Are Tall Men 'Slayers'?

Slenderchad isn't real, he can't hurt you

Chad: the central figure of black pill lore. He is thought to delight in an endless parade of sexual escapades by virtue of his genetic superiority. The features which receive the lion’s share of attention from black pillers are facial attractiveness and height. These are thought to be the main determinants of men’s sexual and romantic success, the only real dispute is over the relative importance of each. Today we will be investigating height and its association with men’s sexual partner count. Are tall men the ‘slayers’ (highly promiscuous men) which black pillers make them out to be?

Let’s begin with a study by Frederick & Jenkins (2015) which seems like it’s started to garner a bit of attention as of late. This study analyzed the results of a survey posted to MSNBC.com, which seems like it was conducted in 2006. The participants were 60,058 heterosexuals between the ages of 18-65, with a mean age of 37.

The below graph shows mean lifetime sex partner counts by height. What it reveals is that while the shortest men report marginally fewer partners, past 5’7 there isn’t a notable effect. The difference between a 5’2 gnome and a 6’2 quarterback was a mere 4 partners, about 1/3rd of the mean partner count of the latter.

Frederick & Jenkins (2015)

In the table below, very short for men was categorized as 5'2-5'4, short 5'5-5'7, average 5'8-5'10, tall 5'11-6'1, very tall 6'2-6'4, and extremely tall 6'5+. A rule of thumb based on Cohen’s suggestion is that a d value of 0.2 represents a small effect size. The difference between very short and tall men was d = -.22, so barely qualifying.

Frederick & Jenkins (2015)

The linear regression model which controlled for education, BMI, and ethnicity and revealed an effect size of 0.07, falling to 0.05 when including ethnicity interaction effects (0.04 for women).

Seffrin & Ingulli (2021) employed data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, using lifetime sex partners as reported in Wave IV, conducted in 2008 when subjects were 24-32. For height, their regression analysis yielded a coefficient of 0.03 (n = 5,635). It had no effect on non-romantic sex partners or having committed infidelity.

For the following meta-analysis, I drew on three nationally representative US surveys: The General Social Survey, National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, and the National Survey of Family Growth.

I got the effect size for Mosing et al. (2015)—which utilized data from the Swedish Twin Registry—from the data provided by Lidborg et al. (2022).

Since there are numerous high-quality large datasets owing to height being a readily quantifiable metric, we can afford to be picky—we’re not missing anything important by excluding small studies with 50-200 subjects.

The pooled random effects estimate: .04. This would mean height explains well under 1% of the variance in men’s lifetime sex partners.

Meta-analysis on men's height and lifetime female sex partners

We do see some heterogeneity, mainly caused by the big fat zero shown by NHANES. In this survey (as well as Add Health) height was objectively measured rather than self-reported, so it might actually be closer to the reality. Still, while it seems like men and women both slightly over-report their height on average, self-reported and objectively measured height correlate remarkably well, typically at .95 or higher.

While it’s not always a good idea to mix bivariate (just two variables) and partial effects (i.e. the regression coefficients from Frederick & Jenkins and Seffrin & Ingulli) in a meta-analysis, I ran a regression on the NSFG data controlling for age, education, ethnicity, and BMI and the effect of height didn’t significantly differ.

A similar graph to that seen in Frederick & Jenkins is produced when including all ethnic groups, but when limiting the sample to non-Hispanic whites, the line appears to be almost completely flat¹.

Running separate correlations for height and lifetime sex partners for Hispanics, non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks, and non-Hispanic others produced a value of .01 for whites and values between .08-.1 for the others. There’s also the fact that different ethnic groups vary in both height and sexual partner histories (e.g. Hispanics are both shorter and report slightly fewer sex partners) which could skew the results when not controlled for.

Now let’s look at NHANES. Running separate correlations produced no significant results for any groups this time (-.02-.02). For the following graph I set the maximum age to 50. Since the first survey was conduced in 1999-2000, the oldest participants will have been born around 1950. Therefore they will have been beginning their sexual lives at around the peak of the sexual revolution which black pillers believe was the beginning of the end for ‘sub-8’ men.

I also ran some regressions on the NSFG surveys which had STD data available and found no effect of height on having been tested or treated for an STD in the past year:

Logistic regression on having been treated for an STD in the past year

Height also seems to have no relation to men’s number of one-night stands specifically:

Meta-analysis on men’s height and total number of one-night stands

Nor extra-pair copulation partners (contrary to the ‘dual-mating hypothesis’):

Meta-analysis on men’s height and total number of extra-pair copulation partners

But what about dating apps?

