Speaking in front of an audience at TED today, Google co-founder Sergey Brin made a bizarre pitch for buying his company’s wearable Google Glass headset, essentially by arguing that product utilizing one of his company’s biggest projects — Android — were effeminate and made for wussies.

Speaking in Long Beach, California, Brin said:

“Brin told the audience that smartphones are “emasculating.” “You’re standing around and just rubbing this featureless piece of glass,” he said.

Using Google Glass requires a fair bit of rubbing as well, and the prototypes have fewer hardware features than most phones. But Brin said they improved on smartphones in certain ways, particularly in having a camera ever-ready to start snapping pictures. (The same camera is also the source of the most serious privacy concerns raised by Glass.)

In other words, not only did Brin claim that one of Google’s major projects, Android — an operating system that runs mostly on “featureless pieces of glass” like smartphones and tablets — was “emasculating,” he is also essentially arguing that carrying a smartphone around in your pocket makes you look stupider than wearing a computer on your face 24 hours a day.

A very poor choice of words, indeed. Google’s PR department must be doing spins.

• SourceCNet