There was an article on the BBC News app yesterday that made me quite angry when I read it.  I read that in Japan, some companies are banning their female employees from wearing glasses.  It was also stated that in the Japanese retail sector, female shop assistants who wear glasses give off a ‘cold’ impression.

So how about Japanese men who wear glasses then?  I take it they get to keep theirs on while the female staff suffer headaches and bump into the furniture if they don’t want to wear contact lenses?  This just goes to perpetuate the sad predominantly male idea of women as sex objects to be ogled at and not taken seriously; a kind of walking (but not talking) vagina.  Hundreds of thousands of creepy men slavering over pornography through the decades has only helped to intensify the misconception that women are air-heads.  This ban will do nothing to help teenage girls and young women, who through some men’s warped views of what women should look like, magazine air-brushing of ‘celebrities’ or on-line bullying, obsess about their body image and become over-conscious about their appearance.

I’ve worn glasses since I was 17.  I could no more put a contact lens in my eye than fly to the moon.  So what if women wear glasses?  So do men, and they wear them for a reason – because they can’t see very well without them.

Do women have the same problem dating a man who wears spectacles?  My eldest son, his wife and their two children all wear spectacles, so obviously glasses do not matter to them.  I’d been wearing glasses for 3 years before I met Sam.  My glasses are part of me – I’d feel quite peculiar without them.  I know that my daughter-in-law would say that if anybody has a problem about her or her daughters wearing glasses, then it’s their problem and not hers.

Whenever you see any woman on TV wearing glasses, she’s either a newsreader, or acting the part of a lawyer, a scientist, or somebody who is very brainy in another sphere; she always takes them off  for her close-ups or if she has to talk.  The only time she doesn’t take them off is if she is advertising the spectacles themselves.  Dorothy Parker once said that ‘Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses’, but another way of interpreting this is that men consider girls who wear glasses might be cleverer than they are, and therefore to be avoided.

Why can’t a woman be cleverer than her partner?  Why does the male of the species think that he has to dominate all the time?  Okay he may be physically stronger, but that does not make him superior.  Sorry for the rant, but this is a real backward step in the fight for gender equality.