classrooms also ran the graduation ceremony. In their wisdom, they decided to organize the grand march into the auditorium on the same principle, overriding even the divisions of the different classes graduating that year. Which meant that the order of the day was "size places" for all graduates. Which placed me at the head of the entire line of 200 kids.

Nothing maliciously intended by that, I know, but it definitely hung a big sign around my neck: "Smallest Kid in the Whole School." Nothing I could do about it, so I soldiered on. I did find, however, a mitigation: A cute girl stood at the head of the girl's line, and she was several inches shorter than me. So I felt fine, glowed through rehearsals, and looked forward to walking proudly down the auditorium aisle next to her, all eyes upon us at the front of the queue. Until graduation day came and she took her place -- with her hair piled up on her head, tottering on her first pair of high heels, towering now at least six inches above me.

I don't propose that this shaped either my life or my relation to women. By the time I reached my full growth of 5'6", sometime during my undergraduate years, I'd stopped thinking of myself as small; there were enough other people around me my own size -- friends and classmates and and faculty and administration, male and female -- that I no longer felt unusual. Whatever concerns I'd accumulated in that regard gradually fell away. As an adult, I've had women surprised to learn my height, because they tell me I don't project myself as a small man.

But I've been small, smaller than most of my cohort, in my time. I know that small people, male as well as female, are in general more at risk in the world than large people. I know that, upon entering any room, they command less automatic respect and attention than large people, are attributed less immediate authority than large people. (Of the 45 U.S. presidents so far, exactly nine have stood under 5'8" tall -- while at least a dozen have been 6 feet or more in height.)

And I know that, for reasons hardwired into the female psyche and biosystem, physical size draws women. That goes for women any height, who don't just want men commensurately taller than they are but actually tall guys -- hence the 4'11" girl with the 6'2" first baseman. So boys and men on the short-to-medium side of the scale compete with each other for girls who, all things being equal, would in most cases prefer someone taller. If Danny DeVito's become a babe magnet (and I'm happy for him), it's probably not just his personality but his money and power; put him behind the counter at the 7-11, or in front of an adult-ed classroom as a math teacher, and let's see how much action he gets.

You can even find this disparity in operation in the online and print-media personals ads. Regardless of their own size, few women want men their height, and none want men shorter than themselves. Most want men 4 to 8 inches taller. Not coincidentally, they also mostly want men earning a substantially larger annual salary than they earn. So the assumption (or at least the hope) that height and income go together makes itself felt in those profiles.

'Nuff said. I'm not singing "Shorty's Blues" here. No point resenting this. And nothing's going to change it. But also no point pretending that it ain't so, or that the gradual awareness of it in a man who's less than tall and/or less than well-hung doesn't affect that guy's relationship to the world. Of course it does. We just prefer not to talk about it.