No smiles
Watching Saturday Night Fever got me thinking about this. The film’s usually remembered as the film that launched disco into the mainstream, but it’s a pretty disturbing, dark film, full of class-inflected racism and misogyny. It climaxes with a gang rape in the backseat of a car while Travolta, thwarted in his own rape attempt, sulks in the front seat. Then the Bobby C., the kid who got a girl pregnant but doesn’t want to be forced to marry her, jumps off the Verrazano Bridge, seemingly trapped by her refusal to get an abortion. The woman-hating is pretty raw and only partially redeemed by the implication of the final scene, that Travolta escapes juvenile mediocrity and working-class self-sabotage by learning to have a mature friendship with a woman, his dance partner who has already made the symbolic leap to Manhattan. The unpleasant ending all but obliterates the vicarious liberation supplied by the peerless dance sequences (now no longer kitschy but just incredible), leaving viewers feeling trapped with a bunch of narrow-minded bigots and misguided dreamers who don’t have enough sense to hope for the sort of things that we watching can approve of. It’s uncomfortable, but does it serve any useful purpose to confront us so starkly with the limited horizons, the doomedness, of the people it has chosen to depict and give an aura of reality to? Is it some kind of implied critique, or are we still vicariously thrilling, only to something else, something meaner, the kind of harsh reality we are happy to see inflicted on other classes (making us feel a bit immune from it)? In Fear of Falling, Barbara Ehrenreich argues that the film fits in to the late 1960s-early 1970s “discovery of the working class” by the middle class interests that control the media and have a lot at stake in fashioning a working class other to demonize and contrast themselves with. And it certainly sets up admission to the middle class as maturity, the prize for rejecting the hedonistic life of the disco and the immediate gratifications it caters to. But is there also a critique of misogyny in all the female hating throughout the film, or simply a reinforcement of its alleged inevitability, or of the hopelessness of trying to changing it?
I want to give the film the benefit of the doubt and view it as exposing underlying misogyny that most films have built into their structure. Something Shulamith Firestone points out throughout Dialectic of Sex is that sexism often manifests in forms we’re trained to regard as appealing and pleasant, or as harmless fun; this is how it gets replicated and reproduced for generation after generation. For example: “Because the class oppression of women and children is couched in the phraseology of ‘cute’ it is much harder to fight than open oppression.” Cuteness is a form of infantilization and self-trivialization, but there can still be something irresistible and fun about cataloging cute things and cooing over them. It would be curmudgeonly and false to deny their appeal, only they have become intimately connected with setting out the boundaries of gendered behavior. Firestone responds to the way men often demand smiles from women (and children) and mask their aggression with this request that seems to them innocuous, almost a favor (she’ll be so much prettier if she smiles) by earnestly calling for “a smile boycott, at which declaration all women would instantly abandon their ‘pleasing’ smiles, henceforth smiling only when something pleased them.” Of course, I, like most white middle-class men, have been enacting the smile boycott my entire life and never understood it to be a politically motivated action. The freedom to express one’s feelings naturally is not automatically granted. In fact, it’s finding out who experiences that freedom and takes it for granted is a good way to identify who has privilege in a society.
Comments
Could it just be possible that men do find women more attractive when they smile? How about a boycott on guys dressing nice, and being well-groomed in order to attract the opposite sex? I suppose if one’s goal to make for a whole let less attraction in the world, this might make sense.
Can/should we really counteract millions of years of evolution with political action? What the fringe feminists (distinguished from the mainstream feminists who are more interested in equal rights and equal pay than who is smiling and why) always fail to recognize is that there *are* biological differences between men and women. Most men want to have sex with women and vice versa. This is not a social construction- trust me, sex between genders was going on long before there was society.
It is to unreasonable to presume that some difference in mating behaviors evolved during those times… that men might be more attracted to younger, dare I say “cuter” females (more likely to give birth to more and healthier babies, especially when there are no doctors or hospitals), and women might be attracted to older, more “mature” males who are more likely to be able to provide for offspring (not to mention stick around to do so)?
Comment by Aaron from Seattle, WA — November 1, 2008 @ 1:29 pm
@Aaron, you are missing the point. It may be true that men have certain preferences about women, but why should those be normative? Should women be punished for failing to live up to male expectations?
Even if we grant a sociobiological reason for oppression, it doesn’t justify it.
