SIZE AND SHAPE
In 1985 a singer named Randy Newman released an unexpectedly popular song called “Short People,” in which he said “Short people got no reason to smile.” Although some listeners got angry at the unremitting string of insults based on size, almost everybody got the joke. Not only is height a source of pride, and lack of it a source of shame, but any time we are stuck for something to feel superior about, we can find people shorter than us and lord it over them. But why? How did size get linked with pride and shame?
As we age, we get larger. Most of us weight between five and ten pounds when born, and between 100 and 200 pounds as adults. We get longer, too. Babies, when uncurled, usually measure about two feet long; by full maturity, most adults more or less triple their birth length. We do not merely grow, we grow “up” because we get bigger in the vertical dimension. These increases in measurable size have tremendous importance to the growing child. Bigness is associated with power—the ability to accomplish tasks—and therefore efficacy. To the child, growing bigger means becoming less helpless and dependent, even though these concepts are not strictly the same. But in the mind of the child they become inextricably linked.
It is not just the child who is focused on size. The growth of children is noted and complimented by adults: “My goodness, what a big girl you are!” “Look how tall you’ve gotten!” “Hey! Look who’s growing up!” There is a clear message, a definite emphasis on the unspoken “Look who’s not little anymore!”
“Big” draws compliments—the verbal accompaniment of positive affect—therefore big is better than small. Anything that makes us a source of positive affect to ourselves, and (within certain limits) to others, becomes a source of personal pride. Thus most moves from small to big are sources of pride, while whatever reduces our size is a source of shame. We praise people by calling them “prominent,” for a promontory is that which sticks out above the rest. Similarly, any reduction in size is likely to trigger shame, as when we cut up or put down another person, tear down a reputation, diminish someone’s self-esteem. When we accuse a man of being “too big for his britches” we are saying that he is behaving as if he carried more weight than is actually his. A “swelled head” is about having too much of your self-esteem based on fantasy rather than real accomplishment, on wish or assumption rather than deed or fact. We psychiatrists are called “shrinks” because, just as other physicians reduce swelling in a joint or any other part of the body, one of our jobs is to reduce the swelling caused by inflated opinions about the self.
Bigness is about power. When we are little children, every increment in height and weight makes us better able to “stand up to” our peers and reduces the possibility that we will be tormented (and therefore humiliated) by somebody bigger. In the world of children, at least to a certain extent, with size comes strength. Although kids grow larger along a fairly predictable path, it is less easy to foretell increments in brute strength. In this matter of muscular attributes we vary, each to the other, much more than we vary in matters of height and weight. Especially is this important in early childhood, when slight differences in measurements make for huge disparity in power. What we experience as small children carries with us throughout life—big means pride, and small means shame.
We take it for granted that children are reared in the company of adults; thus, it is clear that children are always able to evaluate themselves in terms of these adults as their own likely final form. Pretty much, children know how they are going to turn out, the range of possible goals. Then, too, most are brought up around other children, who become therefore an additional standard of comparison.
All of this is pretty easy to understand when viewed at the level of children and authentic alterations in size and power. To a certain extent we would expect children to want to be larger. Some people from childhood—even into adult life—seem obsessed about size, focused inordinately on attributes relating to the axis of big and small. As we will discuss later, it turns out that they have suffered from other shame-based injury, such as a central feeling of not being loved. We humans are great bargain hunters. A prime characteristic of our internal psychological life is our avidity for deals in which we concentrate our attention on matters that resemble what bothers us most—matters of far less toxicity. Thus, notwithstanding how much discomfort a child feels about being short when she wants to be tall, this particular source of shame is a less undesirable focus of attention than the shame that floods us when we feel unlovable.
We insult people by labeling them as smaller than they really are. When, for his own emotional needs, a policeman must show his power, he examines the driver’s licence of the motorist he has stopped and addresses him as James, or in the diminutive as Jim, or (even worse) as Jimmy—ignoring completely whatever status forms this driver’s personal identity. Many southern Caucasians still intimidate and control their African-American employees by addressing them as “Boy.” The trigonometry of size, the ratio of reduction achieved to preexisting self-image, and the exact degree of reduction in size needed to cause shame in any given individual on any given day will depend on other factors. Wherever a person sees himself as having a certain size, or expects that he will be viewed by others as being that size, he is capable of feeling shame when he is exposed as or treated as being smaller.
I hope this sketch of the relation between whole body size and shame or pride helps to convey the breadth of the problem facing anyone who tries to explain how a couple of relatively simple physiological mechanisms become adult emotions. There is an infinitude of possible patterns that can be made into reasons for pride or shame. If the possession of an attribute can make us proud, the sudden “loss” of that possession will cause shame, no matter what the nature of the attribute. Simple enough when it comes to bulk size, to patterns involving the whole self. What about sections of the body, small parts? Can they, too, be sources of shame and pride?
