Second Life avatars tend to be very tall compared with real life, as many have pointed out. The average height of American women is 5'4" (that's 1.63 meters for you folks with a rational system of measurements), but despite the trend for more realistic avatar heights, I believe you'll find most women in SL are taller than that.
I like that trend, by the way--not because I want "height police", in either direction, but because, given the limits on avatar height, I can't be tall if everyone is tall. So please, if you don't want to be tall, don't be! :)
One problem with being tall is the limit on arm length. That gives rise to what people call "T. rex" avatars, avatars with disproportionately short arms. It occurred to me that one aspect of my disproportion saves me, at least a little, from another.
You see, I don't just want to be freakishly tall; I want to be freakishly leggy. Svetlana Pankratova and Iwona Syhre are among my role models. (Can I realize my dreams with a mesh avatar? Height, yes; legginess, I'm less sure of.)
So, when I set out to adjust my shape, I had an eye to maximizing leg length, and it turns out that doing so requires cranking down torso length. I wish it weren't so, but... it makes my arms look less disproportionately short, because they extend further past my shortened torso and down my lengthened legs. Alas, despite being cranked to 100, they really are too short--boxing with God is still out of the question--but it's not as obvious. Until that mythical day when Linden Lab improves the avatar, I can get by.
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For what it's worth, Melissa, you totally can; there's a store selling (overpriced, no mod) mesh bodies of rather drastically altered proportions out there.
Alternatively, you can pick up the Avastar plugin for Blender and roll your own. The plugin will generate an SL mesh av in blender, complete with sliders. To a point these can 'stack' with the actual SL shape, so you can kind of 'cheat' extra long limbs, or be extra bulky, etc, and upload it at a slightly higher scale to boot. Clothing is more difficult then (since you'd need to either have a second layer or use prim clothing or whatnot) but it's *doable*.
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