Comment by alsomike — November 1, 2008 @ 1:51 pm
@alsomike We’re talking about preferences of attraction. The fact that men may find smiling women to be “cute” or otherwise attractive is not oppression in my book.
I am not attracted to obese women. I have nothing against them, and certainly I try to treat them with the respect and dignity due any person, but I am not attracted to them. I therefore oppressing women with my preconceived notions of beauty? Should all women strive to become obese in order to counteract such oppression? Should I be reeducated by postmodern cultural initiatives?
Similarly, some women may not find my looks or demeanor attractive. I can either choose to accept that I’m not universally attractive, or I can whine about how society is oppressing me with its flawed concepts of beauty.
Whining, however, is certainly not attractive.
Comment by Aaron from Seattle, WA — November 1, 2008 @ 3:20 pm
Aaron,
You’re still missing the point. You say:
“We’re talking about preferences of attraction. The fact that men may find smiling women to be ‘cute’ or otherwise attractive is not oppression in my book.”
Your preference for smiling women is not oppressive. No one is calling it oppressive. The oppression exists in the assumption that your preference should guide female behavior. That sort of claim (whether you make it or not) denies women the right to authentic emotional responses to their experiences. A world full of smiling, pretty women is a world where at least a few women are masking their true emotions because society has told them that it would be too unpleasant for the men they meet.
As “alsomike” might put it, the preference itself isn’t oppressive—the normativity of the preference is.
Comment by Bill from Fredericksburg, VA — November 1, 2008 @ 6:04 pm
@Aaron and alsomike:
I think both of you are missing the point about smiling. I am guessing by your names that you are both male, and I am going to guess that you have never been approached by complete strangers who told you to smile. I find it annoying in the extreme. The fact that the smile-demander never turns to my male compatriots and tells them to smile, too, is evidence that his goal is not for everyone to be happy and jolly, but for a woman he does not know to make herself more attractive to him—to do something he wants her to do, just because he wants her to do it.
I’ve tried to explain to smile-demanders why it’s annoying, but none seem to get my point. So the last time it happened, I told the man that in the future, if he sees a woman and wishes that she were smiling, he should say something funny that will get her to smile. He seemed to understand the difference, then.
Comment by Laurel from Houston — November 1, 2008 @ 6:32 pm
thank you laurel, for explaining it to the boys: men are never asked for a smile, but girls and women are expected to “prettify: themselves for a man’s consumption and pleasure. And it speaks to the sense of entitlement that men have regarding their monitoring of female appearance and comportment. I cannot count how many times leering fat men would say, “Gissa smile, luv!” as I walked through the streets of London during college years; this is not something I grew up with and at first i complied. Finally I realized I could tell these jerks to piss off—and it felt great to do so.
Comment by asha — November 1, 2008 @ 10:35 pm
@Laurel: I think it’s interesting that, on an issue of alleged sexism, you make an assumption about my personal experiences based on my gender. In fact, I have been told before by strangers that I should smile, and I find it as annoying and intrusive as I presume you did. Perhaps you have experienced the phenomena more than I, but as I tend to be rather introverted around people whom I don’t know, I certainly get that and similar comments from friends and strangers alike.
If you experience it more, or in a way targeting you due to your gender, I suspect that has less to do with institutional sexism saying that women should please men, but rather to do with the expectation in our culture that men be the ones to initiate overt flirtation with women. I ask that you not judge the entire male gender because some men happen to be awkward and annoying when they flirt.
For all… I’m not saying that the expectation that someone should smile is not annoying and intrusive, it certainly is. What I’m saying is that the charge of sexist oppression requires a bit more substance to substantiate it. There are all kinds of social norms and expectations that everyone deals with, and some of these land heavier with one gender than the other. It is for each individual to decide if he or she wants to abide by social conventions or not- and to suffer or benefit from those decisions.
Some people consciously choose to wear a smile, real or feigned, because it encourages rapport with others. Others choose not to, and deal with life accordingly. If someone feels induced to feign a smile to fulfill the perceived expectations of someone else, or society in general, then I submit they have bigger problems to deal with, and a general ‘smile strike’ is not going to get to the root of their insecurities.
I encourage everyone, male or female, to fake a smile or refuse to fake a smile- whatever you choose. When someone tells you to smile despite yourself, smile for them, tell them to go to hell, whatever.
