Behavior: Is Smiling Dangerous to Women?

Wanda: How was your flight in from the coast, dear?

Ralph: Perfectly adequate, my pet. But something must have been bothering all the stewardi. None of them seemed able to smile much.

Wanda: You are missing yet another social trend, Ralph. A lot of them have decided to cut back on all the smiling. Other professionals, like lawyers and accountants, don’t have to smile relentlessly for hours at a stretch. Why should flight attendants?

Ralph: Let me get my coat off, dearest. I want to brace myself on the off chance that someone I love intends to launch a hearty feminist harangue. Am I about to hear that smiling is bad for women?

Wanda: Righto, Ralph. In her book The Managed Heart, Arlie Russell Hochschild says that the perpetually frozen smile of flight attendants is a classic bit of commercial manipulation that propels many of them into mini- breakdowns at the end of the trip. One flight attendant calls it “artificially created elation,” the sort of thing that turns women into ticket-selling objects, not to mention flying bunnies.

Ralph: Let us lapse briefly into logic, dearest. The average flight contains 40 or 50 people who are convinced that the plane is going to crash, maybe 50 who are enraged by the mandatory 30-minute delay in getting off the ground, and another 100 or so who are busy getting giddy or truculent through the magic of booze. Under the circumstances, which is better: a calming smile or a conventional dose of feminist grimness? Wanda: Pilots don’t have to chuckle when they give one of those reassuring Chuck Yeager speeches saying that there’s nothing to worry about even though the plane has no landing wheels. Females are assigned the social role of grinning all the time, Ralph. It’s one way men keep women in their place. Vivian Gornick talks about “that damned dazzling smile,” and Social Psychologist Nancy Henley calls it “woman’s badge of appeasement” that placates the more powerful male. Henley did some experiments showing that women smile 89% of the time in social encounters, while men smile only 67%. And 26% more of female-to-male smiles are not returned.

Ralph: The idea of all those women’s smiles dying unrequited is nauseating, dearest. We’ve got to get men beaming at full throttle to close that smile gap. Another hour of TV each week for Phil Donahue ought to do the trick.

Wanda: Don’t start, Ralph. Even some of you men are starting to get the hang of this. Erving Goffman, the expert in nonverbal communication, wrote that women are almost always shown smiling in ads to show their deference to men. When there’s a smiling man in an ad, the woman usually has to smile twice as broadly to indicate her subordinate status. Then there’s the new book Winning Moves: The Body Language of Selling. It warns women sales representatives not to smile too much or too early when calling on a prospect. Ken Delmar, the businessman who wrote the book, says, “Most men are quite ready not to take you seriously. Don’t give them any ammunition.” A woman who smiles too much is pigeonholed as frivolous, Ralph.

Ralph: These are certainly deep waters, Wanda. As your local representative of the uptrodden gender, I frankly had no idea that cheerfulness was a sexist plot. If I correctly recall our last 42 arguments, you have been telling me that men not only have trouble expressing their feelings, they may even be emotionally tone deaf. Wouldn’t it be logical for you to argue that women , smile more because they are less blocked emotionally, not because niceness is a symbol of servitude?

Wanda: Nice try, wily husband. In fact, the smile is a hostility deflector, and it is trotted out more often by disadvantaged groups. Women smile more than men because they have to appease men and because everyone assumes we are responsible for the emotional tone of social life.

Ralph: Au contraire, my ideological one. The smile is a famed instrument of social bonding, and females are simply better at it than males. Women’s greater tendency to smile seems built in by evolution, probably as one tool to make them respond quicker and better to infants. Umpteen studies show that little girls are organized to respond better to people than little boys. They are more sensitive to the crying of other infants, and even in the first two or three days of life, they spend much more time smiling than newborn boys do. Doubtless this is an early attempt to placate the patriarchy.

Wanda: Those are genetic smiles, Ralph, and they have nothing to do with the beaming bimbo that you men have created as a model for all women. The pasted- on smile that we are supposed to wear marks us as sexy little numbers, perpetually feather-headed and reassuring to men.

Ralph: Be of good cheer, Wanda. Your doting husband understands and accepts your ideological commitment to grimness. But surely even a fearless feminist needn’t be a sourpuss in the privacy of her own home. Now how about a nice industrial-strength smile? I can assure you that the Bureau of Feminist Rectitude will never hear about it from me.

Wanda: Ralph, the only difference between you and a leering construction worker is that your request for a smile is not accompanied by a full repertoire of smacking and sucking noises. Also, the construction worker is probably a tad more sensitive.

Ralph: Smile and the world smiles with you, Wanda. As I believe Shulamith Firestone once observed, “You can catch more flies with honey . . .”

Wanda: Not one more word, Ralph!

Ralph: “. . . than you can with feminist theory.” Good night, dearest.