The Perils of Eye Sex When You're Legally Blind

I took health and human sexuality in elementary, junior and high school and they taught us a lot about the normalcy of boners, how lady parts work and how to avoid making a baby, but they didn’t teach us anything about eye sex.  They didn’t even mention it!  A Tribe Called Quest said, “Bust a nut inside your eye to show you where I come from,” but I’m pretty sure that’s not about eye sex in the traditional sense.  Truthfully, I didn’t know what eye sex was until I was 16 and my friend Michael’s normally-sighted older sister explained to me that sometimes two strangers who have sexual chemistry will lock eyes and look at one another lustfully.  My friend’s older sister made eye sex sound like both a lot of fun and a necessary and frequent aspect of dating. This instant ocular intimacy, she said, could happen anywhere. It happened at the gym, in her classes at college, at Starbucks and obviously at parties and bars, where eye sex was often a great segue to the kinds of sex we learned about in health class and had seen simulated on Cinemax. She said it was a great way to meet strangers and feel good about yourself.  It opened doors, could lead to a relationship and, in her experience, eye sex had definitely led to some of the best hook ups of her life. In my experience though, eye sex has been a disaster, mostly because I'm legally blind.   

While there is much debate about who originally said “eyes are the window to the soul” the universal truth of this statement is not debated.  As human beings, biologically there are many emotional and physical cues our vision helps us process and many of these cues come from reading the eyes of other people. A person’s eyes provide information about what they are thinking, what they are feeling and what they might do next. In the NFL, a free safety knows where the quarterback is going to throw the ball because he can read his eyes from 30 yards away.  In discussions in my classroom, a normally-sighted student knows when to lighten up on her criticism of another student’s writing because, from 20 feet away, she can see in his eyes that the critiques are making him anxious.  At a poker table, a gambler knows his opponent is bluffing because he can see the dishonesty in her eyes from five or six feet away.  I’m aware and in awe of these abilities because they are completely foreign to me.  For me to be able to see someone’s eyes well enough to read them, that person needs to be less than three feet from me, any further than that and their eyes are imperceptible oval blurs from which I glean nothing.  However, since I was not raised to be bound by my disability, I haven’t let the fact I can’t see anything keep me from trying to have eye sex, just like most guys don’t let the fact we have no idea what we’re doing in bed keep us from trying to have sex.  

One time at a dark and crowded rock and roll show in Boston I could feel someone’s eyes on me.  Feeling people staring at me was nothing new, but this girl’s gaze felt curious in a positive way, as opposed to the usual slack-jawed gawking of drunken assholes. There was something hungry and carnal in the manner I thought she was eyeing me, though she was on the opposite side of the room. From my vantage point, this chick looked like a punk rock Katie Holmes, so I smiled in her direction and, keeping my eyes on her, approached.  She smiled back and I felt warm and understood the appeal of eye sex for a nanosecond before my leg slammed into something metal and I tripped and fell flat on my face. My eyes were so focused on Punk Rock Katie Holmes I stumbled over a person in a wheelchair who I had not seen.

In my early 30s, walking down a Chicago street around Christmas time, I could’ve sworn a sexy, sophisticated older woman was making eyes at me from down the block. With a smug smile on my face, I approached her, beaming.  Then she seemed to stop moving and I thought for sure she was waiting for me.  I straightened my scarf and adjusted my hat, staring at the red velvet cocktail dress it looked like she was wearing and letting my imagination fill in the details of her body, which I could not fully see yet. In my mind, this woman was shapely and gorgeous and this was the start of a beautiful relationship. As I approached, my love interest revealed herself to be a large red Christmas bow tied to a wrought iron gate.      

Since I’m legally blind and cannot see everything, my imagination fills in the details of what I can’t see with what it wants to see. Most people engage in some version of this same practice, often seeing things in other people which are not really there, particularly early in relationships.  For me, though, I sometimes see things which aren't there in extreme and literal ways. From afar, my first instinct is almost always to assume people are good looking.  I think because most of the people I truly see in full detail and clarity are on enormous movie screens or my 4K UltraHD TV, I tend to I imagine the world is a much more beautiful place than it actually is, which probably seems ironic given my curmudgeonly disposition.  Almost every person in Los Angeles seemed stunning to me, for example; though, even my normally sighted friends had trouble telling cute hipster chicks from homeless people when they were more than 50 feet away.  From across the street, most people in Chicago are model gorgeous simply because they are well-dressed. As I get closer to these imagined beautiful people the image gradually clarifies and sharpens, eventually rendering the truth. But there have been plenty of times when I fell madly in love with a woman across the street only to eventually realize she was not interested, not attractive and sometimes she wasn’t even a human woman.  In college, my friend Michael observed my tendency to think women were prettier than they are.  As a good friend, he took it upon himself to function as my eyes, steering me away from women he thought were ugly.  The only problem with this strategy was Michael’s standards of beauty were so insanely high that a girl had to look like she just stepped out of the pages of Vogue for him to think she was attractive. Thanks to Michael though, I ended up making out and striking out with a lot of girls who were way out of my league.

In grad school, I met my friend Jordan.  He’s the kind of guy who walks into a bar and has had eye sex with seven different women before ordering his first beer.  He’s one of the best pick-up artists I've ever seen and he's probably had sex with more women than I’ve talked to. Given his broad range of experience with broads, Jordan offered a really interesting perspective on sex and vision.  “One insanely magical thing about human beings,” he said, “is that everyone is beautiful when you’re two inches from their face.” Thanks in part to Jordan, I stopped caring so much what people look like and learned to value inner beauty because he’s right, everyone is beautiful when you let yourself see them up close. 

When I turned to internet dating, sites like OKCupid and Tinder helped eliminate the perils of eye sex, but even on a date, my inability to read a person’s eyes was a setback.  I can’t tell you how many times I thought I was establishing chemistry so I went in for a kiss only to realize I'd misread the signals and get rejected.  I'm so happy to be done with dating.  Though, I should point out that just as blind people sometimes develop extraordinary hearing abilities to compensate for their lack of eyesight, according to my wife, who is beautiful inside and out, I developed extraordinary abilities of touch to compensate for my bad eyes.  Turns out poor eyesight doesn’t matter much once the lights are off.

Further Reading: Amuse-Douche