WHY WOMEN SMILE: BY EMOEFE.O. BRYT
WHY WOMEN SMILE
After smiling brilliantly for nearly Two decades, I now find
myself trying to quit. Or, at the very least, seeking to lower
the wattage a bit.
Not everyone I know is keen on this. My smile has
gleamed like a cheap plastic night-light so long and so
reliably that certain friends and relatives worry that my
mood will darken the moment my smile dims. "Gee," one
says, "I associate you with your smile. It's the essence of
you. I should think you'd want to smile more!" But the
people who love me best agree that my smile which
springs forth no matter where I am or how I feel-hasn't
been serving me well. "Your
smiling face and unthreatening demeanor make people
like you in a fuzzy way, but that doesn't seen'; to be what
you're after these days."
Smiles are not the small and innocuous things they appear
to be: Too many of us smile in lieu of showing what's
really on our minds. Indeed, the success of the women's
movement might be measured by the sincerity-and lack of
it-in our smiles. Despite all the work Nigerian women
have done to get and maintain full legal control of our
bodies, not to mention our destinies, we still don't seem
to be fully in charge of a couple of small muscle groups
in our faces.
We smile so often and so promiscuously-when we're
angry, when we're tense, when we're with children, when
we're being photographed, when we're interviewing for a
job, when we're meeting candidates to employ-that the
Smiling Woman has become a peculiarly Nigeria
archetype. This isn't entirely a bad thing, of course. A
smile lightens the load, diffuses unpleasantness,
redistributes nervous tension. Women doctors smile more
than their male counterparts, studies show, and are better
liked by their patients.
Oscar Wilde's old saw that "a woman's face is her work of
fiction" is often quoted to remind us that what's on the
surface may have little connection to what we're feeling.
What is it in our culture that keeps our smiles on auto
matic pilot? The behavior seems to be an equal blend of
nature and nurture. Research has demonstrated that since
females often mature earlier than males and are less
irritable, girls smile more than boys from the very beginning. But by adolescence, the differences in the smiling
rates of boys and girls are so robust that it's clear the
culture has done more than its share of the dirty work.
Just think of the mothers who painstakingly embroidered
the words ENTER SMILING on little samplers, and then
hung their handiwork on doors by golden chains.
Translation: "Your real emotions aren't welcome here."
Clearly, our instincts are another factor. Our smiles have
their roots in the greetings of monkeys, who pull their lips
up and back to show their fear of attack, as well as their
reluctance to vie for a position of dominance. And like the
opossum caught in the light by the clattering garbage
cans, we, too, flash toothy grimaces when we make major
mistakes. By declaring ourselves non-threatening, our
smiles provide an extremely versatile means of protection.
Our earliest baby smiles are involuntary reflexes having
only the vaguest connection to contentment or comfort. In
short, we're genetically wired to pull on our parents'
heartstrings. As Desmond Morris explains in Babywatching,
this is our way of attaching ourselves to our caretakers, as
truly as baby chimps clench their mothers' fur. Even as
babies we're capable of projecting onto others (in this
case, our parents) the feelings we know we need to get
back in return.
Bona fide social smiles occur at two-and-a-half to three
months of age, usually a few weeks after we first start
gazing with intense interest into the faces of our parents.
By the time we are six months old, we are smiling and
laughing regularly in reaction to tickling, feedings, blown
raspberries, hugs, and peekaboo games. Even babies who
are born blind intuitively know how to react to pleasurable
changes with a smile, though their first smiles start later
than those of sighted children.
Psychologists and psychiatrists have noted that babies
also smile and laugh with relief when they realize that
something they thought might be dangerous is not
dangerous after all. Kids begin to invite their parents to
indulge them with "scary" approach-avoidance games; they
love to be chased or tossed up into the air. (It's
interesting to note that as adults, we go through the same
gosh-that' s-shocking-and-dangerous-but -it' s-okay-to-
laugh -and-smile cycles when we listen to raunchy stand-
up comics.)
From the wilds of New Guinea to the sidewalks But smiles are by no means limited to the
expression of positive emotions: People of many different
cultures smile when they are *frightened, embarrassed*,
*angry, or miserable*. In *Japan*, for instance, a smile is
often used to hide pain or sorrow.
