A truism: men lie about how tall they are. Height exaggeration is one of the oldest and most well-documented forms of self-inflation. Joseph Stalin reportedly wore lifts and had photos of himself doctored so that he would look larger; historians have posited that he was between five feet two and five feet four, which is perhaps why Harry S. Truman (a respectable five feet nine) is said to have referred to him as a “little squirt.” And it’s not just dictators. Overstating—and straight-up manipulating—height has long been common in Hollywood: Alan Ladd, the nineteen-forties leading man (an estimated five feet six or five feet seven), once acted alongside a taller starlet, who stood in trenches that had been dug into set floors. Tom Cruise (five feet seven) has been known to stand on a wooden box.

In recent years, the rise of dating apps—some of which allow users to set height preferences when browsing potential matches—has made height exaggeration even more ubiquitous. “I have gone on dates with multiple men that have all starkly lied about their height. STARKLY,” one woman shared on Reddit. “This has happened multiple times and I’m just so confused.” Some men argue that these lies are necessary to land a date at all: it’s common for women to specify on their profiles that they’re only interested in men taller than them, leaving shorter guys stuck between, on the one hand, being truthful and ignored, and, on the other, lying and getting more matches. Studies suggest that men are frequently opting for the latter. In 2008, a group of researchers found that more than eighty per cent of surveyed participants physically misrepresented themselves on dating profiles, with men distorting their height significantly more than women did. Perhaps doing so arose from a history of in-person rejection: social scientists have found, in both observational and experimental studies, that women overwhelmingly prefer taller men—one assessment of speed-dating trends identified that shorter men ended up with fewer matches than their taller peers. Behind the digital fortress of the apps, men have taken to upselling themselves to increase their odds of an in-person date, a development that prospective matches are none too thrilled with. Some women have even begun using A.I. tools to assess a man’s photos in hopes of using his proportions and surroundings to estimate his true height.

Still, isn’t the jig up as soon as a conversation moves from an app to an in-person meeting? Perhaps not. “The thought process is that you can get by her stupid height filter and she won’t really know the difference anyway,” one Reddit user wrote, to justify adding a few inches to his profile’s listed height. Other men have adopted a more defensive posture, claiming to overstate their height only because everyone else is doing it. “I’m 5'10" but I’ve heard women take off 2" on dating apps,” one poster lamented. “So I should probably put my height at 6' to get past the 6' height filter.”

Does height actually matter? It’s a pervasive pop-philosophical question in which many contemporary ideologies clash and converge. Social-media platforms are filled with short-form videos that clumsily grapple with stigmas surrounding height supremacy. Man-on-the-street interviews often feature drunken arguments between men and women about whether height is essential to sexual attraction. “If he’s not six-four and buff, he’s not it,” a young woman declares in one video, prompting her interlocutor, a twentysomething dude with frosted tips, to threaten to remove her makeup with a wipe—I guess to make the point that women can more easily manipulate their appearance, whereas short guys are stuck as they are. Then there’s the viral video of a freshly showered blond woman satirically intoning that she’s “looking for a man in finance. Trust fund. Six-five. Blue eyes.” The clip has been viewed more than fifty million times and clearly struck a chord in the Zeitgeist; its creator, Megan Boni, has since said that she sought to criticize “impossible” dating standards, while acknowledging that she maintains some of those standards herself. Is wanting to mate with a six-five sexual partner “living in alignment” with your authentic values and desires, or a discriminatory practice that punishes a person based on an irrevocable biological characteristic? On the internet, where cliché-derived moral frameworks and undercooked psychologizing constitute much of the sociocultural discourse, the positive correlation between height and status either is flattened into the shallowness of one’s “personal preferences” or enters the realm of ethical outrage.