Do you admire the dancing of Fred Astaire? My wife has pointed out that “Fred Astaire was the essence of Art Deco.” He was a master of line as well as movement. Astaire’s linearity stands in sharp contrast to the curvier style of previous generations of dancers. Mikhail Baryshnikov, the preeminent male ballet dancer of our era, described him as one of the greatest dancers in history. Even standing still, dressed in the top hat, white tie, and tails that became his emblem, he seemed to be dancing elegantly. Actors, dancers, comedians who worked with him, friends who knew him off stage, everybody recognized his unique grace.
One of the women who danced with him (one of the many beautiful, supple, talented dancers who are remembered more for the fact that they danced with Astaire than for what they actually did on screen) asked why he had gone into the “lowbrow” world of motion picture dance rather than the classical ballet, where his greatness would have been acknowledged in a more conventional forum. His reason was astonishing. Fred Astaire felt that his hands were too big for classical ballet! He was certain that people would laugh at him for trying to appear graceful. The man who set the standard for masculine elegance and grace lived in shame because he had large hands.
Next time you get a chance, slow down a videotape of his dancing and try to see his hands. The number of tricks he used to hide them is remarkable, especially if you then compare his use of his hands to the work of any other male dancer. Sometimes he ducks his thumb under his palm and pulls the other fingers close together; at other times he curls the fingers. Almost never will you see his hands with the fingers spread out—even in the non-dancing dramatic scenes. Often a dancer will end a step or a complex routine in such a way that our focus is on his hands. Never Fred Astaire. But occasionally you can stop the videotape at just the right frame and study his hands. They were literally huge, especially in proportion to his slim, lithe frame.
So what? Why on earth should that have mattered to the greatest dancer America ever produced? The answer is that the person who decided his hands were too big for classical ballet was not the mature, adult Fred Astaire, the motion picture star admired by millions. The person who was so terribly concerned about his hands was probably a small boy to whom they were for some reason a constant source of shame.
Is the size of other body parts associated with shame and pride? Ask the plastic surgeon, whose life work is the repair of perceived defects. Myriads of people spend large amounts of money in an attempt to purchase a smaller nose or to vary the size of their breasts. Why? Men can be so concerned about the size of their penis that one could fill many books with the anecdotes, slurs, jokes, puns, retorts, and rejoinders designed to counteract the embarrassment associated with genital size. Why? “Body building” has become a national obsession, men and women alike struggling to achieve a degree or range of visible muscularity in conformity with ever-more-exotic norms. Some will take illegally prescribed hormones (steroids) in order to appear more muscular—despite the fact that such medication puts them at great risk of diabetes, early heart disease, and some forms of manic-depressive illness. What underlies this strange and often dangerous quest?
The answer is inherent in the way we grow up learning to handle our affects. Since there is relatively little we can do to prevent affects from being triggered (they are called forth by physiological mechanisms over which we have no control), we are forced to draw conclusions, to form ideas and concepts about our experiences of affect in order to gain some control over them. Through most of our years of growth and development, shame and pride are so often experienced over matters of size that for many of us the seesaw of feelings about ourselves (whether we are flustered and chagrined or calmly self-satisfied, our “position” on the oscillating system of the shame/pride axis) leads us to experience shame as if we were little and pride as if we were big.
Neither the surgical augmentation of one’s breasts nor the exercise-induced hypertrophy of one’s muscles makes one a bigger or a better person—but the sheer mass of people who experience pleasure and pride as a result of these maneuvers forces us to ask why they work to increase self-esteem. Adult humans seem to be able to live in a world of affective barter. We are willing to balance the decrease in self-esteem, the shame that accompanies recognition of one or another less-than-wonderful attribute, against the pride that derives from a completely different, unrelated sort of accomplishment.
Some reductions in size and power are so profound that our only recourse is to humor. The great actor John Barrymore, confined to bed during his final months and forced to accept severe limitations on all aspects of his life, bitterly resented the erosion of his accustomed self-esteem. Alcoholic cirrhosis had destroyed the ability of his liver to synthesize certain substances needed for life and to metabolize the protein in food. Staring at the thimble of wine and the tiny plate of edibles offered him, the Great Profile roused himself briefly, stared at his hapless nurse, and in the voice that had moved audiences for decades said, “And now, would you please bring me a postage stamp. I should like to do some reading.”
In the world of shame and pride, size comes to be a metaphor of tremendous importance. The interest and enjoyment accompanying increases in size, and the shame-amplified impediments to these pleasures attending the recognition that we are somehow smaller than we thought, these affective experiences become the nidus around which are crystallized large portions of our personality.