A lot of people wear glasses. In the US, 143 million adults are estimated to do so. I am one of them. Of my three partners, one wears glasses, one wears contacts, and one has had laser eye surgery so she no longer needs either. Both my parents wore glasses (until my mother had her cataract surgery, which resolved her need); my kid wears them too, as does her mother, her stepmother, and my two best friends. In fact, it’s more likely that people do wear glasses than don’t.

So why, especially in porn (but also in media in general), is glasses-wearing synonymous with “nerd”. A search for the word “nerdy” returns a preponderance of videos where at least one person is wearing glasses. Is it nerdy to want to see what you’re doing? I mean, I admit it, I don’t wear glasses during sex (they get in the way when I give head), but I do wear them while I’m giving spankings. When I’m receiving spankings, I take them off, because I don’t need to see. I would think most people who qualify as “nerdy” don’t keep their glasses on during sexytimes. It doesn’t matter how bad your vision is.

There’s plenty of other kinds of shorthand, too; any woman who looks over 30 in porn is labeled a MILF. Maybe some of them actually are. But I know lots of women over 30 who don’t have children that I’d still count as fuckable (or spankable). Any woman with more than the slightest curve to her stomach runs the risk of being labeled BBW. And for some reason (actually, we all know the reason, and it is “the patriarchy”) there are way more “sluts” having sex on porn sites than there are “women”. If a white woman has a larger-than-average backside, even if it’s not huge, she’s labeled a PAWG. And let’s not forget the assumption that all black men have enormous penises; just because you see it in porn doesn’t make it true.

I’d love to see some quantitative stats on porn consumption that doesn’t rely on self-reporting, but that’s hard to get. (Actually, it’s probably not, but it would be unethical for companies that have access to PII to share that information with researchers unless the people whose PII they’re sharing know what it’s being used for. That’s a gross oversimplification of the rules, so don’t yell at me. But it would be super simple to correlate gender from PII with porn viewing on one’s phone, which I bet is the primary place porn is viewed these days — on phones or tablets, anyway.) So we’ll just have to rely on self-reporting, which we all know is flawed, mostly from social desirability bias. I would be willing to hazard a very strong guess that average penis size research is also affected by self-reporting issues, but that’s neither here nor there.

Shorthand, in the case of this post, is just another word for stereotyping. And stereotypes happen because over time they tend to be true for an observable number of people. In Ye Olde Dayes, if you wore glasses you were a nerd, so being nerdy has come to be equated with glasses-wearing. Even though most porn these days doesn’t have a story or plot, back when it did it was easy shorthand to make someone nerdy by having them wear glasses. Hell, it even happens in mainstream media to this day; how many action heroes wear glasses when said glasses are not a character trait making them smart, nerdy, or old? I mean, sure, they’d probably wear contacts, but let’s go even further; I was watching the season 3 premiere of Only Murders in the Building and not one character who wasn’t nerdy, fat, or older than 40 seemed to need glasses. How many romantic leads who aren’t supposed to be nerds wear glasses? Watch some Hallmark movies and you’ll see what I mean; if a woman wears glasses, it means she’s supposed to be seen as smart, but what if she’s not wearing them? Does that mean she’s not smart? Or does it just mean that’s not as important to her character?

My glasses communicate one thing: I have vision problems. Yes, I’m also a nerd, and smart, and older than 40, but you shouldn’t assume that. Don’t use shorthand. And especially don’t use it in your writing. Give “normal” people glasses for once.