Pearly Teeth--Like The Shark, Dear

I've created a bunch of facebook groups in my day. One of my favorites is semi-recent, and it's called "Fuck you, I'll smile when I feel like it." I checked it again the other day, and discovered that it now has 227 members. This is, by far, the largest membership in any of the groups I've created. Most of the members are people I don't know, some from different countries. It's very gratifying, and I feel like I've filled a need. A lot of the commenters seem actually thankful to be on the record as vehemently against the phenomenon.

In explaining, to myself even, why it makes many of us so angry when strangers tells us to smile, I pose the question as it's posed in the intro to Manifesta: why is this person doing this? Manifesta described it as the "click" moment for a particular woman--the moment at which you realize that sexism and feminism do in fact affect you, the moment when everything is suddenly clear and you go, as Caryl Rivers put it, "Hey, this isn't fair!" It's not that being told to smile holds us back, but I always wonder what the ROOT is, and what the aim. I tend to gravitate towards one particular theory, though I've listed others in the group: a deep-seated belief that women aren't to be taken seriously. The business of running the world and thinking important thoughts falls to men, but why should girls worry their pretty heads? Why would they do anything but walk around smiling, looking happy for the sake of cheering the men around them?

And this, of course, relates to the world's fear of angry women. I remember sitting at a bar/coffee shop about a month ago, one that has an open storefront, and there was a really bad accident outside. No one was hurt, but a woman's sedan ended up crashed into an iron fence on the sidewalk, and the other party was a truck. None of us saw the accident--we heard it and then went to look. The woman got out and yelled at the truck driver, "You ran me off the road! You ran me off the road!" The owner (manager?) of the bar said to some customers, "It must've been her fault, the way she's yelling."

I was so angry and depressed for the rest of the day. My mother talked later about that woman who died mysteriously in the Phoenix airport while in police custody--she was arrested in the first place because she was yelling and making a scene, and my mother felt this would never have happened with a man, that her "crime" was being simultaneously angry and a woman. If it'd been a man screaming at a truck driver over the same accident, there's no way the bar owner would've said that. He'd probably have said something about what a menace those huge trucks are*.

I'm not happy being a feminist today. But I'm glad 226 other people understand what I mean.



*All of which is probably why I didn't let him buy my apartment.