Smile

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Have people ever told you to smile when you had absolutely no interest in doing so? My mother used to tell me to do so endlessly. And several times complete strangers have said I should.
Has anyone every told you to smile?

The Atlantic: The Sexism of Telling Women to Smile: Your Stories

Oh hell yes. It doesn't happen so much to me now, but it was a regular thing when I was a child, a teenager and a young woman during the 60s, 70s and 80s.

Back then when I was younger, I was actually already using a "mask smile" a lot of the time, to cope or not cause offence. But even if I let it slip and just wore my "real" expression in anything, someone would pipe up "Smile!" or "Cheer up."

That made me so furious inside, not least because it was often said to me when I actually wasn't in need of "cheering up" at all, but was feeling neutral or even quite okay.

It took a lot for me to drop the smile I was already faking for myself in social settings, even while getting angry that strangers would tell me to smile when I was just walking along minding my own damn business. While I wasn't in therapy primarily for the fake smiling, therapy happened to be part of what helped me realize I don't have to do that. It was so ingrained in me that it was a problem that needed work to drop.

I do also think this "Hey, smile!!" thing is something people put onto girls and women more than males -- like an unconsciously sexist need to force a girl to be the pleasantly smiling auto-bot instead of someone with realness. This was back when unconscious, automatic sexism was the "norm" -- I don't know if people still do this now.

I don't think people do it to me anymore, perhaps because I now wear a "real" enough expression that I look like I'll bite their damn head off if they try to order up a custom requested facial expression from me, lol.

Yup, more times than i can remember

The random dudes who tell women to "smile" really piss me off... even more than the more standard catcalls. Ew.

I used to hear the commands to smile constantly growing up and also the phony-sounding "what's wrong" or "it can't be that bad" with a pouty face. Hardly anyone ever says stuff like that anymore but I feel like it was so ingrained in me to smile that I just do it anyway. I hate feeling like I am going through life like a trained monkey, smile on cue, say something nice, blah blah blah. It's gotten so bad that sometimes I realize I'm just smiling blankly, when a person just said something rude to me, where I used to would have told them off.

I was taught to mask early on by my mother, who insisted that I be as attractive as possible at all times. My face is so used to making the mask that I have to consciously relax my muscles. I have a tendency to mentally drift off and when I do I sometimes make odd facial expressions (which are actually appropriate to what I am thinking,) but it seems to make people nervous.

Look back at paintings through the centuries, not many smiles, same with photographs from say the 1800s-- no smiles. People had actual s**t to do back then, if they didn't get it done they perished, they didn't have time to sit around and smile to make everyone else feel good. Now the machine takes care of all those tasks, and with the spare time you've been granted you're expected to use that time to gratify the machine, and the machine demands smiles.

Luckily, no one has ever told me to smile more, except for a doctor who once told me I looked too serious if I didn't smile. I was pretty bothered by it.

Throught my entire life this has been an issue.

I think the "machine" is a metaphor for "our society."

I must say that a woman's smile is delightful.

And I also believe that smiles enhance people's looks in photographs; that includes myself.

Saying that, I wouldn't try to get a person to smile unwillingly. Sometimes, I don't feel like smiling.

When a man (and yes, it is always a man) tells me to smile I usually tell him "no" in a loud, harsh voice to let him know he'd better back off. One man actually said it twice, at which I got my car keys into position to use them to defend myself.

He finally backed off (and you can guess what he called me while doing so) but that's the sort of thing I've had to learn to keep safe.

I can't even count how many times I've been told to smile. Like a lot of aspie gals I suffer from a bad case of Resting b***h Face, so I always look kind of annoyed, but you know what? If some dork tells me to smile, then I have a right to be annoyed.