Meet the Women of My Giant Life

posted: 07/08/15
by: Rebecca Goldberg

COLLEEN a.k.a. COCO - San Diego

At six feet six inches tall, Colleen is not an average single gal playing the field. The 36-year-old, former pro-volleyball player is on the hunt for a man - someone between Mr. Right and Mr. Right Now - with the assistance of her best friends, Chris and Michael. She also faces the struggles of moving home to San Diego, settling into her new apartment, and tricking it out with the "tall hacks" that she uses to customize her space.

HALEIGH - Huntington Beach, California

23-year-old Haleigh stands at six feet seven inches tall and has a world of possibilities at her fingertips: a professional volleyball career that will take her around the globe, a master's degree, and all the promise that comes from being young and talented. Her much shorter, 32-year-old boyfriend, Bryan, is ready to settle down and have a handful of kids, but Haleigh's father is worried that he's going to slow his daughter down.

NANCY - Cypress, Texas

At a staggering six feet nine inches tall, Nancy is anything but an average American high school student. She is going through the rites of passage of being a teenage girl: learning to drive, finding a date to prom and then selecting the perfect dress, but none of those are easy when you're seventeen and so much taller than your classmates. Nancy learns how to rise to the challenge of being exceptional as she figures out how to navigate life as a rising basketball superstar.

LINDSAY - Los Angeles

Statuesque and striving to make a name for herself, Lindsay stands out from any crowd at six feet nine inches tall. The actress and former wrestler is the Guinness World Record holder for the Tallest Actress in a Leading Role. She gets her height from her father, but she hasn't seen him since she was 11-years-old. Ready to put the demons of her past to rest and move on, Lindsay is on a quest to locate her father and ask him why he left her all those years ago.

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Viewers take offence at Miranda and accuse Doctor Who of promoting a gay agenda... and don't get them started on Bake Off playing Handel

For some, the problem is that Doctor Who is promoting a gay agenda. Others object to characters in a drama taking their eyes off the road while driving. And then there are those who found one popular sitcom offensive to all tall women.A report examining complaints received by the BBC over a 19-month period has thrown a light on the sheer variety of subjects which prompt viewers' objections, from Americanisms and poor grammar to the use of metric over Imperial measurements.

But while it may be a simple matter of editorial judgment whether to use pounds or kilograms, there is no accounting for viewers' tastes.

The report, published by the BBC Trust, found that one viewer considered that Miranda, the BBC One comedy, unfairly ridiculed tall women (the eponymous heroine, Miranda Hart is 6ft tall, or 1.85m if you prefer), while another argued that showing the police and hospital staff in popular dramas at a bar after a "shift" was a "bad example".

One person complained that the reporting of women's deaths in Gaza as "newsworthy" was offensive to men, while three believed Doctor Who was promoting homosexuality.

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On August 18 TLC aired the final episode of “My Giant Life,” a reality show that followed four exceptionally tall women over a period of a several months. Episode 5 was a conversation between the 6’6” or taller women who agreed to be vulnerable enough to share their feelings, very personal moments, and the trials and tribulations of a life heads about most. Besides updating the audience about their lives, Lindsey, Haleigh, Coco, and Nancy discussed how the taping of the show impacted them and answered questions from the moderator.

As interesting as the show was, so were the many comments on its Facebook page and how they have changed over the past five weeks. The show has brought out haters, rubbed salt into open wounds among tall women and bridged a gap among people of all heights. It also created a heated conversation among the tall community on the Tall Clubs International Facebook page.

The first controversy focused on using the word “Giant” in the title of the program. Tall people hate being considered giants or giraffes. Even the ladies on the show weren’t keen on the title. As Coco said to her friend while taking a yoga class, “I’m not big, I’m tall.”

The next problem was the angle of the camera when the women spoke directly to the camera. As they talked about their specific lives, it appeared that they were sitting on small chairs and the camera was on the floor, angled upward. Viewers were quick to voice complaints about how the shots made the ladies look like giants among the Lilliputians.

As the weeks passed the storylines uncovered the raw emotion that ran just below the surface for each of the women. Buying long enough pants, “trying on” furniture to find sofas high enough and deep enough to be comfortable, and knee-bruising airplane seating were just a few of the trials that viewers experienced along with the ladies. Both Nancy and Haleigh let us tag along as they tried to find a prom dress and a wedding dress that covered their ankles and high heeled shoes without expensive alterations. Coco went on a blind date only to have the man turn and run after seeing how tall she was.

