All of the short kings, please stand up. If social media is anything to go by, then it’s officially the season of the “short king”, or Short King Spring, if you will.
It seems the days where women would put “6ft or nothing” in their dating app bios are long gone as the term “short king spring”, which has over 1.1m views on TikTok, has been coined by social media users who are celebrating the shorter men in their lives.
The term, which refers to men who are under 5’9”, has taken off after users pointed out a number of celebrity pairings where the man is shorter than the woman.
Couple of the moment, Zendaya (5’10”) and Tom Holland (5’8”) are prime examples of this trend, as are Joe Jonas (5’7”) and Sophie Turner (5’9”), and Keith Urban (5’8”) and Nicole Kidman (5’10”).
The term “short king” can be traced back to 2018 after a Twitter user lamented that they were “f***ing tired” of the term “short” being used as an insult.
“‘Short’ gave you Donald Glover. ‘Short’ gave you Tom Holland. ‘Short’ gave you Daniel Kaluuya. ‘Short’ gave you Bruno f***ing Mars,” the Tweet read. “Short kings are the enemy of body negativity, and I’ll be forever proud to defend them.”
The #shortking hashtag has over 340m views on TikTok, and has been pioneered by the likes of influencer Abbie Herbert who is taller than her musician husband, Josh.
Herbert, a model, posts multiple videos about the pair’s height difference, including “how to pose with a short king”, and “why height doesn’t matter”.
According to Google Trends, “short king spring” skyrocketed in searches during the week after the 2022 Oscars, as stars like Jonas and Urban were pictured next to their taller wives.
The trend has also seen a study from 2014 be widely shared, which found that shorter men are more sexually active than tall men.
The study, published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, looked at 531 straight men who were just under 5’9” and found they had “higher coital frequency”.
The study also found that shorter men were 32 per cent less likely to get a divorce, and more likely to do a greater share of the housework compared to their taller counterparts.
The trend has found itself on Twitter too, with users sharing their favourite “short kings”.
Celebrities like Daniel Radcliffe and Bruno Mars have been celebrated, with one user even pointing to Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy whose heroics during the Ukraine-Russia war have been widely praised.
However, one person said the season of the short king was already “over”. “Short king spring is over sorry u [sic] guys are annoying I want a gigantic dumb beefcake now,” she tweeted.
Buzzfeed reporter Kelsey Weekman tweeted a picture of Euphoria actor Jacob Elordi standing next to West Side Story’s Rachel Zegler at the Oscars with the caption: “Huge blow to short king spring.”
A taller man joked that short king spring is “toxic” for the tall community: “As someone who is 6’3”, Short King Spring is toxic to our community, and here’s why ppl [sic] like myself, 6 feet and 3 inches, need you to hear our story.”
One user replied: “Come down here and say it to my face.”
