Earlier this month, I attended a black-tie function to which I wore heels. To most of you, that sentence is not a cause for much alarm – a girl goes to a fancy event, she wears heels, no one thinks much of it. But for any girl over 5'6", wearing heels becomes an ordeal – a spectacle worth discussing. It seems that once a woman crosses the average threshold of 5'6", and still likes to enjoy in her more feminine side, she suddenly becomes "too tall for those heels." That's what I was deemed when I, standing at 5'11", decided to wear heels to a formal function. “Too tall for those heels.” To put that into perspective for those of you who haven't dealt with such commentary, that's like telling someone that “they're too short for those flats”, “too ‘black’ for that music”, “too ‘white’ for that dance”, or “too old for SpongeBob”.
We live in a society where it has become normal to tell people what they're supposed to be, do, or feel. But really, who are we, as individuals, to tell someone else what they can and cannot do especially if it relates to them as a person; to their genetic makeup. Most often, when we try to limit people based on their preferences and appearance, we don't even realize what we're doing. We've been so trained to see the world in terms of relative norms that we forget that the majority of the world lives beyond those norms. Without even realizing it, we've decided that people need to fit some imaginary ideal that exists only in our minds before they can be considered "normal". What we fail to see is that no one is able to completely satisfy those standards. We objectify one another to the point where we spend the bulk of our time trying to determine how tall is too tall, how skinny is too skinny, how short is too short, how fat is too fat, how black is too black, how white is too white. We spend so much time trying to figure out how far off the people we meet are from this imaginary standard. And when we feel like we've reached a conclusion, we pass a judgment that typecasts them before we even get to know their name.
Instead of shaming, judging, and assuming, we should adopt a culture that celebrates individualism and rejects false norms. A very wise woman once warned me against judging people concerning things that cannot be fixed in 10 seconds. She said that that was the worst kind of insult because you move beyond superficial errors and attack who they are as a person. Maybe once we stop attacking people for what they cannot easily change, we will transcend to a place where acceptance precedes judgment and personality precedes appearance.