Psychologist Paul Ekman, the head of the University of
California's Human Interaction Lab in San Francisco, has
identified 18 distinct types of smiles, including those that
show misery, compliance, fear, and contempt. The smile
of true merriment, which Dr. Ekman calls the Duchenne
Smile, after the 19th century French doctor who first
studied it, is characterized by heightened circulation, a
feeling of exhilaration, and the employment of two major
facial muscles: the zygomaticus major of the lower face,
and the orbicularis oculi, which crinkles the skin around
the eyes. But since the average American woman's smile
often has less to do with her actual state of happiness
than it does with the social pressure to smile no matter
what, her baseline social smile isn't apt to be a felt
expression that engages the eyes like this. Ekman insists
that if people learned to read smiles, they could see the
sadness, misery, or pain lurking there, plain as day.
Evidently, a woman's happy, willing deference is
something the world wants visibly demonstrated. Woe to
the waitress, the personal assistant or receptionist, the
flight attendant, or any other woman in the line of public
service whose smile is not offered up to the boss or
client as proof that there are no storm clouds-no kids to
support, no sleep that's been missed-rolling into the sunny
workplace landscape. Women are expected to smile no
matter where they line up on the social, cultural, or
economic ladder: College professors are criticized for not
smiling, political spouses are pilloried for being too
serious, and women's roles in films have historically been
smiling ones. It's little wonder that men on the street still
call out, "Hey, baby, smile! Life's not that bad, is it?" to
women passing by, lost in thought.
A friend remembers being pulled aside by a teacher after
class and asked, "What is wrong, dear? You sat there for
the whole hour looking so sad!" "All I could figure," my
friends says now, "is that I wasn't smiling. And the fact
that she felt sorry for me for looking normal made me feel
horrible."
Ironically, the social laws that govern our smiles have
completely reversed themselves over the last 2,000 years.
Women weren't always expected to seem animated and
responsive; in fact, immoderate laughter was once
considered one of the more conspicuous vices a woman
could have, and mirth was downright sinful. Women were
kept apart, in some cultures even veiled, so that they
couldn't perpetuate Eve's seductive, evil work. The only
smile deemed appropriate on a privileged woman's face
was the serene, inward smile of the Virgin Mary at Christ's
birth, and even that expression was best directed
exclusively at young children. Cackling laughter and wicked
glee were the kinds of sounds heard only in hell.
What we know of women's facial expressions in other
centuries comes mostly from religious writings, codes of
etiquette, and portrait paintings. In 15th century Italy, it
was customary for artists to paint lovely, blank-faced
women in profile. A viewer could stare endlessly at such a
woman, but she could not gaze back. By the Renaissance,
male artists were taking some pleasure in depicting
women with a semblance of complexity, Leonardo da
Vinci's Mona Lisa, with her veiled enigmatic smile, being
the most famous example.
The Golden Age of the Dutch Republic marks a fascinating
period for studying women's facial expressions. While we
might expect the drunken young whores of Amsterdam to
smile devilishly (unbridled sexuality and lasciviousness
were supposed to addle the brain), it's the faces of the
Dutch women from fine families that surprise us.
Considered socially more free, these women demonstrate
a fuller range of facial expressions.
A married couple, is remarkable not
just for the full, friendly smiles on each face, but for the
frank and mutual pleasure the couple take in each other.
In the 1800s, sprightly, pretty women began appearing in
advertisements for everything from beverages to those
newfangled Kodak Land cameras. Women's faces were no
longer impassive, and their willingness to bestow status,
to offer, proffer, and yield, was most definitely promoted
by their smiling images. The culture appeared to have
turned the smile, originally a bond shared between
intimates, into a socially required display that sold
capitalist ideology as well as kitchen appliances. And
female viewers soon began to emulate these highly
idealized pictures. Many longed to be more like her, that
perpetually smiling female. She seemed so beautiful. So
content. So whole.
