Owning Your Smile

I had a discussion with my roommate today about the weird thing where random strangers will walk up to women and ask that they smile. If a woman, especially an attractive woman, looks upset or down or just neutral, people will think it is perfectly okay to ask her to smile. In some cases, they'll even demand it. I've seen this a lot in comments people will post over women. If the woman isn't smiling in the picture or doesn't smile in the video, there will always be several comments that run along the lines of "would it hurt her to smile a little?" as if the fact that she never smiled was some kind of offence directed at the viewers.

I find this to be a highly strange practice. Smiling is an emotional reaction. Smiles can be faked, of course, but most of the time, people can tell when they are. A genuine smile is a response to some positive stimuli (or an evil plot). It should happen when it happens, and not just because you think it should. Asking someone to smile for you when they don't want to smile is like asking a flower to bloom when it's not ready to bloom. This isn't the time, no matter how much you think the flower would be prettier in full bloom.

When you ask some random stranger to smile for you, you're not doing anything to benefit THEM. Don't even for a second think you are. In fact, all you are doing to them is reinforcing the idea that they are there to be on display for the benefit of others, not to think and feel and react on their own terms. You may like their smile and you may find them easier to be around when they're displaying a positive emotion, but that is about you and whatever other people may be looking at them. It doesn't help the smiling person at all. You're just leeching off of their beauty.

If some random person walks up to you and asks/demands that you smile, I think the best response is your favorite form of "Go fuck yourself." Most people are probably more polite than I am, so I'm sure they won't say that. Some form of it SHOULD be said though, because these people need to be stopped. I really have no idea how it got into their heads that it was okay to ask women to smile, but it's not okay. You have no right to do that. So go fuck yourself.

Honestly, why would you even do that? You have no idea what this person is going through in that moment. They may have just found out their mom died. They may have just lost their job. They may have just decided to kill themselves because they were tired of being treated like everyone's pretty toy. Everyone, every day, is living through their own personal war. Leave them alone. Is that really too much to ask?