Telling women to smile is sexist

The obvious problem is that the shitty smile stranger knows nothing about you or what might have just happened to you. Secondly, being strangers their intentions can never be genuine worry about your unhappiness. Thirdly, since when has demanding an unhappy person to smile ever made them suddenly stop being unhappy? So I must question – why? and why do men, specifically, feel they have the right to tell women to smile. Why do they expect women to do what they want them to, just because they said so. The smile benefits them, they can see it not us. It’s not for our benefit – so it must be for theirs.

I interviewed a young woman recently about female beauty standards. She seemed to me like quite a happy person, maybe even one of those ‘smiley-smiley’ people yet I learned that she too was fed up of people, predominantly men, demanding her to flash them a smile. It’s not just me then, with my perma-frowned face. Maybe part of it is related to our age; the false perception that young people should be thoroughly enjoying and sucking the nourishment out of every second of their day because being young is so much fun and nothing can ever go wrong for us. I got fired from a job two years ago for not being “bubbly and out there enough”, I was told I was “young and attractive and have everything going for you” as if my age and gender placed this expectation on me to act “bubbly” every second of the day.

So maybe it’s the age thing. I think mostly though it’s because we’re women and we’re expected to look pretty and happy and there for other people to look at to use for their own visual pleasure. Not just for men actually, some women expect it too and can be just as sexist as men with their expectations of gender stereotypes. At work I tried to conform to looking conventionally attractive and ‘feminine’ through make-up and clothing but the one thing I couldn’t fake was the lack of carbonated bubble in my personality – I could not look good enough.

See article: Victoria Beckham doesn’t smile, gets called shit names for it. Would the same judgement be directed at a man who didn’t look particularly grumpy, but just didn’t smile?

Are you ‘male’, is being told to smile a problem for you? let me know, I’m interested.

Oh and if you hadn’t noticed, my smile is turned upside down to show that my lips naturally curve to create a ‘downwards smile’.

Originally posted at SecondAura.blogspot.com