萨科奇总统有矮人综合症吗？实用英语

文章作者 100test 发表时间 2009:10:14 23:30:38
来源 100Test.Com百考试题网

　　When Alan Ladd starred in the 1957 film Boy on a Dolphin, Sophia Loren had to walk in a trench alongside him so filmgoers couldn’t tell she was taller than him. Loren was 5ft 8in of Italian voluptuousness, while Ladd was 5ft 5in tall and, in his own words, a man with "the face of an ageing choirboy and the build of an undernourished featherweight". The following year, when screen hardman Ladd starred in The Deep Six, he stood on boxes so as not to appear smaller than his co-stars.
　　More than half a century on, another man who is 5ft 5in tall is similarly doing his damnedest to conceal the shortness of his stature. Earlier this week, French president Nicolas Sarkozy gave a televised speech at the Faurecia motor technology plant near Caen in Normandy. He stood before the cameras flanked by white-coated workers and suited executives, very few of whom were taller than him. A journalist reportedly asked one of them later: "Is it true you were all picked to appear alongside the president because of your height – because you shouldn’t be taller than the president?" The worker answered: "Exactly that." And French TV news showed 20 relatively small Faurecia workers from a total workforce of 1,400 being bussed to the press conference from other parts of the site.
　　Sarkozy’s aides were keen to ensure no repeat of the D-day debacle in June when, just along the Normandy coast in Colleville-sur-Mer, Sarkozy had stood next to 6ft 1in Barack Obama and 5ft 11in Gordon Brown during the 65th anniversary commemoration ceremony. French virility had been symbolically castrated by an Anglo-American height conspiracy.
　　But, you might well be asking, why did Sarko bother to try to conceal the truth about his height? Surely the French president or his aides must realise that any attempts to conceal his relative shortness will make him look even more ridiculous than – with all due respect – he does already? Surely someone should tell him it is madness to stand on a little box in front of a lectern to give a speech (as he did in Colleville-sur-Mer), since any snapper worth their salt was going to photograph him not from the front but from the side – thus making his pathetic ruse globally apparent?
　　What is it about short guys that makes them go to such great lengths (sorry) to conceal what they really are? It’s an old story. Back in the day, Humphrey Bogart (5ft 8in) would stand one step higher than his leading ladies (Lauren Bacall, 5ft 8in, Katharine Hepburn, 5ft 7in) when they were snapped coming down the steps from a plane, recalls Ralph Keyes in his book about the hilarities of human extension, The Height of Your Life. Last year, Tom Cruise (5ft 7in) reprised Bogey’s technique when he appeared outside a New York theatre, standing not one but three steps above his wife Katie Holmes (5ft 9in).
　　Why did it have to be three steps? Because Holmes (selfishly, in my view) had chosen to go out that evening wearing four-inch patent black Christian Louboutin heels, which clearly made the chances of a disastrous night out on the town, PR-wise, catastrophically likely. But of course the three-step ploy didn’t work: the Daily Mail, for instance, ran with the headline, "Tiny Tom finds a way to rise above his shortcomings."
　　Cruise, Bogey, Sly (of whom more later): small male actors, at least, are, like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, telling themselves and us that they are not small. "I am big!" hissed Swanson. "It’s the pictures that got small." The intolerable truth that none of the foregoing allow themselves to admit is they’re not as big as they want to be. Why do they delude themselves and attempt to con us? "We associate size with power," says Keyes. Consider, for example, the world’s leading Hobbit interpreter, Elijah Wood. He was supposed to be about 4ft 2in tall in the Lord of the Rings films. In real life, though, Wood is 5ft 6in, while his co-star Liv Tyler is apparently 5ft 10in. Yet on the cover of Entertainment Weekly to publicise the Tolkein trilogy, he appeared towering over her. Male actors have a problem with being seen to be shorter than women.
　　But there is a very good reason for that. According to Dutch psychologist Professor Abraham Buunk of the University of Groningen, tall men have greater success with the opposite sex. So pretending to be tall may confer a sexual and thereby evolutionary advantage. Larger males are more likely to win fights, are more dominant, have clout with the Ivy’s maitre d’, make eye contact with bar staff at crucial moments, and, crucially, are more likely to reproduce. True, that hasn’t been my life story, even though I would be 6ft 1in if I stood up straight, but then there’s always someone who ruins the theory. For male actors, for whom being desirable to women is obligatory to a successful career, size is everything.
　　Buunk’s researchers questioned 100 men and 100 women in relationships about their feelings of jealousy and how interested they believed their partners to be in other members of the opposite sex. They found taller men were less jealous. Apparently, 5ft 4in men scored an average of 3.75 out of six on a jealousy scale, with the men around 6ft 6in getting just 2.25. The results among women were more complex, with those of around average height (5ft 6in) scoring lowest for jealously, at around three out of six.
　　But is there such a thing as short-woman syndrome? The shortest women in Buunk’s study, who measured around 5ft, scored five on the scale, while the tallest, at 6ft, got an average of four. So is there a tall-woman syndrome too, whereby women over 6ft tall aggressively overcompensate because they’re livid about Buunk’s thesis, whereby not only tall men, but also medium-height women, have greater success with the opposite sex? Is that why the explosive grunt of top tennis player Lindsay Davenport, who is 6ft 2 in, has been recorded at an ear-splitting 88 decibels? You know what? Probably not.
　　Moving on. There is something called the Napoleon complex, which was identified by the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler, by means of which small men are supposed to overcompensate for their height by aggressiveness. Lou Reed, 5ft 5in of handshake-crushing anger (just ask anyone who has ever interviewed him), is the present-day personification of this complex. But this theory is dubious: if, over time, short men are known to overcompensate for their smallness by being aggressive, surely taller men, annoyed with being duffed up by short, inadequate blokes, will themselves turn aggressive so they don’t get picked on so much, thus confounding the theory. Also, the theory is all but sunk by counter-examples: true, Stalin was 5ft 4in, and Hitler and Mussolini were small men filled to the brim with pure evil, but it is folly to associate badness with titchiness. Khrushchev and Gandhi were both 5ft 3in and eternally occupy very different positions on the aggressiveness scale. And while Alexander Pope undeniably wrote some very biting verses, it would be a mistake to ascribe this to the fact that he did so because he was chippy about being only 4ft 6in.