As long as there are streets and as long as there are guys who think that women are supposed to be presented to the world as grinning, preening beauty queens to be pleasant and looked at, there will be guys telling women to ‘smile’.
Though it’s perhaps the thinnest wedge of the overall harassment spectrum, at a basic level it gets in the way of women just trying to get on with their day-to-day, and implies that a random guy has every right to dictate a woman’s behaviour or emotions. Like we’re voice-controlled Furbies or something.
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That’s why we totally love this Funny Or Die video which shows a pretty disproportionate, but appropriate response, to a guy telling a woman to smile.
Smile – watch more funny videos
If you can’t watch it right now, here’s what happens: a woman sits down on a bench, a man tells her to smile, she asks why, he says it’s because women look ‘pretty’ when they smile. All women. So she smiles, then blares a horn to call all the other women in the area to heed this man’s advice.
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When surgeons, teachers, lawyers, criminals and all the rest of female humanity in between (or whichever extras were available that day) turn up to eagerly hear this one man’s message to all women – that they must smile, he gets a bit overwhelmed.
Eventually, he cracks under the pressure after the women repeatedly ask him what to do with their faces. After all, if men are the gatekeepers to women’s smiling faces, what happens when women need to do something else with their face other than smile?
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Admitting defeat, he explains: ‘Do whatever the hell you want with your faces! They’re your faces!’
The only problem with this response? We just haven’t got the time, effort – or surgeons, lawyers and criminals on hand – to make this point every time we’re told to ‘Cheer up, love’.
Like this? You might also be interested in:
Sexism, Trolls and Rape Threats: What It’s Really Like To Be A Female Gamer
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Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.