So I watched The Hobbit – the Desolation of Smaug
over Easter – cosied up by the fire with a dog on my knee, wearing a beanie. Yes, yes, I know, I know. I said I wouldn’t watch it; said I hated The
Hobbit. But a few people told me
to stop being so picky, so finickity, that I should forget about how it bears
precious little resemblance to the book and that I should ignore the fact that
it’s been stretched so far that its plot might snap into three overworked
exhausted pieces. And then the nice
people at ThinkJam sent me a copy, along with a very fetching beanie hat so,
really, it would have been rude not to…right?
And, actually, it was fun. But then it got me wondering. About dwarves. They’re having a bit of a moment right now. I mean Gimli in Lord
of the Rings was a bit of a false dawn but those Hobbit dwarves are pretty
darn cute (well okay, three of them) and then there’s Tyrion Lannister in
Game
of Thrones and then there’s…well…okay, but that’s still four dwarf sex
icons going on, isn’t it?
But then I started thinking about it. In practical terms. And there’s a problem, isn’t there? I mean, you just can’t get around the height
differential. You can’t snog someone who’s
a couple of feet shorter than you are, can you?
Well, you can, but it can’t be spontaneous - you’d have to sink to your
knees or hoik your snogee up onto a handy nearby wall. Okay, you might say, so skip that bit and go horizontal. But then…well…
you can’t attend to both ends at the same time, can you?
Am I being picky here? I’m
not being dwarfist btw.
You’d equally have a problem if your chap was mega tall. I was looking at these pics of celebrities
who have huge height differences and my neck ached just thinking about it.
It’s a funny thing this height thingy,
isn’t it? I clearly remember when I was
at school, a (to my mind) hulking 5’ 8”, a veritable Sansa Stark, thinking that I would have to spend any
date shuffling along the gutter in flipflops, dodging drains, while my hypothetical boyfriend strode
along the pavement in stack heels. I
even started developing a bit of a hump from hunching over. It took me years to walk tall.
But why?
Why does it matter so much? Why
do women want tall men? Or rather, why
do they want men who are taller than they are (because it’s all a question of degree – if you’re 5’2” you’d
probably settle for a Tom Cruise-alike, right?)?
And if you’re 5’2” and still going
after the over-six-footers, basically you should back off and leave them well
alone. The gangly tall girls need them way
more than you do.
But really, why? I hunted around and found very little
research. All that’s out there simply confirms
that women like men to be taller than they are, and men like women to be shorter
than they are. The women surveyed said
they wanted to feel delicate and secure, while the men said they wanted to feel
masculine and protective. Yee-awww…
But again, I started pondering practicalities. Cos all the attraction stuff comes
down to procreation, right? Bottom line,
we are hardwired to fall for people who will give us good babies (when we're young enough to have said babies, of course). And big tall men could be perceived as being a
better bet (to our slow-to-catch up primeval hardwiring) than stumpy little shrimps. But then, if you’re a tiny woman you don’t
want too big a guy, do you, or you’d be stuck trying to push out a monster baby
through your size sub-zero pelvis (now I'm thinking of Twilight – yes, I watch
way too many crappy films and no, I know he wasn't taller but he was dead for pity's sake and rock hard - yes, yes, enough already). So basically
I reckon it’s way better to stick to someone who’s kinda roughly the same as
you – just a bit taller for those snog practicalities.
Which made me think about that
dwarf-elf romance going on in The Hobbit. Are we going to see some elf/dwarf love
action in part three? Probably but they'll fudge it. Cos, let’s be honest, it’s just not
going to work, is it? I mean, the snogs would look downright daft (unless there’s a
handy gutter). And yes, yes, I know he's 'tall for a dwarf' but still...I went checking for pics of Kili and Tauriel together and, yup, you guessed it - there aren't any - well, not standing next to one another. Game of Thrones, of course, is braver - no shilly-shallying there. And, well, Tyrion Lannister...
What you reckon? Would you?
Anyhow.
The Hobbit – the Desolation of Smaug (which reminds me, something else - ‘Smowg’ rather than ‘Smorg’? – do they know that’s how Tolkien said it? Cos I’ve always said Smorg) – not bad. Sorry, very very infeasibly long bracket there. Oh,
and nice song at the end too.
What?
The beanie? Sure. Here you go.
J
