The Height of Vanity

Why People Want to Grow Taller?

(Xindi Ouyang)

The people of China are are growing taller thanks to the popularity of leg-lengthening surgery. That’s right, we’re talking about a type of surgery that can make you at least two to three inches taller.

The details of the procedure, as you may imagine, are pretty gruesome.

First, the doctor breaks the tibia and fibula, or the bones of the lower leg. Then, a device comprised of two metal rings connected by extendable rods, called the fixator, is screwed into both ends of the broken bone through the skin.

About a week later, the stretching begins. The surgeon lengthens the fixator in small, two millimeter increments. This slowly pulls the broken bones apart, allowing new bone to grow and fill in the gap.

Barring complications such as infection where the fixator is attached to the bones and nerve injury, you can be back up and walking around on newly lengthened legs in about a year.

If all goes well, the three month bone-lengthening period is followed by another three to six months of bone strengthening. During this phase, the patient is confined to a wheelchair and must undergo physical therapy that’s typically described on leg lengthening websites as “extremely painful.”

75,000 yuan (US$11,000)

Leg-lengthening was first performed in the 1950s in the former Soviet Union, and then in China.

Taller Bodies in Indonesia

By E.I.J. 

Many Indonesian people are trying by all means to have taller body. This is evident from the number of ads that promise to elevate the body. From milk to body improvement tool obscure the results.

Since childhood, my parents gave my brother and I drugs and cheese with high growth bias. Many Indonesian people want to be high because they think height is important. They believe with a taller people have more confidence, easier to get a job, not easy to get teased, receive more respect, and women prefer tall men.


BEING TALL
  Alot of people want to be tall for numerous reasons, some want to be taller for sports reasons because in sports athletes are usually tall. On the male side a tall man would bring in more girls because women like tall men. It is studied that tall people earn more money than the average height person. Alot of people drink milk to strengthen the bones and make you grow taller. On a negative side for tall people, the clothes are bigger and harder to find, food intake is more and costly.

-AUSTIN CRISS

Height in Society. Growing or Shrinking?

With societal concerns growing more and more around personal appearance with new advancements in technology to allow for such changes, the world has become obsessed with becoming the ideal being regardless of the pain and torment they are willing to put themselves in. The knee surgery to increase a person's height is just one of those. The entire process take more than a year to complete and each person deals with intense pain on a daily basis. So what would make a person want to undergo such excruciating pain? I looked into the average height differences between the 1960's and present, and the average height these days has changed by one inch. We are one inch taller than the average male and females were only 50 years ago. 

Taking a look at my family, I have relatives that are in their 80's and 70's and when I was little, I always thought that they were so tall, but now that I am the same height, if not taller, I am noticing that my younger cousins are taking up all the air above our heads. It could be genes, but my generation of cousins are about the same height until a group of girls was born into the family, growing past us at an amazing rate. Many of my younger cousins who are barely in high school have already surpassed me in height and it is quite shocking. Did they put something in the chocolate milk after I left from elementary?

With this said, I would make sense that in today's business world that men and women who are taller, seem to be portrayed as being attractive. Who do you think you would choose to take more seriously? Your boss who is tall? Or your boss who is several inches shorter than you? This is the reason why I think more and more people want to get this intense surgery done. In addition to being perceived as being more attractive, to be taken seriously is just as important.

Jovanna Reyes