The Case for Keeping Your Eyeglasses on During Sex

So I very rarely remove my glasses while having sex (see above note about how it’s my face, etc.), and if memory serves, I have never explicitly been asked to—I imagine if a partner were to request that, it would be to protect the frames from breaking (which is nice) or because they had some classic high school movie kink where removing them is some sexy striptease (this is nice too if that’s your bag—consent is king). As a result of all of this, I just never feel the need to remove them before getting down to business.

But I wanted to discover if other people felt similarly, so I conducted my own scientific poll—a.k.a. I asked Twitter if folks took their frames off before getting between the sheets. I asked the question twice, changing the phrasing from, “Do you take your glasses off during sex?” to “Do you keep your glasses on during sex?” because I remember something from my college psych class about having a control and verbiage coloring your results. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

I wasn’t too surprised to find that most Tweeters said they don’t wear glasses—though the Vision Council of America suggests 75 percent of adults require some sort of vision correction (however, it doesn’t break down what percentage are part-time wearers, how much of that population goes untreated, or opts for contacts, or Lasik eye surgery, and so on). I was surprised to see an overwhelming majority of folks admit to never taking off their glasses, and some non-glasses wearers revealed that their glasses-wearing partners would take them off all the time. This isn’t the most accurate reading—I’m not a scientist—but it does seem like a bummer.

By removing glasses before intercourse, we four-eyes of the world are forgetting one crucial thing: Aside from physical health conditions outside of our control, the majority of us choose to wear glasses. We could get Lasik, we could poke at our eyes with glass (plastic?) contacts day in and day out (again, I’m dedicated to spectacles), but we choose glasses.

Why? Because they’re cute and handsome, and we look good in them. People find us sexually attractive in them, and they are part of the reason we’re so damn cute and handsome and good-looking.

In a particularly memorable episode in the third season of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, resident badass/recent divorcée Brandi Glanville mentions that she owns a pair of glasses that she keeps only for the bedroom. While that’s not totally true—she’s since made it a trend to wear them out and about and look oh-so-fabulous when she does—it’s still an inspiring thought. If all of us glasses wearers could embrace our inner (and outer) Brandi Glanvilles and take our frames to the bedroom, we’d probably have better sex because of it.

And for what it’s worth, “glasses” is a popular tag on a lot of porn sites. People are into our frames, specifically and especially for sex reasons. We should be too.