I now find myself wanting to leave after smiling brightly for almost four decades. Or, at the very least, to try to reduce the wattage a little.
Not all I know is passionate about this. My smile has gleamed so long and so consistently like a cheap plastic nightlight that some friends and relatives fear that the moment my smile dims, my mood will darken. "Gee," one says, "I equate your smile with you. It's your essence. I 'd think you'd want to smile more!" But the people who love me most accept that my smile has not served me well — which springs forth no matter where I am or how I feel. Recently, my husband said, "Your happy face and unthreatening attitude render people like you blurry, but that doesn't seem to be what you're after these days."
Smiles are not the tiny and harmless things they tend to be: Instead of revealing what really is in our minds, so many of us smile. The progress of the women's movement, indeed, may be measured by the sincerity — and the lack thereof — in our smiles. We still don't seem to be completely in charge of a couple of small muscle groups in our faces, considering all the work we American women have done to get and retain complete legal ownership of our bodies, not to mention our destinies.
We smile so much and so promiscuously — when we're frustrated, when we're angry, when we're tense, when we're with kids, when we're being photographed, when we're interviewed for a position, when we're meeting job applicants — that the Smiling Woman has become an odd American archetype. Of course, this isn't entirely a bad thing. A smile makes the load lighter, diffuses unpleasantness, redistributes nervous stress. Female doctors smile more than their male counterparts, studies show, and their patients like them more.
The old view of Oscar Wilde that "a woman's face is her fictional work" is frequently quoted to remind us that what is on the surface can have little relation with what we feel. What is it that keeps our smiles on the auto-matic pilot in our culture? It appears that action is an equal mix of nature and nurture. Research has shown that, because females always mature faster than males and are less irritable, from the very beginning, girls smile more than boys. But the variations in the smiling rates of boys and girls are so robust through puberty that it is obvious that society has done more than its share of the dirty job. Just think of the mothers who painstakingly embroidered on small samplers the words ENTER SMILING, and then hanged their handiwork with golden chains on the doors. Your true emotions aren't welcome here, "translation."
Clearly, another aspect is our intuition. Our smiles are rooted in the greetings of the monkeys, who draw their lips up and back to demonstrate their fear of attack and their inability to fight for a place of supremacy. And like the opossum trapped by the clattering garbage cans in the sun, we, too, when we make big mistakes, flash toothy grimaces. Our smiles have an incredibly flexible means of defense by declaring ourselves non — threatening.
Our earliest baby smiles are spontaneous reflexes with only the vaguest relation to happiness or comfort. In short, we're genetically programmed to tug on the heartstrings of our kin. This is our way of binding ourselves to our caretakers, as Desmond Morris describes in Babywatching, as baby chimps genuinely clench the fur of their mothers. We are able to project onto others (in this case, our parents) the feelings we know we need to get back in exchange, even as infants.
Bona fide social smiles occur at the age of two-and-a-half to three months, usually a few weeks after we first start staring into our parents' faces with keen curiosity. We smile and laugh constantly in response to tickling, eating, blown raspberries, hugs, and peekaboo games by the time we are six months old. And babies born blind intuitively know how to react with a smile to pleasurable changes, although their first smiles start later than those of children who are sighted.
Psychologists and psychologists have noticed that when they learn that anything they thought could be risky is not dangerous after all, babies often smile and laugh with relief. Kids start inviting their parents to "scary" approach-avoidance games to indulge them; they love to be chased or thrown into the air. (It's fascinating to note that as adults, when we listen to raunchy stand-up comics, we go through the same gosh-that's-shocking-and-dangerous-but-it's-okay-to-laugh-and-smile loop.
Smiles are synonymous with laughter, relaxation, and amusement, from the wilds of New Guinea to the sidewalks of New York. But smiles are by no way restricted to the display of positive emotions: when they are afraid, ashamed, angry, or miserable, individuals from many different cultures smile. For example, a smile is sometimes used in Japan to mask pain or sorrow.