Regarding the Frederick & Jenkins study, the incel wiki provides these caveats:

Some criticise this study due to the age of the sample, the date of the study, and the selection method (users of a mainstream media TV companies website in the United States), claiming this may not be representative of contemporary dating.

We’ve established that the representativeness of the sample doesn’t seem to have been an issue. Probably the most common objection to the data I’ve shown thus far though is that for the most part it precedes the introduction of dating apps, which are thought to have ruined the dating landscape for the majority of men (in reality they’ve probably had very little impact). Is it now six feet or bust, with tall men all of a sudden feeling like Muslim martyrs in paradise? To test this I have done another meta-analysis, this time limiting the studies to those conducted after the introduction of dating apps, all with young male samples².

What do we see? A virtually identical estimate of 0.05 for the random effects model. Tall men don’t appear to be any more ‘chad’ than before.

Meta-analysis of young men’s height and sexual partner number post-dating apps

There is a meme graph that purports to show height filters set by women on Bumble, with close to 70% of men below 6 feet tall filtered out. This may be an instance of such a graph being outright fabricated. I haven’t seen any evidence to suggest that it’s genuine. While it lists Statista as a source, it doesn’t appear to exist on their website, and Bumble themselves deny ever releasing such information. Regardless, even assuming it were real there would be a selection bias due to women with more strong height preferences being more likely to set the filter. Then there are the more general points regarding dating apps: gender imbalance, hook-ups rarely occurring, etc.

Why doesn’t tallness make men sex machines?

We’ve established that height has for all intents and purposes no connection to men’s ‘sexual success’. What are we to make of this? Even a lot of ‘normies’ are probably surprised by these results as the ‘tall pussy magnet’ is hardly an uncommon trope. There is also no shortage of studies showing women displaying a preference for taller men (though of course only up to a point, and the height differences people desire are largely dependent their own height). How do we square this with the null results? Here are some potential reasons:

• For most women it might be the case that men taller than themselves have passed the bar and anything past that point is at most a bonus, so even most short men have an adequate dating pool.

• When it comes to overall physical attractiveness, height might be an overrated component. In Kordsmeyer et al., 80 female raters rated eight sets of video recordings of men on sexual attractiveness. These ratings had a nonsignificant .12 correlation with the men’s height.

• Since most sexual activity occurs within the confines of a relationship, this limits the room for variance. On the other hand, a similar proportion of men across the height distribution were promiscuous, and it doesn’t seem like there is a relationship between height and non-relationship partners either (it’s difficult to see how there could be one for one-night stands but none for lifetime sex partners). There is also the idea that serial monogamy can lead to ‘de facto polygyny’ through sequential sharing of ‘high value men’, and this would also cause a positive correlation with lifetime sex partner count.

• Taller men may tend to have a more long-term mating orientation, practicing quality over quantity. After all, height correlates with intelligence, education level and socioeconomic status, even if only weakly. However, there was no correlation either way between height and sociosexuality (which basically measures how oriented toward short-term uncommitted sex someone is) in Mosing et al. I also found no association between height and short- or long-term mating orientation in the raw data provided by Fajardo et al. (2022). Maybe thisControlling for educational attainment in the NSFG also only strengthened the effect of height by about 0.004.

• Even for men promiscuity is less about desirability and more about disposition and behaviour. Sociosexuality, extraversion, and dark triad traits seem to correlate stronger with sexual outcomes than do physical traits. Some have also suggested that intrasexual contest competition has played a larger role than female choice on men’s mating success, and may still operate today in a more subtle form (though you'd think height would be beneficial here as well).

• Shorter men exert more mating effort to compensate.

There are also of course other considerations aside from body count. Another criticism of this data is that it doesn’t say anything about partner quality—it could be the case that taller men’s partners are more attractive and that the shorter men are ‘scraping the bottom of the barrel’. Since we see assortative mating for attractiveness, there may also be cross-trait assortment for attractiveness in women and height in men. One study found a nonsignificant correlation of .12, but a significant correlation of .27 when instead measuring the women’s attractiveness relative to the man’s, I guess implying that it compensated for lower facial attractiveness in men.

So far in my search for the game changing effect height is supposed to have I’ve had little luck. I’ve also failed to find it in the case of reproductive success, which tends to show a quadratic effect whereby very short and tall men are less fertile. Relationships aren’t looking much more promising either. It’s possible that tall men’s relationships are more pleasant owing to greater enthusiasm from their partner. These questions will likely be covered in future installments. At this stage I don’t think it’s possible to squeeze out an effect that’s close to as dramatic as what internet discourse would have you believe, but I try to be charitable. For now, what we can say is that you don’t have to let slenderchad keep you up at night any longer.

