I’ve been wearing glasses since around the 3rd grade. It’s a wonder I made it that long being that I come from terrible eye DNA.
My first glasses were reading glasses – metallic blue and roundish. I never wanted to take them off, despite only needing them for short distances. I would squint & strain so that I could see the blackboard without removing them.
Later, my nearsightedness emerged and my glasses became a necessity. I embraced half-rimmed glasses as my eyewear statement for several years before realizing my natural klutziness made them highly impractical.
That’s when I was introduced to plastic frames.
It was the tail end of high school. I was letting go of the trappings of impressing peers who didn’t care and coming into my own personal style. I had a pixie hair cut and a reputation for geekiness that I was a little too proud of. At the end of my annual eye exam, the sales clerk presented me with the wall of frames as per usual.
Then she pulled out a tray of new arrivals, saying that I might be interested in the latest trend.
In the tray, there were frames of every color. They looked like candy.
Sold.
I’ve had make-a-statement plastic frames every since. Orangey tan, black & red, white & black, gray & cream. I got married in a particularly striking pair of raspberry-colored frames.
I’m not myself – a geek by all definitions – without glasses perched on my nose. They are part of my identity.
Being a geek is more than just having the latest gadgets – which I do, speaking in code-ladden gibberish – which I can, or even having a penchant for the technological – oh yes. Being a geek is a worldview.
We girl geeks just see the world differently. Whether we geek out over art & design or the latest iSomethingorOther, vampires or video games, our daily activities are colored with the paint of our geeky desires. It’s no wonder glasses have become a staple of girl-geekdom.
In a recent Bust magazine article, there was a short history of the female-with-glasses archetype:
Steel or horn-rimmed but always plain and pragmatic, glasses marked both the women’s-college grind (a pejorative term for the overly studious) and the spinsterish co-ed who competed against rather than coquetted with male students.
It seems most of the 19th & 20th centuries were not kind to girl geeks. I’d like to think that’s changed. Girl geeks are leaders, entrepreneurs, sex symbols, and change-makers.
Tortoise shell or colorful plastic, you can tell a lot about a girl by her choice of spectacles. She’s passionate and she doesn’t care to hide it. She’s not afraid of committing to her choices. She sees a world that’s fuzzy on the edges so she prefers to look straight ahead onto the path she’s forging.
Glasses, and geekery in general, are alluring because nonconformity is alluring. And nonconformity is a great way to see through the mediocrity all around us.
The Dalai Lama has said that Western women will save the world. I like to think those women are geeks in glasses.
Tara Gentile empowers passion-driven entrepreneurs to find the profit in producing the work of their true spirit. She is the author of the digital guide, The Art of Earning. To find out more & read her musings on building the New Economy with you at the center, visit her blog.
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