Red Room Where the Writers Are

While I was pleased to see Obama elected as President, I have to admit I was even more thrilled to see Michelle step into the role of First Lady. And I do mean step.

 

While many have focused on her wardrobe or her toned arms, I've been watching her feet. At nearly 5'11" the statuesque Michelle and I have something in common: tall stature. While the country rejoices in the first African-American president, I have a personal reason to rejoice at the first really tall First Lady.

 

Not so long ago, being a tall woman was considered a cultural tragedy. Back in the 1960s when I was a teenager, a local internist suggested to my parents that I could grow to be very tall, a situation that he warned could compromise my future happiness. Not only would clothing and shoes be a problem, finding a mate might be impossible.

 

My mother was crushed. She was a tall woman who married my even taller father, but somehow this doctor spooked her. When he advised starting me on hormones ("something just like birth control pills," he claimed) she consented to the growth-stunting treatment. The pills, which I took daily for five years, were supposed to push me through puberty faster, allowing my bones less time to grow long.

 

I swallowed them obediently, like thousands of other tall girls in the U.S. and around the world, in the belief that tall women, unless they could somehow evolve into supermodels, were doomed to become terrifying Amazons--as some newspaper advice columnists warned. (A columnist/physician writing in the LA Times in 1953 advised parents of tall girls to withhold food and allow them to eat just enough to stay healthy.)

 

More than two decades later, I discovered the pills I'd been given were not just birth control pills, but diethylstilbestrol, or DES, a carcinogenic chemical compound that mimics estrogen in the body. The dosage I received each day was 100 times the estrogen in a high-dose birth control pill. The same drug made headlines in the 1970s when it was discovered to have caused cancer and reproductive abnormalities in the millions of children of women prescribed it during pregnancy to prevent miscarriage.

 

I'd begun the growth-stunting treatment as a healthy girl who didn't particularly care that I was taller than my friends. At the end of five years of treatment--years marked by nausea, vomiting, depression, leaking breasts, and a mistaken diagnosis of diabetes that led to even more drugs--I ended up on an operating table having a D&C for heavy, unstoppable bleeding at the age of 19.

 

My height--normal, just not average--had been turned into a social disease, and medical intervention stirred up all sorts of mental, as well as physical havoc. My teenage years were a misery, and my adult years have been plagued with the anxiety of knowing I was saturated with huge doses of carcinogenic drug, along with a raft of medical problems that may be attributable those red and yellow DES tablets.

 

Nobody knows for sure, because there's been almost no follow-up of what happened decades later to women like me who underwent this treatment. A couple of small studies in Australia have found decreased fertility in women treated as girls, as well as greater levels of dissatisfaction with mature height among the women treated compared to a control group of tall women who were not treated.

 

For all these reasons, I suppose, I watch Michelle's feet.

 

On Inauguration Day, Michelle, for example, wore her spring-green high heels when she marched down Pennsylvania Avenue on the arm of the new president. She switched to flats, though, when she stood next to and welcomed visitors to the White House. I recognized that strategy. Tall women work hard at making others feel comfortable. They know their height can be imposing, so they do what they can to calibrate it downward whenever possible.

 

As the Obamas, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip arranged themselves for the cameras at Buckingham Palace, commentators may have fixated on who would touch first, but I was fascinated--no, self-consciously cringing--as our tall, vibrant First Lady tried to make herself appear less large as she posed for pictures beside the small, grey queen.

 

Although I'm nearly an inch taller than our First Lady, and never have to worry about meeting the Queen, I know all too well the discomfort of looming over those next to me in a viewfinder. We tall women scrunch down a bit, or slump. We sink into our hips slightly. And we choose shoes, like Michelle's little kitten heels, that qualify as dressy but don't compound the height situation.

 

Thankfully, the estrogen treatment--which never worked very well to begin with--has waned in the last decade or so, and many fewer girls are subjected to it today. Cultures change, as we've seen with the election that carried Obama into the White House. In the 1970s, the passage of Title IX, which encouraged more girls to play sports, meant pushing six feet or more could be an advantage on a volleyball or basketball court. At the same time, as discriminatory hiring practices were discarded, women's career options increased; they could become police officers, astronauts, or CEOs--as well as wives and mothers.

 

Think of the opportunities awaiting Malia and Sasha, who, given their tall genes, will probably top out above Michelle.

 

These days, instead of shrinking girls, doctors and pharmaceutical companies are spending millions to boost the height of short kids--especially boys--with powerful, expensive drugs: growth hormone to increase height another inch or two, and Lupron and aromatase inhibitors to extend puberty and prop open the growth plates in order to give growth hormone longer to work. The long-term side effects are unknown, but theoretically worrisome.

 

Just as surely as everyone knew tall women were condemned to a life of misery a few decades ago, many now believe being a short man is a cultural tragedy. But maybe spending $52,000 an inch and taking unknown risks with the bodies and minds of healthy short kids will look just as crazy in a few decades as my growth-stunting treatment does today.

 

That's what I thought as I looked at the photographs of the G20 summit: There is France's 5'5" president, Nicolas Sarkozy, standing cockily beside his singer/supermodel wife, Carla Bruni, who is said to be 5'9". Of course, he's a powerful political leader--and she is wearing flats.

 

Christine Cosgrove is the author with Susan Cohen of "Normal at Any Cost: Tall Girls, Short Boys, and the Medical Industry's Quest to Manipulate Height," published by Tarcher/Penguin.