Can We Talk About Breaking Pedro Pascal's Legs?

Height bias: it's the material in Materialists.

If you haven’t seen Materialists yet, I’m going to ruin it for you. But that’s okay, because if ever a movie arrived pre-ruined, this is it: Celine Song, who worked as a matchmaker in Manhattan before making her debut with Past Lives, has absolutely steeped Materialists in the performative cynicism of contemporary dating. And because the orientation is straight-women-seeking-straight-men, the focus of the movie’s attention shifts from beauty standards for women to, well, beauty standards—standards of attractiveness, acceptability, competitive advantage—for men.

This is refreshing, to say the least. “Women destroying themselves to keep their looks” is such a widespread staple of American film and TV that it can’t even be called a subgenre; it runs the gamut from flesh-churning body horror in The Substance to incidental anorexic subplots in nearly every streaming series about teenagers or twenty-somethings. To have Pedro Pascal playing a man who’s taken radical and risky steps to alter himself purely for romantic success—there it is! That’s the plot!—isn’t just refreshing. It’s Song’s way of calling out the so-called “Manosphere” on its misogynist fantasies of rational, confident, decisive men in a world of weak, distracted, superficial women. Alpha males, like the ones Pedro Pascal plays in Materialists, are made, not born—that is, made of male insecurity, narcissism, vacuity, and also some sober calculation about what it takes to “succeed” in the algorithmic world of elite courtship. That’s where the leg-breaking comes in.

I happen to know a lot about this, because I’ve lived most of my life in the shadow of an earlier trend in male cosmetic enhancement: the use of synthetic human growth hormone to help boys grow taller. I was among the very first boys to take synthetic HGH, in 1986, after an endocrinologist, with the prompting of my parents, gave me a brand new medical diagnosis: “idiopathic short stature.” In my case, as anyone can tell, HGH didn’t exactly produce eye-popping results; endocrinologists informed my parents afterward that it was impossible to know if it had any effect at all. This moment is the genesis of a book I’ve been writing for the last five years: On Being Short: Men, Masculinity, and Not Measuring Up. (It’ll be published by Graywolf in 2027.)

To me the most interesting aspect of height bias or prejudice—sure, you could call it “heightism” or “sizeism”—is that most people, like the characters in Materialists, don’t think it exists. They treat it as something natural or obvious, not as a form of irrational bigotry (which, of course, it is). Short men and tall women are both targets, as Susan Cohen and Christine Cosgrove demonstrate at great length in their study Normal at Any Cost: Tall Girls, Short Boys, and the Medical Industry's Quest to Manipulate Height, but this bias has almost never been legally documented or classed as discrimination, even though there are reams of studies demonstrating that height plays a significant factor in romantic and career success, lifetime income, and mental health. Being outside-of-average-height is a little like being fat: it brings all kinds of stereotypes and assumptions and aversions into play, including very real moral/biological judgments—for example, that short women shouldn’t have children with short men, because of what many a pesky grandparent or intrusive friend will call “the obvious disadvantages” of having short boys. But fatphobia is a well-understood and (in some contexts) legally actionable form of discrimination; height bias is not.

Of course, nothing about this symbolic order that privileges 6’ men and 5’6” women is natural or obvious; it’s all part of the commodification of the body in the social order of Western capitalism, which leads us back to Materialists. Dakota Johnson plays a willowy young Manhattan matchmaker from a working-class family who has become an expert at her job according to the numbers, matching clients according to an exact ratio of what incomes/heights/backgrounds/personalities fit together. She herself has sworn off dating for the same reason some chefs eat nothing but undressed lettuce: she knows too much. The only person she would ever date, she avers, is a wildly rich man who can give her the financial security she never had—especially not with her ex-boyfriend, a struggling (and bad) actor who still lives with roommates in Queens. Enter Pedro, who is, as she says, a “unicorn”: tall, rich-from-a-rich-family, extremely handsome, capable of holding a conversation, most likely not a rapist. (That last caveat is not a joke, as anyone familiar with dating knows, and as Materialists makes crystal clear.) Pedro wants her, even as she keeps insisting—and she really means it—that they’re not compatible, that he can do much better, and that he doesn’t really love her, he just wants to own her. Finally Pedro gets the message, she decides to try again with miserable ex in Queens, they have a romantic date with food from a halal cart, exeunt.

This is all great material, a rom-com for people who know the term “late capitalism” and have unread books by David Graeber and Thomas Piketty on their shelves, but it would be pretty unremarkable if Celine Song hadn’t twisted the knife in one particular way, revealing a detail about modern life even Dakota Johnson’s character couldn’t anticipate. The “unicorn” was originally 5’6” and had leg-lengthening surgery along with his brother as a young man, calculating that the money and pain involved would pay dividends in the future. In one of the film’s most notable scenes, Pascal’s character bends his legs to simulate his real height, suddenly appearing even shorter than Johnson (who’s an ideal 5’7”)—a poignant, pathetic demonstration of why he was obviously right to grow six inches.

Is that what leg-lengthening surgery actually does? There’s a great in-depth investigative piece in GQ that goes into all the details, but the upshot is: it’s very expensive (in the six figures), extremely painful and somewhat risky, takes a year or more to complete, and yes, it can make your legs 4-6 inches longer. It doesn’t change the rest of your anatomy, meaning your arms will always look too short, among other visual oddities. Contrary to the fantasy Materialists perpetuates, it will not turn you into Pedro Pascal. (In this sense, Song’s movie is a prime example of prestige art shamelessly morphing into marketing, or what I’ve started to call “flattire”.)

Of course that’s not all it is. Leg-lengthening surgery, like hair plugs or other procedures designed to enhance masculinity, is gender-affirming care for straight men. It’s a profound statement about the power of conventional norms of masculinity, economic, social, and (in some situations) racial power. It resonates with the oldest modern plastic surgery, rhinoplasty, which, as Sander Gilman details in Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul, was developed by German Jewish surgeons in the 19th century to help Jewish men conform to the Teutonic ideal of the masculine face. (Gilman’s book was one of the inspirations for my novel Your Face in Mine, which is about cross-racial plastic surgery or “racial reassignment surgery.”) Rhinoplasty, which is of course still very popular, is intrinsically entwined with European antisemitism and the ideal proportions of the white European body; medical “solutions” for short boys and men, though they seem very recent, actually evolved out of the same era—as I discuss in On Being Short, hormonal treatments for short boys began in the 1920s and were a key reason for the development of endocrinology as a medical field.

Should height bias be condemned, should short men and tall women be considered a protected class, vulnerable to discrimination? These are important questions, but not my questions. I’m more interested in the ostensible subject of Materialists: dating. Dating—in an earlier era it would be called “courtship,” in an anthropological sense, “courtship rituals”—is where sex, class, race, gender, and money become hopelessly interlocked. As Dakota Johnson and her matchmaker colleagues know all too well, it’s where people reveal their real desires, which much of the time are explicitly, unapologetically racist, misogynist, discriminatory in every way. Technically speaking, Manhattan (where Materialists takes place) is a site of elite biological and economic reproduction, where good genes wrap around good bank accounts, or vice versa. (I wrote about this years ago in a short story about my alma mater, another key site of elite biological and economic reproduction: “Dear Yale”.) As a short boy becoming a short man, I was exposed to the unfairness, the discriminatory and highly economic nature, of desire early and often. It’s okay! I survived. Given that my arms still match my legs, I came out of it with a sense of proportion.

Image credit: a screenshot of a website showing a TikTok edit of what is likely a pirated version of Materialists, by Celine Song, 2025.