Four Eyes

Why is it still socially acceptable to make fun of someone for wearing glasses? No one would see a blind man with a cane or a hearing-impaired person with a hearing aid and point and laugh. No one would see an elderly lady with a walker or a person in a wheelchair and tell them that they are lesser for needing these devices to function in everyday life.

The majority of people would have sympathy for any of the above, but when it comes to a person wearing glasses, they’re fair game for ridicule, even though glasses are medical devices, the same as a hearing aid, cane, wheelchair, or any other device needed for a physical ailment.

I stared wearing glasses at the age of 9. Wearing glasses didn’t bother me then. They were a bit of an inconvenience, but I got used to them. Fast forward to Jr. High School and I still didn’t care about glasses, until one boy started making fun of me.

I was a quiet kid, who minded my own business, but for some reason, this boy, Anthony, decided that I was to be his target for the year. He called me blind and had something to say about my glasses every single day. The worse part was that out of 9 classes per day, he was in 7 of them. He even made up a rap song to mock me and my nearsightedness. At first he made me feel bad about wearing glasses, but by the end of the year, I felt bad about myself.

His taunting made me aware of how people with glasses were treated in movies and on TV as well. The person with glasses was always the nerd, the unattractive one, the loser, or some combination of the three. The person with glasses was never the nice, attractive, cool person, who just happened to have poor vision.

People with glasses weren’t allowed to just be normal people in the media or in real life. I internalized this, never feeling “good enough” as a person, until I got contact lenses in my early 20s.

This feeling of being “ugly” when wearing glasses never went away. Well into adulthood, I still wouldn’t dare be seen outside wearing glasses. I wouldn’t even run across the street to the convenient store without putting in my contacts first.

Even living with a partner, who loved me, I still felt less attractive to them when night time came and I took out my lenses and put on my glasses. I felt like I was a princess, who reverted back to a frog in front of her Prince Charming, although my partners never seemed to care.

It seems silly that a grown woman would harbor such insecurities over wearing glasses for decades, but they stuck with me, until one Zoom call at work.

Several years ago, I was working remotely and each morning, I got on a Zoom call to meet with my team before the start of the work day. I always got up beforehand and put in my contact lenses, but one particular morning, I was mentally and physically exhausted, and I said to hell with it. I didn’t feel like dealing with contacts and the world wasn’t going to blow up if my coworkers saw me in glasses.

I nervously went to my desk and logged into our morning meeting, still feeling a bit ashamed to be seen “like this”. My team members then started logging in one by one, and lo and behold, everyone, even the team leader, was wearing glasses! I had never been around that many people wearing glasses at one time and I was borderline moved to tears! There were seven other people on my team and I had never seen any of them wear glasses until that day.

I still wear my contacts when I'm going to be out of the house for a while, but I no longer feel the need to put in lenses to run across the street to get toilet paper or for a 30-minute remote work meeting. I love my rose gold, John Lennon style glasses and I actually feel kinda cute in them!

But, back to the question. Why is it socially acceptable to insult someone for wearing glasses? We live in a time of political correctness, where some standard medical terms are now considered slurs. People have to watch their language left and right, but calling someone with glasses a “Poindexter”, “Urkel”, “four eyes”, “nerd”, or whatever is totally OK.

It’s time to give the kindness to visually impaired people who wear glasses the same kindness that’s given to other visually impaired people, whose impairments are more severe.

It’s time to start seeing glasses for what they are, medical devices, that are not an indicator of one’s personality or lot in life. I hope that my fellow “four eyes”, who were and are teased and bullied for wearing glasses finally realize that their worth as a person is not tied to the frames on their faces.