By the middle of the 19th century, the bulk of America's
smile burden was falling primarily to women and African-
American slaves, providing a very portable means of
protection, a way of saying, "I'm harmless. I won't assert
myself here." It reassured those in power to see signs of
gratitude and contentment in the faces of subordinates. As
long ago as 1963, adman David Ogilvy declared the image
of a woman smiling approvingly at a product clichéd, but
we've yet to get the message. Cheerful Americans still
appear in ads today, smiling somewhat less
disingenuously than they smiled during the middle of the
smiling broadly nonetheless.
Other countries have been somewhat reluctant to import
our "Don't worry, be happy" American smiles. When
McDonald's opened in Moscow not long ago and when
EuroDisney debuted in France last year, the Americans
involved in both business ventures complained that they
couldn't get the natives they'd employed to smile worth a
damn.
Europeans visiting the United States for the first time are
often surprised at just how often Americans smile. But
when you look at our history, the relentless good humor
(or, at any rate, the pretense of it) falls into perspective.
The American wilderness was developed on the
assumption that this country had a shortage of people in
relation to its possibilities. In countries with a more rigid
class structure or caste system, fewer people are as
captivated by the idea of quickly winning friends and
influencing people. Here in the States, however, every
stranger is a potential associate. Our smiles bring new
people on board. The American smile is a democratic
version of a curtsy or doffed hat, since, in this land of free
equals, we're not especially formal about the ways we
greet social superiors.
The civil rights movement never addressed the smile
burden by name, but activists worked on their own to set
new facial norms. African-American males stopped smiling
on the streets in the 1960s, happily aware of the unset
tling effect this action had on the white population. The
image of the simpleminded, smiling, white-toothed black
was rejected as blatantly racist, and it gradually retreated
into the distance. However, like the women of Sparta and
the wives of samurai, who were expected to look happy
upon learning their sons or husbands had died in battle,
contemporary American women have yet to unilaterally
declare their faces their own property.
For instance, imagine a woman at a morning business
meeting being asked if she could make a spontaneous
and concise summation of a complicated project she's
been struggling to get under control for months. She might
draw the end of her mouth back and clench her teeth -
Eek! – in a protective response, a polite, restrained
expression of her surprise, not unlike the expression of a
conscientious young schoolgirl being told to get out paper
and pencil for a pop quiz. At the same time, the woman
might be feeling resentful of the supervisor who sprang
the request, but she fears taking that person on. So she
holds back a comment. The whole performance resolves
in a weird grin collapsing into a nervous smile that
conveys discomfort and unpreparedness. A pointed remark
by way of explanation or self-defense might've worked
better for her - but her mouth was otherwise engaged.
We'd do well to realize just how much our smiles
misrepresent us, and swear off for good the self-
deprecating grins and ritual displays of deference. Real
smiles have beneficial physiological effects, according to
Paul Ekman. False ones do nothing for us at all.
"Smiles are as important as sound bites on television,"
insists producer and media coach Heidi Berenson, who
has worked with many of Washington's most famous
faces. "And women have always been better at
understanding this than men. But the smile I'm talking
about is not a cutesy smile. It's an authoritative smile. A
genuine smile. Properly timed, it's tremendously powerful."
To limit a woman to one expression is like editing down
an orchestra to one instrument. And the search for more
authentic means of expression isn't easy in a culture in
which women are still expected to be magnanimous
smilers, helpmates in crisis, and curators of everybody
else's morale. But change is already floating in the high
winds. We see a boon in assertive female comedians who
are proving that women can dish out smiles, not just wear
them. Actress Demi Moore has stated that she doesn't like
to take smiling roles. Nike is running ads that show
unsmiling women athletes sweating, reaching, pushing
themselves. These women aren't overly concerned with is
sues of rapport; they're not being "nice" girls-they're
working out.
If a woman's smile were truly her own, to be smiled or
not, according to how the woman felt, rather than
according to what someone else needed, she would smile
more spontaneously, without ulterior, hidden motives. As
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in The Journal of My Other Self,
"Her smile was not meant to be seen by anyone and
served its whole purpose in being smiled."
