Why Are 'Short Kings' and 'Hot Rodent Men' Having a Moment? "Madwoman" Author Has an Idea (Exclusive)

07/25/2024 12:00 PM

Move over, tall drinks of water. Author Chelsea Bieker digs into why we love shorter men — and what that means

You may remember where you were the moment Jeremy Allen White's Calvin Klein ad broke the internet. Maybe you, like me, viewed it … more than once, maybe even uttering an appreciative yes, chef. As if watching him as Carmi sweat in a hot kitchen and confront his inner demons on The Bear wasn't enough, the famed underwear campaign brought things to a fever pitch, confirming our cultural shift toward the appreciation of unconventional forms of male hotness. Since then this trend is only picking up steam. Even Dunkin' Donuts renamed their small sized coffee "the short king." 

"Short kings" and "hot rodent men" are subverting the long-held standard of male attractiveness. Recently the NY Times Styles team theorized that the celebration of non-stereotypical masculinity could be a backlash to A.I. face and years of snapchat filters, or maybe something even more nuanced is going on. Is there something about the rejection of the tall drink of water narrative that has dominated fairytales, mainstream romantic comedies and old-wave romance novels for so long that makes women feel safe? 

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Personally, I feel ahead of the curve. I've never been attracted to tall drinks of water. My partner of nearly 20 years is 5'7" on a good day, making us the exact same height. What can I say? Short men are just my type. Or so I thought. 

Admittedly before writing my latest novel Madwoman, it always seemed to me that who a person is attracted to is something preset, and out of their control. While I can appreciate beauty in all forms, I'll always skew more Barry Keoghan than Jacob Elordi. 

It wasn't until I crafted my novel's main character, Clove, a woman bent on meticulously rebuilding her life after a childhood dominated by her father's violence, that I realized there might be more to it. 

Clove thinks that if she can achieve a "normal" family of her own, it will heal her, cancel out her violent childhood. She is intentional as she maps out a system of a wellness-forward, Instagram-perfect lifestyle to avoid the abuse that befell her mother. The most important piece of this system is to find what she calls a "Safe" to be her partner. 

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When Clove finally finds the man who will become her husband in a college drama class, she notes, "His body was solid and sculpted but not overbearing … We were about the same height, so he would never glower down at me." 

As I wrote these words, I remember feeling surprised at the character's overtly calculated approach to finding a non-violent partner. In essence, a man unlike her father. And for her, that included finding someone who would not stand taller than her. 

I am not suggesting that height in any way determines a person's potential for violence. Of course it doesn't. My father wasn't an extraordinarily tall or large man, coming in at around 5'11" at his prime. But he was taller and bigger than my mother, and from my child's vantage, he might as well have been a giant. I will never forget what it felt like to look up at him and feel terror. 

For survivors of domestic violence, life is often filtered through the lens of safe and unsafe. I now believe that, as a child and young adult, all I saw when I looked at tall men was a future power imbalance, potential threat to my body, someone who could overtake me in a fight. 

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Like Clove and her mother in Madwoman, my mother and I lived in a high-rise apartment in Waikiki with my father who was prone to red-outs, routine physical and verbal violence and wild mood swings. A trip to the beach could turn on a dime from being a wholesome family outing to an absolute terror show. 

I remember my mother and I running from my father at the fair after he'd become angry at her for smiling at a concessions attendant. We hid in the parking lot under a semi-truck waiting for his outburst to pass. I wanted us to run and never look back. But we always ended up back with him. His rage, or the threat thereof, filled our apartment, infected the air we breathed. Altered who I was on a chemical level.

It became my mission to create a different life for myself. When I fell in love at 17, was it any surprise he was different in every way than my father?

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Seeing my own words take shape on the page, I wondered if my type was not something preordained but rather formulated in those early plastic years of childhood when home was the least safe place of all. 

There is plenty of research to suggest that we choose partners based on emotional precursors, often gravitating to individuals who have complementary yet different skills than our own — opposites attract — or we find the exact right person who will mimic a caregiver in the subconscious hope that we can get it right this time. 

But what drives physical attraction itself feels more opaque. Women have had to be so conditioned toward survival, it sometimes feels impossible to know where patriarchal influences end and our own desire begins.

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Writing Madwoman forced me to see the ways my earliest traumatic experiences have shaped my predilections in every way and affected my attraction and desire in the context of intimate partnership. I longed to bypass the tired cliché that "women marry their fathers" and to strive toward a new, deeper narrative. One that is not merely a reaction to my earliest experiences with men, but something that springs from a more integrated, healed place. A place less tethered to the past, and more in touch with who I am authentically and who I want to be. 

Like me, Clove is eventually forced to snap out of her survival-mode thinking and finally confront a truer version of herself. Untangling who I really am from the version of me shaped by abuse is a life's work. I'm grateful every day that I did find a safe partner whose height, ultimately, has nothing to do with it. 

Rest assured, though, that Clove's type, and my own, (gladly) persist. 

Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker comes out Sept. 3 from Little, Brown and Company and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.

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