Psychologist Paul Ekman, the head of the Human Interaction Lab of the University of California in San Francisco, has identified 18 different kinds of smiles, including those that reflect pain, obedience, terror, and disdain. The smile of true merriment that Dr. Ekman calls the Duchenne Smile, the French doctor who first studied it after the 19th century, is characterized by increased circulation, a feeling of exhilaration, and the use of two main facial muscles: the lower face zygomaticus main and the oculi orbicularis, which crinkles the skin around the eyes. But because the smile of the average American woman always has less to do with her real state of happiness than with the social pressure to smile no matter what, her social smile of the base line is not appropriate for being a felt gesture that engages the eyes like this. Ekman believes that they might see the sorrow, suffering, or pain lurking there, plain as day, if individuals learned to interpret smiles.
Obviously, the relaxed, eager deference of a woman is what the world needs clearly displayed. Woe to the waitress, the personal assistant or receptionist, the flight attendant, or any other woman in the public service line whose smile is not given as confirmation to the supervisor or customer that there are no storm clouds, no help for girls, no lost sleep rolling into the sunny workplace landscape. No matter where they line up on the social, cultural , or economic ladder, women are supposed to smile: college professors are blamed for not smiling, political partners are pilloried for being too serious, and the positions of women in films have traditionally been smiling. It's no wonder that men always call out on the street, "Hey, girl, smile! Life isn't so bad, is it?" to women who walk by, lost in thought.
"A friend recalls being pulled aside after class by a teacher and asked," What's wrong, dear? You sat there looking so depressed for the whole hour!" "All I could think, "my friends now claim," is that I wasn't laughing. And I felt bad because she felt sorry for me for looking normal.
Ironically, over the last 2,000 years , the social rules which rule our smiles have fully reversed themselves. In reality, immoderate laughter was once considered one of the most obvious vices a woman might have, and enjoyment was utterly immoral. Women were not always supposed to look animated and sensitive. Women were kept apart, and veiled in some cultures, so that they could not perpetuate the seductive, evil work of Eve. The only smile on the face of a wealthy woman considered fitting was the serene, inward smile of the Virgin Mary at the birth of Christ, and even that expression was better addressed exclusively to young children. The types of sounds heard only in hell were cackling laughter and wicked glee.
What we know of the facial expressions of women in other centuries comes mainly from religious texts, etiquette codes, and paintings of portraits. It was customary for artists to paint lovely, blank-faced females in profile in Italy in the 15th century. A audience might gaze at such a woman forever, but she could not look back. Male artists took some pleasure in portraying women with a semblance of ambiguity during the Renaissance, the most famous example being Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa with her veiled mysterious smile. A fascinating period for studying the facial expressions of women is the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic. While we might expect a devilish smile from the drunken young whores of Amsterdam (unbridled sexuality and lasciviousness were meant to add to the brain), we are shocked by the faces of Dutch women from fine families. These women exhibit a broader range of facial expressions, considered socially freer, than their Eu-ropean sisters. 1622 Frans Hals'sA portrait of a married couple, Stephanus Geraerdt and Isabella Coymans, is remarkable not only for the absolute, welcoming smiles on each face, but for the frank and shared enjoyment of the couple.
Sprightly, beautiful women started appearing in advertising in the 1800s for everything from drinks to those newfangled cameras from Kodak Country. The faces of women were no longer impassive, and their willingness to give, sell, sell, and yield status was most certainly encouraged by their smiling pictures. The culture seemed to have turned the smile into a socially necessary show that marketed capitalist ideology as well as kitchen appliances, originally a connection shared amongst intimates. And soon, female viewers started emulating these highly idealized images. Many longed to be more like her, the ever-smiling woman. She looked so stunning. Thus, content. So whole, so whole.
