Socialization and Smiling

I just read a great article on Sadie Magazine's website about the gendered act of smiling. It discusses how women are expected to smile more than men, regardless of how they feel. We are socialized to smile just to be polite, even when we don't feel like it.

I have dealt with this all my life. I used to be asked all the time "what's wrong?" when my face was in a natural, relaxed position. People find me standoffish or even snobbish when I don't smile. I'm a nice person. I'm generally pretty happy most of the time. That doesn't mean my face has to show it (and come on, forced smiles are exhausting!). I have a female coworker who tells me stories all the time and I can see her waiting for me to laugh and smile. I think she's great, her stories are funny sometimes, but they rarely inspire huge grins and loud laughter. Yet I do it, because otherwise I feel I'm being impolite. I've been socialized to feel like I'm being rude when I don't find someone else as funny as others do.

My boyfriend called me out on this. He makes a lot of corny jokes and I would often laugh at them without thinking about whether they were funny or not. He finally asked me why I was fake laughing so often. I hadn't even realized I was doing it! It was so nice, though, to be called out for smiling/laughing too much and nongenuinely instead of being asked to smile more. (By the way, even though my computer is putting an ugly red line underneath it, nongenuinely is a real word. I looked it up. Ingenuinely is not.)