References

1. Frederick, D. A., & Jenkins, B. N. (2015). Height and Body Mass on the Mating Market: Associations With Number of Sex Partners and Extra-Pair Sex Among Heterosexual Men and Women Aged 18–65. Evolutionary Psychology, 13(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/1474704915604563

2. Seffrin, P., & Ingulli, P. (2021). Brains, brawn, and beauty: The complementary roles of intelligence and physical aggression in attracting sexual partners. Aggressive behavior, 47(1), 38–49. https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.21934

3. Mosing, M. A., Verweij, K. J. H., Madison, G., Pedersen, N. L., Zietsch, B. P., & Ullén, F. (2015). Did sexual selection shape human music? Testing predictions from the sexual selection hypothesis of music evolution using a large genetically informative sample of over 10,000 twins. Evolution and Human Behavior, 36(5), 359–366. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2015.02.004

4. Lidborg, L. H., Cross, C. P., & Boothroyd, L. G. (2022). A meta-analysis of the association between male dimorphism and fitness outcomes in humans. eLife, 11, e65031. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.65031

5. Strong, H., Luevano, V. X. (2014). Prenatal androgen exposure predicts relationship-type preference but not experience. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science.

6. Kordsmeyer, T. L., & Penke, L. (2017). The association of three indicators of developmental instability with mating success in humans. Evolution and Human Behavior, 38(6), 704–713. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2017.08.002

7. Kordsmeyer, T. L., Hunt, J., Puts, D. A., Ostner, J., & Penke, L. (2018). The relative importance of intra- and intersexual selection on human male sexually dimorphic traits. Evolution and Human Behavior, 39(4), 424–436. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2018.03.008

8. Međedović, J., & Bulut, T. (2019). A life-history perspective on body mass: Exploring the interplay between harsh environment, body mass, and mating success. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 13(1), 84–92. https://doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000136

9. Polo, P., Muñoz-Reyes, J. A., Pita, M., Shackelford, T. K., & Fink, B. (2019). Testosterone-dependent facial and body traits predict men's sociosexual attitudes and behaviors. American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council, 31(3), e23235. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.23235

10. Rhodes, G., Simmons, L. W., & Peters, M. (2005). Attractiveness and sexual behavior: Does attractiveness enhance mating success? Evolution and Human Behavior, 26(2), 186–201. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2004.08.014

11. Prokop, P., & Fedor, P. (2013). Associations between body morphology, mating success and mate preferences among Slovak males and females. Anthropologischer Anzeiger; Bericht uber die biologisch-anthropologische Literatur, 70(2), 121–135. https://doi.org/10.1127/0003-5548/2013/0284

12. Von Borell, C. J., Kordsmeyer, T. L., Gerlach, T. M., & Penke, L. (2019). An integrative study of facultative personality calibration. Evolution and Human Behavior, 40(2), 235–248. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2019.01.002

1. Some info about the surveys used in the NSFG graph: 50+ was the cap for lifetime sex partners. In most surveys the upper age bound was 45 though in one it was 50. 15 was the lower age bound but I set it to 18. In one survey the lower height bound was 63 inches and below, in one 65 and below, and in the others 64 or below. In one of them the upper age bound was 77 inches or above, and in the rest it was 76 and above. This is why there might appear to be less data points in some of these bins than you’d expect. I recoded height and partner counts past the limits shown in the NHANES graph to make it more readable.

2. In the NSFG and GSS data, I set the age range to 18-30 and this time used the question on sex partners in the past year for the correlations so as to avoid encounters that pre-dated dating apps. This is also the measure used for Kordsmeyer et al. (where T2 was a follow up survey 18 months after the first), Mededovic & Bulut, and Polo et al. For Kordsmeyer & Penke, total number of one-night stands was used, and for von Borell et al., sociosexual behaviour was used (which combines sex partners in the past year, total ONS, and total sex partners without long-term relationship intentions). In terms of participant ages, the range was 19-30 with a mean of 23.7 for Kordsmeyer & Penke, 18-34 with a mean of 24.2 for Kordsmeyer et al., a mean of 23.7 for Mededovic & Bulut (for the whole sample including women), 18-38 with a mean of 22.4 for Polo et al., and 18-29 with a mean of 21.5 for von Borell et al. It can take a bit of time for studies to be published, but generally the data would've been collected some time within the prior year.