Mamaturg on the Move: Making Passes at Girls Who Wear Glasses

The girl I meant to be: 1994

Okay, you guys, I'm still thinking about this "Sexy PhD" costume that popped up in my newsfeed via HuffPo the other day. It was the day after Halloween, so what's a few more days of reflection, eh?

The Amazon comments are fantastic. I suppose this is the natural progression from both the ubiquitous Sexy Teacher costumes, and the ever-increasingly-ridiculous Sexy Any-Profession costumes that have been popping up more and more every year. There is a Sexy Pizza costume, y'all. This needs to stop.

But there was an unforeseen (possibly terrible-feminist) part of me that thought, Hooray, smart girls are sexy now! Yes, I know that's not the actual message. 15-year-old me doesn't recognize that.

I first got glasses when I was five years old. 1980s-style bug-eye glasses, because that's all there was in 1985. And I was also a Very Smart Kid who related to adults much better than I ever related to kids my own age. And that made me socially awkward inwardly, and a certified nerd outwardly.
My mom tells a story about a woman at a restaurant who leaned down to five-year-old me and cooed, "You'll be so cute once you get contact lenses!" My mom, ever the champion of her children, politely snapped back, "She's cute now." That was the narrative I grew up with: I was cute with my glasses and, by extension, with my nerdliness. Sure, I wore contact lenses for a good six months, but I quickly went back to my glasses. They were a part of me.

Rocking my '80s glasses, with my still-adorable brother.

And then.

There was this guy I had a crush on in high school. A big crush. He and I were friends outside of school--we had an awesome phone relationship going--but he very rarely talked to me in school. It started out with him calling me for help on homework, and evolved into us talking for two hours at a time, several times a week. And yet, though we shared several classes and similar friends, we never talked in school.

One night over the phone, he told me he thought my best friend was cute. And I, in all of my fifteen-year-old-Jewish glory, asked, "So what am I, chopped liver?"

His answer? "We talk about you. We think you're okay. But...some guys just don't like smart girls."

There it was.

Some guys just don't like smart girls.

I could have focused on the "some guys" part, and realized--as I do now--that those aren't exactly the guys I want to hang out with. And who cares what they think anyway? But the reality was:

I cared. I cared a lot. Some guys in my head extrapolated to, the reason I don't get asked out, ever, is that I'm smart. And it's one of those things that sticks to your subconscious. Enough so that you blog about it almost twenty years later.

But though the facts of that conversation haven't changed in the last almost-twenty years, something has: my confidence in my nerdliness. I like to read. I like to talk about the things I read. I like to write things and talk about them, too. I like to teach other people about the things I like. And all of those things? Are awesome.

I am confident that I'm smart. And being smart is part of what makes me attractive. Maybe not to 15-year-old stoner boys (which now: ick), but to smart and funny people. Which, coincidentally, are also the people who I find attractive and want to hang out with. So, win-win.

OK, so I don't have a PhD, and so I wouldn't merit wearing this super-low-cut, super-short regalia, though admittedly I don't know what a "sexy MA" would wear, since I didn't walk when I got my grad degree. But I'm confident in the fact that attractiveness doesn't (have to) come from the length of your skirt, the size of your cleavage, or the accessories you happen to wear on your face. (And, I should note, If you choose to wear something short and/or cleavage-bearing, it doesn't affect your intellect one bit.)

Smart is sexy.