I am *very* serious.

Once again, Melissa leads the way to feminist glory.

That brief post underscores that absolute jackholery of commanding someone--usually a female someone--to smile. It's never about being nice. If someone is actually experiencing negative emotions, nothing could be more calculated to make that someone feel worse. For instance, I have a very vivid memory of a smile command I got when I was walking to school the morning after I got the late night call from my mom that my grandma had finally, after a long and painful struggle with cancer, died. Who knows why I thought I had to go to molecular chemistry class that morning, but there I was, shuffling to class, head down, glazed eyes. Some older gentleman walking towards me gave me a folksy "Buck up and smile!" I practically jumped out of my shoes and then burst into tears. I have no idea how the man responded. Not being a feminist lady yet, I had no idea why, after drying my tears, I felt so angry. And then I felt guilty, because it seems so wrong to be angry at an old man with apparently kind intentions.

But after that, I started noticing it all the time. It happens to me all the time. I have a thinking face that looks like I'm about to disembowel a dragon that has already set me on fire--somewhere between determination, anger, and pain. I wear this face so often, I've earned two vertical lines on my forehead right above my nose before I was 16. I hated them then, but rather like them now--they are the sign of books read, problems solved, dissertations written. They're not pretty, but pretty's not the point.

And that's precisely why it's so irksome. I've gotten the smile command with disconcerting frequency in the past year--lots of books to read and problems to solve means the dragon face gets a lot of use. The really galling part is that the smile command is almost inevitably followed with "You look so serious." And that is always 1 part surprise and 1 part query, translating to "What in the world could you possibly think about that is so serious, little lady?!" As if it's such a wonderment that a woman is thinking serious thoughts, that it's necessary to stop and inquire.

Dropping the dissertation bomb usually earns me an apology, or at least an apologetic tone. But that never saves me from being annoyed--not only have demeaning things about my pretty little head been assumed, but my train of thought has been interrupted (and perchance lost) because someone is annoyed I didn't smile at him. It's bad enough my face is not wholly my own business--but my time and thoughts, too? I mean, if I really do look that serious, it seems like an obvious and reasonable thing for another person to conclude I think that whatever I'm doing is more important than silly chit-chat about my face.

Which leads me to suspect that the second sin of an unsmiling lady (the first being failure to fulfill the obligation to be a dancing doll for the dudely onlooker) is thinking that anything about yourself (your time, your thoughts, your face) belongs to yourself. How selfish! Which is probably why if you protest too much (i.e. at all) against the smile command, the most common retort is "Bitch!"