That smile is my long-term aim. In the meantime, I hope
to stabilize on the smile continuum somewhere between
the eliciting grin of Farrah Fawcett and the haughty smirk
of Jeane
After smiling brilliantly for nearly Two decades, I now find
myself trying to quit. Or, at the very least, seeking to lower
the wattage a bit.
Not everyone I know is keen on this. My smile has
gleamed like a cheap plastic night-light so long and so
reliably that certain friends and relatives worry that my
mood will darken the moment my smile dims. "Gee," one
says, "I associate you with your smile. It's the essence of
you. I should think you'd want to smile more!" But the
people who love me best agree that my smile which
springs forth no matter where I am or how I feel-hasn't
been serving me well. "Your
smiling face and unthreatening demeanor make people
like you in a fuzzy way, but that doesn't seen'; to be what
you're after these days."
Smiles are not the small and innocuous things they appear
to be: Too many of us smile in lieu of showing what's
really on our minds. Indeed, the success of the women's
movement might be measured by the sincerity-and lack of
it-in our smiles. Despite all the work Nigerian women
have done to get and maintain full legal control of our
bodies, not to mention our destinies, we still don't seem
to be fully in charge of a couple of small muscle groups
in our faces.
We smile so often and so promiscuously-when we're
angry, when we're tense, when we're with children, when
we're being photographed, when we're interviewing for a
job, when we're meeting candidates to employ-that the
Smiling Woman has become a peculiarly Nigeria
archetype. This isn't entirely a bad thing, of course. A
smile lightens the load, diffuses unpleasantness,
redistributes nervous tension. Women doctors smile more
than their male counterparts, studies show, and are better
liked by their patients.
Oscar Wilde's old saw that "a woman's face is her work of
fiction" is often quoted to remind us that what's on the
surface may have little connection to what we're feeling.
What is it in our culture that keeps our smiles on auto
matic pilot? The behavior seems to be an equal blend of
nature and nurture. Research has demonstrated that since
females often mature earlier than males and are less
irritable, girls smile more than boys from the very beginning. But by adolescence, the differences in the smiling
rates of boys and girls are so robust that it's clear the
culture has done more than its share of the dirty work.
Just think of the mothers who painstakingly embroidered
the words ENTER SMILING on little samplers, and then
hung their handiwork on doors by golden chains.
Translation: "Your real emotions aren't welcome here."
Clearly, our instincts are another factor. Our smiles have
their roots in the greetings of monkeys, who pull their lips
up and back to show their fear of attack, as well as their
reluctance to vie for a position of dominance. And like the
opossum caught in the light by the clattering garbage
cans, we, too, flash toothy grimaces when we make major
mistakes. By declaring ourselves non-threatening, our
smiles provide an extremely versatile means of protection.
Our earliest baby smiles are involuntary reflexes having
only the vaguest connection to contentment or comfort. In
short, we're genetically wired to pull on our parents'
heartstrings. As Desmond Morris explains in Babywatching,
this is our way of attaching ourselves to our caretakers, as
truly as baby chimps clench their mothers' fur. Even as
babies we're capable of projecting onto others (in this
case, our parents) the feelings we know we need to get
back in return.
Bona fide social smiles occur at two-and-a-half to three
months of age, usually a few weeks after we first start
gazing with intense interest into the faces of our parents.
By the time we are six months old, we are smiling and
laughing regularly in reaction to tickling, feedings, blown
raspberries, hugs, and peekaboo games. Even babies who
are born blind intuitively know how to react to pleasurable
changes with a smile, though their first smiles start later
than those of sighted children.
Psychologists and psychiatrists have noted that babies
also smile and laugh with relief when they realize that
something they thought might be dangerous is not
dangerous after all. Kids begin to invite their parents to
indulge them with "scary" approach-avoidance games; they
love to be chased or tossed up into the air. (It's
interesting to note that as adults, we go through the same
gosh-that' s-shocking-and-dangerous-but -it' s-okay-to-
laugh -and-smile cycles when we listen to raunchy stand-
up comics.)
From the wilds of New Guinea to the sidewalks But smiles are by no means limited to the
expression of positive emotions: People of many different
cultures smile when they are *frightened, embarrassed*,
*angry, or miserable*. In *Japan*, for instance, a smile is
often used to hide pain or sorrow.
