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8 comments
June 24, 2015 at 7:37 am
violetwisp
Almost spat my coffee out. You can’t imagine the number of men that have taken time out of their busy schedule to remind me to smile. How inconsiderate of me!
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June 24, 2015 at 9:59 am
The Arbourist
@VW
Well one is supposed to permanently happy and ready to please 24/7 what exactly is your problem…. :/
Yet another example of the variability of the social experience that demarcates living while ‘female’ or ‘male’.
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June 24, 2015 at 9:59 am
Wayne
Holy Crap, what a load of bunk. As a man, I have never asked anyone, female or male, to smile. If they are smiling fine, if not and I have the time and they look approachable, I may ask what is wrong. Then again, I may not, depending on how I am at the time. This also sound a lot like to other load of bunk, that men do not cry ever.
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June 24, 2015 at 10:06 am
The Intransigent One
Dear Wayne, what a good boy you are, not ordering women to smile! Here, have a biscuit!
I can assure you that for women, having random men tell/order you to smile, is a thing that happens fairly often. And if you refuse to believe women’s accounts of their own lived experiences, just because you personally haven’t witnessed it or perpetrated it, then you are part of the problem.
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June 24, 2015 at 10:08 am
The Arbourist
@Wayne
Hi Wayne.
I’m glad that you are doing your part not to perpetuate some of the societal stuff that is harmful for women.
It is good to identify similar oppressive gender constructs that exist with our society. One might extrapolate that if one such feature exists then the other, despite one’s own incredulity, might also exist.
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June 24, 2015 at 4:49 pm
Sedate Me
Or maybe it’s just a case of our society’s new “normal”, where EVERYONE in our culture is expected to be happy 24/7. Anybody watch daytime TV anymore? It’s like the entire audience has to be on the verge of orgasm for the entire hour. (Curiously, those audiences are mostly women.)
“Dog die? Lost your job? Woman left you and took the pickup truck? Don’t cry into your beer and listen to old-school country songs. Take a bottle of happy pills, put some product in your hair, turn on some New Country and dance around with a smile on your face. Or else we’ll have to…(gasp!)…de-friend you!”
Everybody (who still speaks to me) constantly tells me to smile. It’s as if I was committing some kind of Thought Crime by not pretending to be happy. This isn’t just because I’m a “humourless lesbian”, but because I’m a humourless, hetero, white, male who doesn’t jizz in his pants every single day for being so privileged. Just because my life is a lot less shitty than most peoples’ lives doesn’t mean I ever get to be happy, nor be happy about the fact billions of people have it far worse.
While this Mad Men era daily reality is still true enough to be a funny “bit”, women no longer have a monopoly on mandated smile-masks. Forced smiles are less & less driven by sexist Patriarchy and more & more by corporate Happiarchy, where turning off your brain and pretending everything is “A-okay” is expected behaviour. Because its good for profit margins!
In these dark days, nobody who isn’t on serious, mind altering, drugs is smiling with any frequency. And if they do, there’s something seriously wrong with them. If it were up to me, they’d wind up in a “re-education camp”.
Look at me. I turn an ironic joke into a snarly tirade. Maybe I should just turn off my brain and put on a fake smile. (Just think about running those re-education camps, Sedate Me. Just think of the camps)
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June 25, 2015 at 9:44 am
The Intransigent One
@Sedate Me – you make good points about our toxic culture of “positivity at all costs”, and the discomfort of your associates with your less-than-happiness. If you want to read a book that makes you go yes! over and over again, try Bright Sided: How positive thinking is undermining America, by Barbara Ehrenreich.
However, this post is specifically addressing a particular form of gendered harassment in which women are accosted by complete strangers and ordered to smile, and met with overt hostility if we don’t comply. It’s not so much about positivity at all costs, as it is about (some) men’s apparent sense of entitlement to women’s compliance.
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June 26, 2015 at 5:11 pm
Sedate Me
The Intransigent One,
Oddly enough, the crippling effect of trying to be perma-happy was a sub-topic on The Current on CBC radio the morning after I wrote the above comment.
I looked up Bright Sided: How positive thinking is undermining America and probably agree with you. I think I saw an interview with her when it first came out. Should I ever see a copy for sale….
I’ve also come across this writer at The Guardian who wrote The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking http://www.oliverburkeman.com/books Curious how both books have titles that take longer to read than the average Canadian attention span. http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadians-now-have-shorter-attention-span-than-goldfish-thanks-to-portable-devices-microsoft-study
I’ve always operated on the starting premise, “Bliss is a function of ignorance”. So when I see people being being happy, I usually question their intelligence.
As for women being forced to smile at metaphorical gunpoint, I didn’t realize it was about complete strangers trying to abduct their moods. Outside of preforming their job duties, or settings where vast amounts of alcohol and pharmaceuticals are present, I was completely unaware that strangers still occasionally speak to each other. I thought the “geniuses” at Apple solved that particularly nasty social problem of “actual human contact” a decade ago.
Within that modern “communication” context, I can certainly see how traumatizing a stranger, not just speaking to you, but pressuring you to smile, can be. So, even if that Mad Men era mainstay has fizzled to almost nothing, that’s still some very serious fodder for shrink sessions.
I know I’d personally find that about as traumatic as living an episode of Hannibal, even if that stranger was Gillian Anderson…especially if that stranger was Gillian Anderson.
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