“Girls learn to smile early, and many cultures teach girls explicitly to “put on a pretty face”. It is a way of soothing the people around us, a facial adaptation to the expectation that we put others first, preserve social connections and hide our disappointment, frustration, anger and fear. We are expected to be more accommodating and less assertive or dominant. As girls’ smiles become less authentic, so, too, does their understanding of themselves.”- Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her
It’s been a handful of years or more since I read Chemaly’s excellent book on female rage, but the feeling I have of continually dashing social expectations continues to this day. Dashing and disrupting people’s expectations is exhausting at times (Sisyphean, actually), but is – in its particulars – authentic to who I am. Authenticity matters. Pushing against expected behavioral norms that undermine my true self is not doable, not for long; it’s also not healthy. I tried it when I was a child, because what other choice did I have, and it did me actual, literal harm.
Going along to get along is dangerous, especially for young children, whatever their gender, but especially for female children. The National Center for Victims of Crime reports that 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of child sexual abuse; self-reporting studies show that 20% of adult females and 5-10% of adult males recall a childhood sexual assault or sexual abuse incident – and this is almost certainly an underreporting of actual abuse occurring in our home and communities. Teaching female children to be compliant, to smile and say yes, to make nice whatever their gut says, endangers them.
Girls and boys need to be able to enjoy the full range of human emotion without reference to their gender, because all humans should. It’s common sense, only not very common. Denying girls rage or boys hurt is inhumane, and leads to damage further down the line. Bottling up hurt and pain, fear and loss, has brought on more strokes and heart attacks in grown men than one could shake a stick at – the primary difference being that those harms are self-inflicted as a result of the patriarchal norms we live under; women die as a result of others – men – inflicting harm, but we all lose as a result of these outdated, idiotic, unnatural norms. Unnatural because not being able to cry when sad because ‘man’ is unnatural, full-stop.
When in social settings, the pressure to perform female pleasant-face/personality is real, including a palpable requirement to ‘be nice’ to people who I cannot stand because hey, c’mon, it’s a small-town, they’re fellow humans, they go to such and such church, etc., etc. No, no, and no. Often the folks I am being pressured into smiling pretty for have a long history of being dicks to me – particularly when I was in public office – so hell no. Hey, I think I’m doing great not telling them to their faces to fck off, because I am doing great, showing an amazing, admirable amount of self-control. This is possible because I have let go, trusting the universe to remind them in various ways what dicks they are.
(Actually, I assume they’re as miserable in their lives as they attempt to make other people with their shitty behavior, but I could be wrong!)
I could, I suppose, go the passive-aggressive route of smiling big and saying ‘Bless your heart,’ which I gather is southern for ‘fck off and die’, but being passive-aggressive isn’t really my style, once more emphasizing the inauthentic nature of performing niceness, anywhere, anytime, anyhow. My dad, whom I adored, said that if I couldn’t say something nice to another person, then I should shut up! He was a wise and good man, and, following his advice, I zip it. I gather my face, averted, and those tightly held lips say it all. Or so I’ve been told.