I just got glasses. I love my glasses. In fact, I might be just a little annoyed that after all these years in engineering, I have only just now needed glasses. Yes, they are tedious to clean, they leave little dots on my nose after a long day, my kids are always trying to pull them off. But aside from being able to see every leaf on every tree and every hair on my kids' heads, and being able to read road signs in time to react to them, they have been fabulous for me at work. And in the supermarket. And everywhere, wherever I go, I look out through these clear-making glasses and people treat me differently.
I love my glasses for two reasons.
1) Women with glasses are assumed to be smarter, and worth listening to. People are listening to me a lot more these days. Women with perfect eyesight evidently ought not be engineers, indeed they ought not speak with authority on anything. Smart women always have glasses. Hollywood tells us so.
In Top Gun, Kelly McGilles's Charlie wore glasses every time the plot required her character to use her PhD. In the Iron Man series, Gwyneth Paltrow was only allowed to take over Stark Enterprises after her glasses proved her to be CEO material. Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestly was clearly much smarter and more dangerous because she wore glasses. In sitcoms everywhere, glasses give a hot supporting female character the ability to use a computer, crack a cipher, speak a second language, know a plot-critical fragment of information at a particular time, run a covert investigation (usually using a computer), defend the accused in court, or hold their professional or intellectual ground.
2) Glasses are a great prop. Peering over the top of them and saying "Really?" can get a very satisfying squirm from a less-than-honest individual, whether my own child, a colleague, or a door-to-door telephone salesman. I really quite like taking them off to clean them whenever someone tells me about the latest project disaster. There is also apparently something where men apparently have a 'thing' about a plain woman taking off her glasses and suddenly being gorgeous (*shrug*).
Hooray for my glasses!
I love my glasses for two reasons.
1) Women with glasses are assumed to be smarter, and worth listening to. People are listening to me a lot more these days. Women with perfect eyesight evidently ought not be engineers, indeed they ought not speak with authority on anything. Smart women always have glasses. Hollywood tells us so.
In Top Gun, Kelly McGilles's Charlie wore glasses every time the plot required her character to use her PhD. In the Iron Man series, Gwyneth Paltrow was only allowed to take over Stark Enterprises after her glasses proved her to be CEO material. Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestly was clearly much smarter and more dangerous because she wore glasses. In sitcoms everywhere, glasses give a hot supporting female character the ability to use a computer, crack a cipher, speak a second language, know a plot-critical fragment of information at a particular time, run a covert investigation (usually using a computer), defend the accused in court, or hold their professional or intellectual ground.
2) Glasses are a great prop. Peering over the top of them and saying "Really?" can get a very satisfying squirm from a less-than-honest individual, whether my own child, a colleague, or a door-to-door telephone salesman. I really quite like taking them off to clean them whenever someone tells me about the latest project disaster. There is also apparently something where men apparently have a 'thing' about a plain woman taking off her glasses and suddenly being gorgeous (*shrug*).
This extract of an old Humprey Bogart movie "The Big Sleep" makes both points admirably. I love it.
Hooray for my glasses!
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