The truth of Dorothy Parker's shortest poem - titled 'News Item' it reads: "Men seldom make glasses at girls who wear glasses" - must have seemed self-evident in 1927, and it held up for decades.

The subtext: men might be both brainy and gorgeous, but women had to choose. They could only be one or the other. Women who needed glasses could wear them - and be written off as bookish wallflowers - or they could keep them in their purses and be seen as beautiful and sexy if likely to trip over things.

The fear that sex and spectacles couldn't coincide launched endless lines of 'feminine' eyeglass frames - sweet pink ones, dramatic swoopy ones, rhinestone-bedizened ' dragon ladies'.

Nonetheless, when contact lenses were introduced, women - and especially young women - couldn't wait to take off their accursed glasses. Men, according to Zoraida Fiol-Silva, director of the contact lens department of Wills Eye Hospital, only came in for contact when they needed them for sports or hunting or something active and macho.

But all that has changed, she says. "Men are coming out of the closet, looking for contacts for cosmetic reasons and admitting it", she says. But the truly passionate new market for contacts if baby boomers who need bifocals and have "trouble getting used to them or getting used to being old enough to have them".

Meanwhile, the spectacle industry is "growing dramatically - people buy two, three four pairs of glasses". Fiol-Silva says baby-faced guys get glasses to "look more mature, more credible", and the young women who despised their specs when they had no choice now switch back and forth from contacts to glasses "depending on what image they want to project".

For instance, my friend Julia's friend Irene wears glasses when she wants to meet men - and Julia says it works. (Curious, Julia put on her driving glasses one slow Friday night at a local jazz club. Within minutes, the three conventioneering psychiatrists at the next table invited her to join them, and they danced all night.)

Irene has concluded that wearing glasses makes women more approachable.

"Well, I just think that the opposite sex is always intimidating, no matter which sex it is", she says. "For me, if I see a good-looking guy with glasses, I think other women might not be able to see behind those glasses". Similarly, she says, "I've been at bars where there's a super-attractive woman - great figure, sharply dressed, looks completely outstanding - and you see her at the bar by herself and no man will approach her... The men are thinking, 'She's too sharp for me'.."

"Wearing glasses softens the blow", Irene says. Besides which, Irene thinks some men still cherish that old movie fantasy of lifting a woman's glasses from the bridge of her nose, unpinning her bun and seeing her transformed into a raving beauty.

Besides that, Irene figures, wearing glasses screens out the kind of guys who would never go out with a woman who wears glasses, who are not the guys Irene is interested in.

"Who you attract depends on how you look" , she says. "A woman in tight pants and sprayed bleached-blond hair attracts a different man than a woman with glasses. You have to dress to appeal to the kind of man you want to attract." Which, in Irene's case is mostly guys with glasses who, she things, tend to be "a little bit more intelligent, more inward-focused."

Based on early field trials, Irene's theory is looking good. "Two out of my past three boyfriends I met when I had my glasses on", she says. Which most of the time she doesn't. She only wears them "sometimes when I feel like I have to try a little harder" to meet someone.

And then?

"After I get the man, I take my glasses off and put my contacts back on", she says. "They're more comfortable."