What really concerns me is this notion that even the most basic of human behaviors like smiling, or wanting others to smile, ought be corrected because some pseudo-intellectual is able to apply a feminist deconstruction to it. Am I overreacting on a small issue? Well, readers here might be interested in the other ideas Firestone presents in ‘The Dialectic of Sex’ under the same rubric of ‘feminism’ (such as cybernetic laboratory reproduction).
Smiling, and the reactions it has on others, is a universal human behavior, not one constrained to 20th century bourgeois white male-dominated industrial society. I assure you that, despite her best efforts, smiles (both real and faked) and their social effects will far outlive Ms. Firestone and her ridiculous ideas.
Comment by Aaron from Seattle, WA — November 1, 2008 @ 10:39 pm
<i>“If someone feels induced to feign a smile to fulfill the perceived expectations of someone else, or society in general, then I submit they have bigger problems to deal with…”</i>
Wow, really? You really want to trivialize people’s experiences of marginalization and exclusion as “insecurity”? I’m sure you also wonder why black people felt so “insecure” about sitting in the back of the bus - they still get to be on the bus, so what’s the big deal?
Comment by alsomike — November 1, 2008 @ 11:18 pm
@alsomike:
Are you really comparing a perceived expectation that someone should smile to forcing blacks to the back of buses? You’re really going to make that comparison?
Why stop there? Why not go all the way to drawing allusion to the Nazis?
Comment by Aaron from Seattle, WA — November 2, 2008 @ 5:15 am
I’m a gay male. 90% of the time, when someone approaches me and encourages me to smile, it’s another man, at a gay bar, or a “gay” event, like a gay pride parade.
What should we make of this? That gay men are prejudiced against their own gender, and go through life with the assumption that all men are inferior beings who “owe” it to the world to smile all the time? Somehow that doesn’t seem right.
I admit that if a male boss insisted that his female employees smiled all the time, and never made the same demand of his male employees, that would be pretty sexist. But if ocassionally a guy comes up to you at a bar and asks you to smile, you’re not a victim of sexist oppression any more than I am.
Comment by Jake from Washington, DC — November 2, 2008 @ 8:48 am
@ Aaron: It was not my intent to judge the entire male gender; my intent in using the phrase “smile-demander” was to criticize that type of person. In my experience, the smile-demanders have always been male.
One particular instance, the one that annoyed me the most, came not from a stranger who wanted to flirt, but from my then-boyfriend’s father. The scenario: I was very late in meeting my boyfriend and his visiting father for lunch, due to a series of frustrating mishaps on my way to the restaurant. As I was explaining what had happened, “Dad” interrupted me to say, “You should smile!” And that, as Bill from Fredricksburg stated above, denies me “the right to authentic emotional responses to [my] experiences.” The only way that comment in that instance can be interpreted is, “What you feel and think is irrelevant. Start being decorative.”
Comment by Laurel from Houston — November 2, 2008 @ 11:12 am
@Laurel: As I said, I don’t dispute that someone suggesting you should smile for no good reason is being invasive. However, I reiterate that I take issue with the notion that oppression exists by sheer force of someone else’s expectations, even for lack of harmful consequences. You may not be making this argument yourself, but that seems to be Ms. Firestone’s argument.
My point is so what if some man suggests you smile despite yourself? So what if he truly believes that what you feel and think is irrelevant and that you should be decorative? If his only action from that belief is to suggest you smile… then what harm has been done to you? How is he, as you say, “denying you the right to authentic emotional responses”? Do you find yourself unable to have an authentic emotional response when someone tells you to smile- or even if someone told you point blank that your feelings are irrelevant? Are you personally unable to simply dismiss such chatter and/or the people who offer it?
This is my point about insecurity. If someone is so insecure that the mere act of another person making an intrusive suggestion, without any threat of harm, is enough for one to internalize the suggestion to such a degree that they actually are denied authentic emotions, then I submit that the real source of harm is that person’s insecurities. There will always be insensitive jerks- some who know they’re insensitive and many who don’t realize it. Guess what? Such people also probably don’t care much about your complaints. The question is how are you going to react when you encounter one?
When women (or men) who refuse to smile on demand are shuffled to the back of buses, demoted at their jobs, or otherwise suffer actual unfair repercussions, then in those cases you will have my full agreement that something egregious is going on. In the meantime I think people should just- pardon the expression- grin and bear it. :)
Comment by Aaron from Seattle, WA — November 2, 2008 @ 3:08 pm