There’s a commercial on television these days that I find particularly offensive. It’s from the world of big-box optometry, and features an aggressive man dressed in a pink leotard and tutu mocking a ballerina, who lands in the middle of a middle-class living room and proceeds to ridicule a woman for wearing pink glasses.
In the living room, some women are discussing a book they are reading. The condemned woman is trying to share her views on the book when she is rudely interrupted by the intrusive man (unfortunately not an unusual event in women’s lives.)
He claims these other women can’t
possibly take her ideas seriously because she’s wearing these pink glasses that
SCREAM ---- and he doesn’t even have to explain why or what the glasses
scream. He simply has to claim that they
do – and everything stops.
Forget that the man looks
ridiculous, and clearly has no room to point fingers. What lacerates me is the reminder of the
double-bind of femininity: damned if you
do, damned if you don’t. But there’s a class message here, too,
and that one brings me out to bat.
The commercial is really aimed at
those of us who think buying cheap reading glasses is an adequate solution to
the problem of increasing fuzziness on the page. They’re trying to convince us that we don’t
have to take this embarrassing route.
For only $69 we, too, can have real glasses that SPEAK of economic
well-being equivalent to people with health plans that include eye care, not
scream our insurance-less bargain-basement survival strategies.
Of course, if you’re paying good
money for glasses, you’re not going to choose pink frames. You’ll choose the standard silver or gold
metal, or faux horn-rimmed, all of which imply a certain class or intellectual
capability. Those rims certainly will
not distract anyone from anything. They’ll
make you fit right in.
I remember when I bought my first
pink glasses from Dollar Tree. I already
had several pairs of cheap readers in standard colors and shapes, the kind
you’d wear in the presence of other people.
Then I found a pair of colorful paint-splattered white ones. I wore them when I worked at RN Market, and people
complimented them all the time. When
those broke, I replaced them with a plum-colored pair from Rite-Aid, since I
had a little cash and they were on sale.
The compliments stopped, but I wore them anyway because they stayed on
my head.
But when I found the pink pair, and
put them on my face, I felt just a little bit more feminine. That’s a difficult place for me to stand some
days because of cultural sentiments like the one in this commercial, but the
glasses helped.
I now have several pair. Mostly I’ve worn them at home, but those days
are over. From now on you’ll see me in
public with pink glasses perched on the top of my head if not on my face. Take that, you wolf in women’s clothing.
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Trudy
Wischemann is an aging reader who writes in Lindsay. You can send your views on rim colors to her
c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 92347 or visit leave a
comment below.
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