Stereotypes In Our Culture

In our culture, friendliness is conveyed through a smile and it is agreed in the discipline of Anthropology that the smile is something that carries across all cultures. In every human society, smiles convey the same emotions: happiness, pleasure, excitement and other positive feelings. However, smiles seem to mean different things between the men and women, of our culture, who exchange them. As my step father said, a woman who smiles is seen as friendly, but also more likely single. Simply put, smiling is an attractive quality and most people flock to a warm smile like moths to a flame. For women, smiling could mean many things. I, among others, have often feigned a smile in nervousness, irritation, awkwardness and sometimes false happiness.
In intimate settings, a natural smile shows a person is enjoying her or himself and the other people present. In professional settings, especially that of customer service, a smile, feigned or not, is a requirement. It makes the business seem warm and open to all but smiling on the job and even in less formal environments can lead to problems for women. Unwanted attention is often gained through a broad, seemingly genuine smile. In Amy Cunningham’s essay, Why Women Smile, she mentions, “ We smile so often and so promiscuously… that the Smiling Woman has become a peculiarly American archetype” (325). On many occasions, I’ve heard of a man who yells at a woman on the street to “Smile baby! It ain’t that bad”. Smiling seems to have become something of a social requirement. To the observer, the smile-less supposed curmudgeon might be falsely interpreted. She must not be happy because she is not smiling. This particular individual could have trouble with smiling due to nerve damage, being in deep thought or maybe she has just suffered a death of a family member. Whatever the circumstances, the stranger has decided that he does not like her frown, for it must be so intolerably unattractive that he has taken it upon himself to make a statement. On a daily basis, the public is reminded by the media that being attractive is important and a beaming smile is attractive. To be plain, humorless and rejected by men was a stereotype given to suffragettes in the early twentieth century, as the book Women’s Rights: Changing attitudes 1900-2000 (11) mentions. Smiling has been labeled as an essential quality for women in our country. Smiling is a social grace that could easily be sexualized because it opens the door for interaction and a lot of female to male interaction ends up involving sex. After all, women and men are made by nature to reproduce with each other, therefore sexuality between the two is biologically inherent. Even though this is the case, the act of smiling itself is not the root issue, it is merely the outer skin of the conflict. In the book, Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy spoke about the episode of the Tonight Show, in May 2003, which Katie Couric guest hosted. Couric later commented that she wanted to show America her “fun” side on the Tonight Show, but in truth she was exposing more than being fun, or even being sexual. Really what she was showing was that she was open to a certain sort of attention- which is something that we specifically require if we are going to think of a woman as hot. Hotness doesn’t just yield approval. Proof that a woman actively seeks approval is a crucial criterion for hotness in the first place. (32)
A smile can convey openness, submission, a willingness to socialize, playfulness and that a person is seeking not only attention, but approval. When smiling and nodding at what a customer or someone we have interest in has to say, the speaker may feel good about themselves and may gain a sparked interest in the listener. To be engaged in socialization likely means openness to more socialization. This is the point where the message of a smile can become tangled in a web of miscommunication. Again, Ariel Levy mentions, “For women, and only for women, hotness requires projecting a kind of eagerness, offering a promise that any attention you receive for your physicality is welcome.” (33), and smiling is the first step down a road to attention gained through behaviorism, a philosophy of psychology that deals with learning through experience. In a man’s world, a woman who smiles is a predictable woman. Through a set of past experiences of women smiling or not smiling, a man can asses what these facial expressions mean. To men, a smiling woman is a friendly woman and a friendly woman is a potential mate. It is a simple, easy to understand, thought process. To the contrary from a woman’s eye, smiling could mean many an emotion or thought. A female passerby could have multiple reasons to willfully smile other than a males sexually attractive qualities. She could be thinking about how she has been promoted at work, is happy about the weather, her new pet fish is on her mind or she may have simply remembered a good memory that took place nearby, all while happening to make eye contact with this stranger. The stranger does not know she is very pleased about her new pet fish and therefore jumps to the assumption that her smile was directed blatantly toward him. She does not know him, therefore he must be attractive or she would not have thrown him that suggestive facial expression. As well, women are taught from a young age to smile eagerly because women are supposed to be nice. Girls play with baby dolls and domestic utensils like miniature ovens when boys are playing with miniature military equipment and G.I. Joes. Women are to be the kind and maternal sex while the men are to be the aggressors. Smiling at a passersby is the polite thing to do, the lady like thing to do. For women, it is a reflex. In her article in the online magazine XOJane, S.E. Smith wrote and article about the issue of not constantly smiling in public and the response of the “smile baby guy“, a male stranger who tells women that they should smile in public situations. It's always smile baby guy talking to a woman or someone he reads as a woman. This is about the fact that ladies need to look pretty, and furthermore, that ladies need to be in good moods all the time. Telling people to smile is about telling them that you think they're in an unacceptable mood... It's yet another reminder of the ways in which women are expected to perform for the public, to put up a "good face" at all times or face the consequences. (1)
These consequences that a women could face can range from social labeling to ostracization to violence. If women, the gentler sex, are not smiling like they are expected to be, something must be wrong and men, being the aggressors must do something to fix or stop it. A woman such as my mother, who takes her job seriously and is stoic when necessary gains labels such as cold and unapproachable. This is not the case, but she happens to lack that veneer smile that should be plastered across her face at all times. She is at work to get her job done and this means that smiling is not always appropriate. A friendly, non-threatening smile has become the appropriate archetype for women. Women have allowed a perpetuated image of femininity, of predictability and kind nature, to exist, mainly through our smiles. It has become an expectation for us. Amy Cunningham states, To limit a woman to one expression is like editing down and 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. (330) Women in America have become beacons of eagerness to the outside world.
