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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Glasses, like small breasts, seem to be one of those things that women automatically assume men find unattractive.
Apr 17, 2002 | For all the ink that's been spilled on the alleged pernicious effect of fashion magazines on female self-esteem, no one has as yet taken on one of the most damaging blows to female confidence. I'm talking, of course, of Dorothy Parker and her famous couplet "Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses."
I speak from some experience, as a man who has made passes at several girls who wore glasses and even wound up marrying one. Glasses, like small breasts, seem to be one of those things that women automatically assume men find unattractive. An old girlfriend of mine suffered terribly when she wore her contact lenses. Her eyes were almost constantly irritated, which, I argued with her, couldn't have been doing her vision any good. When I asked her why she didn't just abandon the nasty things for her specs she said, echoing Parker, that glasses made her unattractive. This was a tall, slim blond with a lovely face and nice figure who didn't give those attributes any chance against two smallish ovals of glass.
I've had something approaching the same argument with my wife, who makes do with her glasses (stylish, as is everything else about her) but who, for an evening out to dinner or some other social engagement, sighs that she has to put in her disposable lenses. She, at least, can wear the things comfortably for a while. But try to tell her that her Alain Mikli frames -- wide (but not big) ovals framed by green plastic that accentuates her red hair, or smallish, outward-slanting rectangles whose idiosyncratic geometry nicely complement the planes of her face -- are of a piece with her vintage Ossie Clark dress, her Clergerie shoes, her '30s Bakelite bracelets, and I feel myself losing the argument even before I've made my case.
Recently a friend of ours, the most va-va-voom woman I know, a voluptuous dirty blond with a great dimpled smile and a personality and brains to match, announced to us that she was saving up for laser surgery. Both my wife and I protested that there was no need, that she was a stunner with her glasses. "But you're my role model!" my wife wailed; she suggested that our friend should take the money she'd saved for the procedure and, once a year for the next 10 years or so, indulge herself in a killer pair of new glasses. We both knew she wanted the surgery, and we didn't want to be pushy or impolite. But we also really wanted to dissuade her. What I longed to say to my friend was that (though she looks great even without her glasses) she was proposing an erotic desecration, something akin to putting Ingres' Odalisque in a chemise.
How did glasses get such a bad reputation? Pop culture, for one thing. How many movies have we seen where the snooty girl, or the ugly girl, wears glasses? Didn't Dennis the Menace's nemesis, stuck-up Margaret, get her sandbox hauteur from those big goggles stuck over her turned-up nose?
Haven't even good movies fed the image of glasses as unsexy? Think of the bookstore sequence in "The Big Sleep," one of the sexiest scenes on film. Bogart's Philip Marlowe takes refuge from an afternoon rainstorm in a Los Angeles bookstore and offers a bottle of "pretty good Rye" to the comely young thing manning the shop. "Well," she says, pulling down the shade on the front door, "looks like we're closed for the day." This isn't just any young thing. It's the young Dorothy Malone, a brunet at the time and a decade before she was to distinguish herself as the platinum man-bait in such Douglas Sirk doozies as "Written on the Wind." She's a doozy herself. Bogart tentatively asks her if she has to ... and hesitates, indicating her glasses. Turning away, she removes them, lets down her hair and, when she turns back to him, is greeted with a friendly, lascivious "Hell-lo." Letting down the hair (one of the simplest and most devastating of erotic acts) is a good idea. For me, though, the glasses could have happily stayed put.