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Sabrina Rojas Weiss - Yahoo Lifestyle, 30 January 2018

Sophie Turner and Joe Jonas have been together for almost a year and a half and the couple have been engaged for about three months, which seems like enough time for Turner to get used to feeling like she’s in a “fishbowl,” as she once told Glamour. It is not enough time for some onlookers to get over a simple fact about this couple: At a reported 5’9,” the Game of Thrones star is taller than her 5’7″ DNCE fiancé.

The paparazzi caught the two walking out in unseasonably warm weather in New York City over the weekend, with Turner wearing a pair of boots with tall chunky heels as Jonas strolled along in his Converse. Gossip site Just Jared posted a photo of them to Instagram, and immediately the comments section became host to a load of criticisms over their height difference.

“She is sooooo much taller than him,” noticed @aurmichkell.

“And why does she wear such high heels?” wondered @csre27. “I mean, there’s nothing wrong with being taller than your partner, but it just seems uncomfortable to accentuate it like that.”

“So … Joe is the little spoon,” wrote @amandachristy12. And @geronimogl was meaner, joking, “Caption should say, Sophie’s fiancee and her little bitch!”

When they first started dating, a couple of tabloids made a big deal about their height difference, but they’re hardly the first celebs to demonstrate that sometimes taller women like men who are ever-so-slightly shorter than them. See also: Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban (or Tom Cruise), Cameron Diaz and Benji Madden, Gigi Hadid and Zayn Malik. Jonas has dated other statuesque women, such as Taylor Swift and Hadid. Why do people get so fixated on this kind of pairing? Does it have any bearing on the internal workings of their relationship?

A lot of that depends on the couple’s past, New York-based relationship therapist Jean Fitzpatrick tells Yahoo Lifestyle.

“Because we think of man-as-taller as ‘normal,’ sometimes this height difference sparks anxiety, usually at first,” Fitzpatrick says. “A very tall woman may have felt like a giant growing up and dating, and may sometimes wish for a guy who feels like her match in height. A shorter man may have been the smallest guy on the team and so dating a taller woman may be an uncomfortable reminder of shame he hasn’t worked through yet. The biggest height difference any of us experiences in life is the one we have with our parents growing up. When we were small and they were tall, we felt taken care of and loved, or deprived and judged, or both.”

But none of that baggage is insurmountable, Fitzpatrick notes, particularly if both parties are willing to talk about it.

There’s one way in which Turner and Jonas are already getting past one shorter-man stereotype: “Tallness in men is associated with career success, which isn’t an issue for couples who are already successful,” Fitzpatrick says. “And with today’s partnership marriages, I find couples less interested in height and more in sharing career, household, and parenting equitably.”

Fitzpatrick says there are much more important questions they’ll have to face together than physical differences.

“Once a couple have been together awhile, it’s the quality of the relationship that matters: Do they listen to and understand each other? Do they express care for each other in everyday ways? Do they trust each other?” she says.

Regardless of height, “Jophie” look pretty happy together, as they begin to plan their wedding, which will feature Maisie Williams as a bridesmaid and some kind of speech (or more) from Nick Jonas. Then we’re betting Turner’s choice of footwear will have everything to do with her dancing plans, not her groom’s height.

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Bazaar celebrates women who live by their own rules and are brave enough to take flight. See all of the Daring Women featured in our November 2015 issue here.

By Laura Brown

A few years ago, Gwendoline Christie was treading the boards for the Royal Shakespeare Company and playing Mag Wildwood in a West End production of Breakfast at Tiffany's. Now she finds herself at the epicenter of three massive pop-culture movements: Game of Thrones, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 2. While an actor saying he/she is grateful has become a cliché, Christie really means it. "It means there's a shift in our culture and our way of thinking about how women are perceived," she says. "People want to see a more diverse representation of women than the homogenized ones we've had so far."

Christie, 36, is far from homogeneous. Standing six foot three, she contended for years with the perception that "if you were taller than average, you couldn't act on-screen. But you've got to hang in there because things change." She had a role in Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus in 2009, then a friend told her "there was something online about me being in an HBO show." Christie researched Game of Thrones's Brienne of Tarth, the loyal-to-a-fault soldier who stars in the series' most riveting battle scenes, and thought, If this remains in audiences' minds, this could work to change the way we view women on television.

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