According to Cunningham, in the 1800s, attractive women began to appear in many types of advertisements. Society got the idea that smiling was a natural trait for women and the women of the time caught on and began to emulate the pictures they saw. (328) This confuses people of other cultures when they encounter American citizens. We have much less formality when addressing strangers and authority figures, and we tend to flash our smiles automatically. When the McDonald’s chain restaurant was introduced in Moscow in 1992, the American’s who ran the businesses were extremely discouraged when the employees wouldn’t crack smiles when greeting customers, who I presume, also did not smile. (329) As a society, it seems that we do not consciously recognize our tendency to over use our smiles for any old occasion. Our teeth are used when anxious, in happiness and in an attempt to be socially pleasing. Along with our unrealistic images of smiles come unrealistic expectations of reality. Our faces are lying to us. Gaining respect is also a plight that the smile has caused personally and professionally for the female gender as a whole. If women are treated as sweet and domestic, expected only to fulfill the stereotype of the kind, listening role, we can not state our opinions thoroughly. It is time that the gentle sex make a new image. Levy
explains, It no longer makes sense to blame men. Mia Leist and plenty of other women are behind the scenes, not just in front of the cameras, making decisions, making money, and hollering “We want boobs.” Playboy is a case in point. Playboy’s image has everything to do with its pajama-clad, septuagenarian, babe-magnet founder, Hugh Hefner… But in actuality, Playboy is a company largely run by women. Hefner’s daughter Christie is the chairman and CEO of Playboy Enterprises. The CFO is a middle-aged mother named Linda Havard. The Playboy Foundation… is run by Cleo Wilson, and African-American former civil rights activist. A woman named Marilyn Grabowski produces more than half the magazine’s photo features. (35)
At this point, not only do we fill the roles of the smiling, sexy woman, but women everywhere are working in jobs that continue to further the attitude that we have a specific purpose.
That purpose being a thing to look at. A thing that looks good, a thing that smiles. It is hypocritical for women to take part in these careers, however as later mentioned by Ariel Levy, in her interview with Christie Hefner, she asked her how she (Christie) felt about young women aspiring to be in Playboy magazine. Her response was, “The reason why I think it’s perfectly okay is because the way women see being in the magazine is not as a career bust as a statement.” (40) Levy goes on to
explain, An actress or a mother sure, but a lawyer or an executive not necessarily. Putting your tush on display is still not the best way to make partner or impress the board. The only career for which appearing in Playboy is a truly strategic move is a career in the sex industry. (43) Smiling does not prove that we are intellectuals or have intense work ethics. Smiling does not show all of the hard physical labor we have done or the hours we have put into studying to earn our bachelors, masters and PHDs. Smiling does not show that we wish to better ourselves more than our grandmothers dreamed was possible. Mostly, smiling shows the world that we believe we are content with the status quo. We must fight back against the stigmas we are furthering in our culture. Smiling is the start. If we can cut back on smiling and only use our grins for genuine happiness, in spontaneous joy, we can begin to move onward. If we can show that smiling has a certain meaning, that the connotation it currently possesses is an inaccurate portrayal of our intelligence, wants and needs, we can gain more respect. The wish for a better future must be fulfilled through showing our own society and eventually the world that we do not meet the standards of a smile, but that we exceed those standards.