Height discrimination, of course, is not a new phenomenon. Researchers in cognitive science have long theorized that conceptual thinking is informed by how the human body looks and moves. Figurative language for power and success tends to evoke verticality and size: to go above and beyond, to be bigger and better, to reach for new heights. Conversely, the language of diminutiveness—to be down bad, to feel small, to live below your means—suggests submission, subordination, weakness. In his 1945 book, “Phenomenology of Perception,” the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the relationship between the living body and the ways we perceive reality, establishing a metaphysical “significance to the directions up and down in the physical world.” Drawing on the image of the mountain as “high and upright,” Merleau-Ponty offers that “there are for me certain shapes which are particularly favoured, as they are for other men, and which are capable of giving rise to a psychological science.” Uprightness, in other words, is associated with agency, potentiality, and capacity, creating a “body schema” that understands its value through physical orientation and movement. For other theorists, the correlation between height and power has a simpler, evolutionary explanation: the bigger the animal, the more likely it is not only to survive but to dominate its natural environment. And why would humans be any different? Taller people, after all, reportedly make more money and earn promotions at a higher rate than their shorter colleagues. They claim to be happier and more fulfilled, and have greater educational success. One study found that kindergarten teachers perceived their shorter male students as being less academically capable than their classmates. Another study observed children as young as ten months old correlating larger physical statures with dominance.

The online subculture known as looksmaxxing claims to offer a set of newfangled solutions for men—many of them short, many of them incels—to increase their sexual and social status. On message boards and forums, TikToks and live streams, looksmaxxers trade strategies for sharpening their jawlines, adding muscle, and “ascending” into a higher order of man. The methodology for achieving such goals spans from the mundane (lift weights; eat healthy; take showers) to the deranged (smoke methamphetamine; smash your face with a hammer; inject high doses of anabolic steroids).

For men under six feet, looksmaxxing influencers suggest several solutions for increasing their “sexual market value”: stand on your tiptoes (“tiptoemaxxing”); wear platform shoes; perform spinal stretches; or, to truly ascend, undergo a limb-lengthening procedure that can add up to six inches of height. And men are indeed lengthening their limbs, flying to international clinics, having metal rods inserted into their bones, and then, after a brutal recovery process, relearning how to walk. In what serves as a sort of penultimate climax in the 2025 film “Materialists,” a stunningly rich and handsome bachelor, played by Pedro Pascal, reveals that he and his brother have both undergone surgeries to become taller. “Women just approach us and talk to us now, which never happened before,” he admits. “But you can also tell the difference at work, at restaurants, at airports. You’re just worth more.” The film makes the resonant if not heavy-handed point that the world, and women, favors taller people, that masculine value is enmeshed with height—an argument that the face of the looksmaxxing movement, Clavicular, extends to other self-mutilation practices that aim to make men more beautiful. Rhinoplasties, jaw surgeries, ab implants, limb-lengthening, whatever: these procedures allow a man to defy the biological hierarchy and remake himself into a towering, vascular Adonis.

Merleau-Ponty believed that “the shape of our body” carries with it an “ever-present principle of absent-mindedness and bewilderment,” a spatial and phenomenological experience we can never fully gain access to. Looksmaxxers and limb-lengtheners may disagree. With enough optimization and intervention, their argument goes, the body can be manipulated into becoming fully knowable, mastered, perfect. And, once they become perfect, they’ll never need to tell a lie again.

Some men are just born with it. The San Antonio Spurs star Victor Wembanyama, for instance, has become the most dominant player in the N.B.A. because of his totally anomalous combination of skill, agility, and, yes, height. There’s really never been a player, or a human being, like him before. By the time he was fifteen, he was more than seven feet tall. Three years ago, when he became eligible for the N.B.A. draft, he was regarded by some as the greatest pro-basketball prospect ever. Now, at twenty-two years old, Wembanyama is competing in his first N.B.A. Finals and is already the single best defender in the history of the sport. Listed at seven feet four, he can dunk without jumping, palm a ball with two fingers, and block shots with the ease of a parent playing against a toddler. And then, with the alacrity of a much smaller player, he can break down defenders off the dribble and take pullup threes from the half-court logo. He also appears to still be growing. On TikTok, fans have taken to conducting forensic investigations of photographs of him, attempting to calculate his height against any object in the frame—proof that even the tallest men in the world are not immune from the kind of scrutiny and careful height analysis that women so often engage in when judging a man on a dating app.