The majority of America's smile burden fell overwhelmingly on women and African-American slaves by the middle of the 19th century, offering a very portable means of defense, a way of saying, "I'm harmless. I'm not going to assert myself here." It reassured those in control to see in the faces of subordinates signs of gratitude and contentment. The picture of a woman smiling approvingly at a product cliché was announced by Adman David Ogilvy as long ago as 1963, but we have yet to get the message. Today, happy Americans still appear in advertisements, smiling somewhat less disingenuously than they smiled throughout the middle of the century, but nevertheless smiling broadly.
Other countries were somewhat hesitant to import our American smiles of "Don't worry, be happy." The Americans involved in both business projects lamented when McDonald's opened in Moscow not long ago and when EuroDisney launched in France last year, that they couldn't get the natives they had recruited to smile worth a damn.
For the first time, Europeans visiting the U.S. are always shocked by just how always Americans smile. But the constant good humor (or, at any rate, the pretense of it) falls into context when you look at our past. On the assumption that this country had a shortage of people in relation to its opportunities, the American wilderness was created. Fewer people are as captivated by the idea of rapidly winning friends and influencing individuals in countries with a more rigid class structure or caste system. However, here in the States, every stranger is a potential associate. Our smiles usher in new people. The American smile is a democratic version of a curtsy or doffed hat, because we are not particularly formal about the ways we welcome social superiors in this land of free equals.
Never mentioning the smile pressure by name was the civil rights movement, but advocates worked on their own to set new facial norms. In the 1960s, African-American males stopped smiling on the sidewalks, happily conscious of the alarming effects this behavior had on the white population. The sim-pleminded, smiling, white-toothed black picture was dismissed as overtly racist, and retreated into the distance gradually. Nevertheless, like the Sparta women and the samurai wives, who were supposed to look happy after learning that their sons or husbands had died in battle, contemporary American women have yet to unilaterally declare their own property to their faces.
For example , imagine a woman being asked at a morning business meeting if she could make a spontaneous and succinct description of a complex project that she has been struggling for months to get under control. Maybe she'll pull back the end of her mouth and clench her teeth — Eek! A polite, subdued expression of her surprise in a defensive answer, not unlike the expression of a conscientious young schoolgirl being ordered to get a pop quiz out of paper and pencil. At the same time, the woman may feel resentful of the boss who made the request, but she is afraid to take on that person. But she's keeping the comment back. A curious grin that falls into a nervous smile that conveys confusion and unpreparedness resolves the entire show. A pointed comment may have served better for her by way of justification or self-defense, but her mouth was otherwise engaged.
We would do well to know just how misrepresented we are by our smiles, and swear off the self-deprecating grins and ritual shows of deference for good. True smiles, according to Paul Ekman, have beneficial physiological effects. The fake ones do nothing at all for us.
"Smiles are as important as television sound bites," insists producer and media coach Heidi Berenson, who has worked with many of the most famous faces in Washington. "And women have always been better at knowing this than men. But it's not a cutesy smile that I'm talking about. It's an authoritative smile. A true smile. It's tremendously strong, properly timed."
It is like editing an orchestra down to one instrument to restrict a woman to one speech. And in a community in which women are still expected to be magnanimous smilers, crisis helpers, and curators of the morale of everyone else, the search for more authentic means of speech is not easy. But change is floating in the high winds already. We see a boon in assertive fe-male comedians who show that, not only wearing them, women can dish out smiles. Actor Demi Moore said she doesn't like to play smiling roles. Nike runs commercials featuring unsmiling women athletes sweating, reaching, moving themselves. These women are not overly concerned with relationship issues; they're not "sweet" girls; they're working out. If a woman's smile were to be genuinely her own, to be grinned or not, as the woman felt, rather than as anyone else needed, she would smile more naturally, without any secret ulterior motives. As Maria RainerRilke wrote in The Journal of My Other Self, "Her smile was not intended to be seen by anyone and fulfilled the entire function of smiling."
That smile is a long-term objective of mine. In the meantime, somewhere between the eliciting grin of Farrah Fawcett and Jeane Kirkpatrick's haughty smirk, I expect to stabilize on the smile spectrum.