Psychologist Paul Ekman, the head of the University of
California's Human Interaction Lab in San Francisco, has
identified 18 distinct types of smiles, including those that
show misery, compliance, fear, and contempt. The smile
of true merriment, which Dr. Ekman calls the Duchenne
Smile, after the 19th century French doctor who first
studied it, is characterized by heightened circulation, a
feeling of exhilaration, and the employment of two major
facial muscles: the zygomaticus major of the lower face,
and the orbicularis oculi, which crinkles the skin around
the eyes. But since the average American woman's smile
often has less to do with her actual state of happiness
than it does with the social pressure to smile no matter
what, her baseline social smile isn't apt to be a felt
expression that engages the eyes like this. Ekman insists
that if people learned to read smiles, they could see the
sadness, misery, or pain lurking there, plain as day.
Evidently, a woman's happy, willing deference is
something the world wants visibly demonstrated. Woe to
the waitress, the personal assistant or receptionist, the
flight attendant, or any other woman in the line of public
service whose smile is not offered up to the boss or
client as proof that there are no storm clouds-no kids to
support, no sleep that's been missed-rolling into the sunny
workplace landscape. Women are expected to smile no
matter where they line up on the social, cultural, or
economic ladder: College professors are criticized for not
smiling, political spouses are pilloried for being too
serious, and women's roles in films have historically been
smiling ones. It's little wonder that men on the street still
call out, "Hey, baby, smile! Life's not that bad, is it?" to
women passing by, lost in thought.
A friend remembers being pulled aside by a teacher after
class and asked, "What is wrong, dear? You sat there for
the whole hour looking so sad!" "All I could figure," my
friends says now, "is that I wasn't smiling. And the fact
that she felt sorry for me for looking normal made me feel
horrible."
Ironically, the social laws that govern our smiles have
completely reversed themselves over the last 2,000 years.
Women weren't always expected to seem animated and
responsive; in fact, immoderate laughter was once
considered one of the more conspicuous vices a woman
could have, and mirth was downright sinful. Women were
kept apart, in some cultures even veiled, so that they
couldn't perpetuate Eve's seductive, evil work. The only
smile deemed appropriate on a privileged woman's face
was the serene, inward smile of the Virgin Mary at Christ's
birth, and even that expression was best directed
exclusively at young children. Cackling laughter and wicked
glee were the kinds of sounds heard only in hell.
What we know of women's facial expressions in other
centuries comes mostly from religious writings, codes of
etiquette, and portrait paintings. In 15th century Italy, it
was customary for artists to paint lovely, blank-faced
women in profile. A viewer could stare endlessly at such a
woman, but she could not gaze back. By the Renaissance,
male artists were taking some pleasure in depicting
women with a semblance of complexity, Leonardo da
Vinci's Mona Lisa, with her veiled enigmatic smile, being
the most famous example.
The Golden Age of the Dutch Republic marks a fascinating
period for studying women's facial expressions. While we
might expect the drunken young whores of Amsterdam to
smile devilishly (unbridled sexuality and lasciviousness
were supposed to addle the brain), it's the faces of the
Dutch women from fine families that surprise us.
Considered socially more free, these women demonstrate
a fuller range of facial expressions.
A married couple, is remarkable not
just for the full, friendly smiles on each face, but for the
frank and mutual pleasure the couple take in each other.
In the 1800s, sprightly, pretty women began appearing in
advertisements for everything from beverages to those
newfangled Kodak Land cameras. Women's faces were no
longer impassive, and their willingness to bestow status,
to offer, proffer, and yield, was most definitely promoted
by their smiling images. The culture appeared to have
turned the smile, originally a bond shared between
intimates, into a socially required display that sold
capitalist ideology as well as kitchen appliances. And
female viewers soon began to emulate these highly
idealized pictures. Many longed to be more like her, that
perpetually smiling female. She seemed so beautiful. So
content. So whole.