Another phenomenon from which basketball players are not immune: lying about their height. Across almost every level of competitive basketball, embellishing one’s height is so common as to be unremarkable. High-school and college players often add a few inches to their listed heights to attract scouts, or to appear more formidable to an opponent. So do N.B.A. players; for much of the league’s history, height reporting relied on hearsay. The Hall of Famer Charles Barkley, who played power forward, was listed at six feet six throughout his career, though he later admitted to being around six feet four—roughly the same height as the shooting guard Michael Jordan. Hakeem Olajuwon was regularly listed as a seven-footer, though it’s understood that he was probably closer to six feet ten. The examples are numerous, the lies incessant: J. J. Barea and Allen Iverson were likely under six feet tall despite being listed as such; big men like Draymond Green and Kevin Love have, in the past, added two to three inches. Paradoxically, some N.B.A. players preferred being seen as shorter than they actually were. Kevin Garnett is allegedly seven feet tall—or seven feet one, depending on whom you ask—but said he was six feet eleven to avoid being pegged as a center. So too for Kevin Durant, who, despite being a verified six feet eleven, marketed himself as six feet nine to maintain positional flexibility, and to avoid the reputation of being a power forward rather than a small forward. (In 2016, Durant told the Wall Street Journal, “When I’m talking to women, I’m 7 feet. In basketball circles, I’m 6-9.”)

In recent years, the N.B.A. has mandated more precise height reporting. “The integrity of that information is critical,” Mark Tatum, the N.B.A.’s deputy commissioner, told Bloomberg, in 2019. He cited legalized sports betting as one impetus for the newfound transparency, and public trust as another. Whereas teams used to be able to “self-report” their players’ heights, or recycle measurements from a player’s college or amateur career, the league now requires front offices to certify a player’s shoeless height via a team physician.

For new players entering—or hoping to enter—the league, the first official measurement takes place at the N.B.A. draft combine. I attended this year’s event, a multiday showcase at Wintrust Arena, in Chicago. The combine abounds with detailed spreadsheets and advanced statistics, athletic testing and anthropometric details, timed drills and agility assessments—data that informs the strange and inexact evaluation process that is professional-sports scouting. While prospects complete jump-shot circuits and execute standing vertical leaps on the hardwood floor of the arena, a jumbotron above them displays a carrousel of percentages and decimals, a seemingly endless scroll documenting the quality of their performance. The numbers aim to tell a story, create an arc, aggregate a narrative out of what otherwise, to the naked eye, might simply seem like a group of exceptionally athletic young men participating in an assortment of frivolous physical challenges. With the proper framing, though, the drills take on an urgent, almost dramatic tenor. The N.B.A. draft is just weeks away, and the uncertain professional and financial futures of the seventy or so prospects invited to the combine hangs like humidity in the air. For some guys, the only question is where they’ll be drafted to; for others, there is also the question of whether they’ll be drafted at all. The stakes are equally high for teams—draft-night decisions can dictate the directions of franchises and determine the fates of front offices. Every iota of data about a prospect, then, becomes pregnant with meaning.

Size, of course, is the most consequential physical attribute of a player in the N.B.A. (If there is one place where height truly matters, for reasons beyond the superficial, it is here.) No matter how cerebral or skilled a prospect is, if he is shorter than average for his position, then his chances of thriving in the league are low. Take Braden Smith or Tyler Tanner, for instance, two talented guards whose combine measurements raised alarms. Smith, the N.C.A.A.’s all-time assist leader, had previously been listed between six feet and six feet one, but his official combine height, without shoes, came in at a hair over five feet ten; Tanner, a guard out of Vanderbilt, also shrank from six feet to under five feet eleven. (These inches are not trivial—there is only one current N.B.A. player listed under five feet eleven: the five-foot-seven Yuki Kawamura, a free agent who may not be on a roster next season.) Sub-six-footers aren’t the only ones who exaggerate their height, though. The Alabama forward Amari Allen, who had been a projected mid- to late first-round pick, had perhaps the most incriminating discrepancy: in college, he was recorded at six feet eight, but at the combine he’s clocked at six feet five and a quarter. (It’s since been reported that Allen will return to school for his sophomore season.) There’s no escaping the truth at the combine—the league measures these guys down to the quarter inch, and publishes the findings online for everyone to see.

