This icon because I don't have one for Ms Parker's apothegm re girls who wear glasses

[oursin]

Have been noticing on Twitter people remarking that spectacles are not a stigmatised assistive technology and neither is the need for them -

Well, maybe that is so now, but I think we have had some discussions in comments in this here venue about the Victorian resistance to letting people with myopia wear glasses rather than struggle and try to accommodate and the idea that wearing glasses was somehow 'giving in' (okay, maybe this was a particular Thing in the works of Charlotte Yonge...)

And people are shocked! shocked! when they come across Marie Stopes's hostility to having a daughter-in-law who wore 'hideous specs' and would communicate that defect to her offspring, and I do not say that it was not gross, but it was an idea that was not unique to Marie but fairly pervasive in early C20th Britain. I have come across someone who was both a communist and a eugenicist arguing that Capitalism was causing the proliferation of the hereditary defect of glasses-wearing among the population, I have discovered men who were, one would think, the sort of men who would have been considered, by people who thought in such terms, eugenically desirable fathers, refusing to become sperm donors because of their very correctable defects of vision.

I also think there are still some attitudes/preconceptions around glasses-wearing - the association with intellectual rather than physical activity. I'm not at all sure we don't have some of the old women-wearing-glasses thing continuing to go on, though I'm thinking of films I've seen where the young woman putting on glasses signals her shift into to a more serious/academic persona. And certain instances - the one I think of immediately is Wesley at the beginning of Season 4 of Angel where from being a bespectacled bookish drip he has become a stubbly non-bespectacled brooding badass - there is also a male version of what happens when he takes off/puts off his glasses (is the ur-instance Superman/Clark Kent?).

Comments

[lilliburlero]

I remember being admonished not to 'get too dependent' on my specs on getting my first pair in 1987, which, if an almost laughably mild instance of it, is nonetheless an ableist trope - better to make yourself 'strong' through using no or inadequate assistive technology than to just use the right assistive technology. I exploited it when I'd yet again lost or mislaid them and my parents or teachers asked where they were -- 'just trying not to get too dependent!'

[perennialanna]

There was a fashion for under-prescribing for short-sighted children in the 1980s, in the belief that making their eyes work harder would improve their eventual sight. It turned out that pretty much exactly the opposite happened; under-prescription led to worse outcomes.

I remember being very distressed when an optician told me I had to try reading without my glasses in order to strengthen my eyes. "But I CAN'T!" was the wail. At that point I could only have seen a book to read it without my glasses if my nose had been in the valley between pages.

[lilliburlero]

My short sight got worse throughout the years of my not wearing the glasses much and then stabilised rapidly when I gave in and just wore them all the time (also a good way not to lose them). The best thing about my fairly hefty level of short sight is that I can fake eye-contact (which I find disconcerting but other people seem to require) by taking off my glasses - turns the interlocutor's face into a comfortingly unspecific blob.

[nineveh_uk]

I am fortunate to be one of those people whose sight has not deteriorated despite preferring to wear my glasses as little as possible, which when I was younger was very much not wanting to be a person who wears glasses, and these days that even with very light titanium ones I find the weight too much to wear all the time due to my nose issues. I can wear glasses in the evening or in the day time, but not both, and really am not looking forward to when I need them for reading.

[oracne]

Also the thing where putting ON the glasses makes you suddenly hot, but it's usually a male character: Tennant's Doctor, for example.

[thawrecka]

I remember being very thankful that hipsters made wearing glasses fashionable just before I started to need them, after having grown up watching films where glasses-wearers were the subject of mockery.

[kathmandu]

Also the physical design of glasses has changed: the stereotype of the glasses-wearing nerd was of thick, large lenses with heavy black frames. A lot of the acceptance is linked to thin rimless lenses with very thin and light metal frames, so that the whole effect ranges from 'invisible' to 'like jewelry'.

[calimac]

That's true. I got heavy black frames for my reading glasses because I take them on and off a lot and wanted something sturdy. But I wouldn't wear that for my distance glasses, partly for the looks but mostly because the frames would get in the way of my strong peripheral vision.

Despite Dorothy Parker's claim ("Men seldom make passes / at girls who wear glasses"), I find well-designed glasses on women to be extremely attractive.

[oursin]

I remember a conversation with a workplace colleague in which we hymned the joys of ultra-thin light optical plastic, without which we would be condemned to wearing glasses like jam-jar bottoms.

[kindkit]

Mine are like jam-jar bottoms even with high-tech lenses, and I've deliberately chosen nerdy black frames, but I get compliments on my glasses. And while my self-presentation is masculine, people still usually read me as female, so it's not entirely a gendered-aesthetic thing. In fact the glasses ads I've seen most recently have shown feminine-presenting women wearing heavy black nerd glasses.

But it may be that this shift in fashion is a result of the normalization of glasses described above, caused be thinner lenses and more delicate frames. Maybe the nerd look could be reclaimed once it became optional?

[oursin]

It is a bit like the gasometer thing: once something ceases to be a utilitarian necessity considered as an eyesore, it can be aestheticised? Or maybe just that the actual virtues (Victorian structural engineering) can be appreciated. Different I think from those people who decide that they will go and live A Victorian Lifestyle (minus the arsenic wallpaper, dying in childbirth, etc).

[serriadh]

I do still get occasional comments on whether I've "never tried" contact lenses, which would suggest glasses aren't universally the cool hipster things to be wearing.

(In fact I used to wear lenses but they can't quite weight them right to correct my astigmatism any more.)

[oursin]

I wore contacts - hard, and then soft - for around a decade, but started getting recurrent eye infections (working on one of the most polluted thoroughfares in London may have had some relevance). This was, I think, just before the arrival of extended wear lenses, so contacts were actually A Lot Of Faff with the putting in and taking out and cleaning and making sure one had adequate supplies of the relevant saline solution etc.

[lexin]

I wore contacts for about twenty years, until I managed to scratch my cornea. Woe.

But since then my sight has become so bad that I can't have contacts any more, and I'm more than idly considering having my actual physical lenses (I've the beginnings of cataracts) replaced with toric lenses which would correct my astygmatism.

I don't like wearing glasses, even though I've needed sight correction for the last 50 years. Not that anyone after my school days (where I was called a 'speccy git' for a few years) has ever said anything uncomplimentary.