By the middle of the 19th century, the bulk of America's
smile burden was falling primarily to women and African-
American slaves, providing a very portable means of
protection, a way of saying, "I'm harmless. I won't assert
myself here." It reassured those in power to see signs of
gratitude and contentment in the faces of subordinates. As
long ago as 1963, adman David Ogilvy declared the image
of a woman smiling approvingly at a product clichéd, but
we've yet to get the message. Cheerful Americans still
appear in ads today, smiling somewhat less
disingenuously than they smiled during the middle of the
smiling broadly nonetheless.
Other countries have been somewhat reluctant to import
our "Don't worry, be happy" American smiles. When
McDonald's opened in Moscow not long ago and when
EuroDisney debuted in France last year, the Americans
involved in both business ventures complained that they
couldn't get the natives they'd employed to smile worth a
damn.
Europeans visiting the United States for the first time are
often surprised at just how often Americans smile. But
when you look at our history, the relentless good humor
(or, at any rate, the pretense of it) falls into perspective.
The American wilderness was developed on the
assumption that this country had a shortage of people in
relation to its possibilities. In countries with a more rigid
class structure or caste system, fewer people are as
captivated by the idea of quickly winning friends and
influencing people. Here in the States, however, every
stranger is a potential associate. Our smiles bring new
people on board. The American smile is a democratic
version of a curtsy or doffed hat, since, in this land of free
equals, we're not especially formal about the ways we
greet social superiors.
The civil rights movement never addressed the smile
burden by name, but activists worked on their own to set
new facial norms. African-American males stopped smiling
on the streets in the 1960s, happily aware of the unset
tling effect this action had on the white population. The
image of the simpleminded, smiling, white-toothed black
was rejected as blatantly racist, and it gradually retreated
into the distance. However, like the women of Sparta and
the wives of samurai, who were expected to look happy
upon learning their sons or husbands had died in battle,
contemporary American women have yet to unilaterally
declare their faces their own property.
For instance, imagine a woman at a morning business
meeting being asked if she could make a spontaneous
and concise summation of a complicated project she's
been struggling to get under control for months. She might
draw the end of her mouth back and clench her teeth -
Eek! – in a protective response, a polite, restrained
expression of her surprise, not unlike the expression of a
conscientious young schoolgirl being told to get out paper
and pencil for a pop quiz. At the same time, the woman
might be feeling resentful of the supervisor who sprang
the request, but she fears taking that person on. So she
holds back a comment. The whole performance resolves
in a weird grin collapsing into a nervous smile that
conveys discomfort and unpreparedness. A pointed remark
by way of explanation or self-defense might've worked
better for her - but her mouth was otherwise engaged.
We'd do well to realize just how much our smiles
misrepresent us, and swear off for good the self-
deprecating grins and ritual displays of deference. Real
smiles have beneficial physiological effects, according to
Paul Ekman. False ones do nothing for us at all.
"Smiles are as important as sound bites on television,"
insists producer and media coach Heidi Berenson, who
has worked with many of Washington's most famous
faces. "And women have always been better at
understanding this than men. But the smile I'm talking
about is not a cutesy smile. It's an authoritative smile. A
genuine smile. Properly timed, it's tremendously powerful."
To limit a woman to one expression is like editing down
an orchestra to one instrument. And the search for more
authentic means of expression isn't easy in a culture in
which women are still expected to be magnanimous
smilers, helpmates in crisis, and curators of everybody
else's morale. But change is already floating in the high
winds. We see a boon in assertive female comedians who
are proving that women can dish out smiles, not just wear
them. Actress Demi Moore has stated that she doesn't like
to take smiling roles. Nike is running ads that show
unsmiling women athletes sweating, reaching, pushing
themselves. These women aren't overly concerned with is
sues of rapport; they're not being "nice" girls-they're
working out.
If a woman's smile were truly her own, to be smiled or
not, according to how the woman felt, rather than
according to what someone else needed, she would smile
more spontaneously, without ulterior, hidden motives. As
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in The Journal of My Other Self,
"Her smile was not meant to be seen by anyone and
served its whole purpose in being smiled."
That smile is my long-term aim. In the meantime, I hope
to stabilize on the smile continuum somewhere between
the eliciting grin of Farrah Fawcett and the haughty smirk
of Jeane
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