Height can be surprisingly difficult to discern when watching a basketball game. Depending on a player’s frame, limb length, musculature, and verticality, he may feel bigger on the court than he actually is. A guy could measure barefoot at five feet nine but play, in shoes, like he’s six feet one. Eric Leidersdorf, the president of P3, a sports-science and athlete-development company that works with some of the N.B.A.’s biggest stars using biomechanics, motion capture, and data analytics, says that a person’s perceived height can depend on their “movement quality,” especially their “lateral movement and change of direction.” For teams interested in drafting a small guard, like Smith or Tanner, this sort of advanced testing may be used to determine whether he can plausibly withstand the physical demands of the N.B.A. Small guards are not the only demographic that demands increased data collection; life in the N.B.A. is evolving even for the freakishly tall. A seven-foot big man is no longer a high-value commodity exclusively because of his size. According to Leidersdorf, questions about “big-man prospects consistently surround lateral movement now,” not just standing reach or wingspan. The modern N.B.A. has little room for the old-fashioned center: slow-moving, ham-fisted, unable to leave the paint or sprint back on defense. Height remains an essential factor when evaluating the archetypal big man, but, as was the case with the undersized guard, it is far from the only metric that teams rely on when assessing a prospect’s potential.

Along those lines, J. Kyle Mann, a basketball analyst and draft expert for The Ringer, argued that there’s less incentive, these days, for players and teams to fabricate height, owing to the positionless nature of the contemporary N.B.A. game. A seven-footer is not, by default, plucked under the basket anymore; he may stretch the floor to the three-point line, or be an integral part of a perimeter-switching defense. When it comes to assessing height and other physical attributes, Mann says it’s “nice that there’s transparency,” but it doesn’t “totally dissuade anyone” from more holistically appraising a prospect’s skill set and taking a chance on a guy if his play style, cerebration, and temperament align with a team’s “organizational cohesiveness.”

Besides, as Mann notes, for all the positive advancements in data analytics and biomechanic measurements, there remains a lot of “pseudoscience-y psychobabble stuff in this realm”—enough data to drive any reasonable person insane. At the combine, as executives and scouts furrowed their brows and furtively took notes, Mann and I stood on the concourse, watching team personnel watch prospects work out. “It’s not an exact science,” he says. “There’s still a lot of human judgment.”

By the time the combine’s midweek scrimmages take place, there seems to be no more data to collect. As riveting as the release of the anthropometric measurements was, they mostly reaffirmed whatever strengths or limitations a player was already perceived to have. Braden Smith certainly measured shorter than expected, but size has never been his calling card. He’s a floor general who can control the pace and tempo of a game, and renowned for those skills which are hard to teach: court vision, competitiveness, decision-making. As the smallest guy on the floor, he’s learned to use his stature to his advantage, curving and slicing between lengthy defenders and finding tight windows to score or set up a teammate for an open shot. During the scrimmages, as he fights over screens and boxes out guys a foot bigger than him, it’s easy to sense in him a silent fortitude, a dogged and determined spirit—qualities that’ll make life in the N.B.A. possible. Maybe it never mattered if he was five feet ten or six feet one. At a certain point, he’ll have to prove that he belongs in a space where numbers and myths and analytics and white lies no longer matter, where breath and body and movement intersect in the absent-minded and bewildered way Merleau-Ponty spoke of, a space we have no conscious control or command over, anyway.

Which is not to say that N.B.A. players don’t also seek physical transformation. They may not be lengthening their limbs, but they are working with people like Leidersdorf to maximize their full athletic potential. After the combine ended, I spoke with him at the P3 offices, in Santa Barbara, where he walked me through the dizzying amount of data and details they use to advise on athlete-specific developmental programs. He mentioned his work with the Oklahoma City Thunder shooting guard Ajay Mitchell, who “was not a good athlete by N.B.A. standards” when he first arrived, as a college student, at P3’s biomechanical laboratory. But, after years of movement and strength training, Mitchell morphed into a player who was “physically ready” for life in the league. A second-round pick coming out of college, he has since bloomed into one of the N.B.A. playoffs’ breakout stars, averaging more than fifteen points per game for the defending champion Thunder, who were eliminated in the Western Conference finals, last week, by Wembanyama and the Spurs. Mitchell’s story is one of those precipitous, magical rises that make sports so enthralling to follow: a no-name guard from a mid-major school who works tirelessly to defy his physical limitations until he becomes a star. It’s a narrative that may give you hope—until you realize that Mitchell is six feet four. ♦