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WHEN DENIS QUAID’S monstrous incarnation leers at a visibly upset Margaret Qualley in the hit 2024 movie The Substance, he tells her, “Pretty girls should always smile.”
A rictus grin slowly forms on Qualley’s face, as she joins generations of women who face a choice in this particular instance: do I comply and remain safe, or do I challenge the dangerous absurdity of the male gaze?
That scene came into my mind recently when Donald Trump took umbrage against Kaitlin Collins, CNN’s White House Correspondent, who dared to ask about Jeffrey Epstein’s victims during a press conference in the Oval Office.
Desperate to turn the page on an uncomfortable topic, the president lashed out, lambasting the award winning journalist for not smiling enough.
“You know, you are the worst reporter… I’ve known you for 10 years.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smile on your face,” he complained, with a giant frown on his own.
I’ve been researching the strange phenomenon of men demanding that women smile, and from the anecdotal evidence I’ve gathered, I have little doubt that many female viewers felt acute empathy for Collins at that moment.
“I was actually really impressed that she didn’t waver in her seriousness while he was saying that,” Gina London, former CNN anchor and communications expert, tells me.
“Almost reflectively, I think some women would smile just because it was such an unusual and frankly stupid thing for him to say. I thought it was a master class in composure and steadiness.”
Collins is not the first woman to be publicly criticised for ‘failing to smile’. Pop star and designer, Victoria Beckham, has received much press attention for years about her lack of a smile, with references to her ‘miserable faces’ at events.
As a man, it makes me recoil when I hear another man tell a woman to smile. While this phenomenon masquerades as someone gently encouraging another person to be happy, it’s clearly about control.
It’s about traditional ideas concerning the place of women, their subservient position and the notion that women should be pleasing to men. It is grossly dismissive and reductive. It’s also a linguistic weapon, used to deflect from something else and engineered to put women down.
Nadia Adan, the owner of Ashford Motors in Wicklow, had an interesting insight on this when I spoke with her.
“When [a man] says something like that, it’s because they’ve said something bad, and they don’t like the reaction,” she explains.
“And then they’re trying to lighten it up by going ‘Ah, give us a smile, I was only joking’. But actually, they’re not joking. There’s an underhandedness there. They’re just trying to get out of it.”
I also spoke with journalist Geraldine Herbert about her experience. She says that, like most women, men have told her to smile, too.
“The fact is, it’s nothing to do with ‘be happy,’ but rather ‘be nicer to look at,’” she claims.
“It’s not charming or flattering; it’s more like being gently but firmly put back in your decorative place.”
In her seminal 1970 work The Dialectic of Sex, author Shulamith Firestone made the case for a “smile boycott”, arguing that all women should “instantly abandon their ‘pleasing’ smiles, henceforth smiling only when something pleased them.”
Women have always been told to present in a pleasing manner. What is extraordinary is that the phenomenon continues today, when so many more women are in leadership roles than before.
I found a copy of Vogue’s Book of Etiquette from 1948, in which the author advises that if a lady “refuses an invitation, a drink or a present in a prim and righteous way, she may be considered stuffy. If she refuses all these gracefully, with a smile, she will be thought charming.”
These words are just as relevant 70 years later, when women will often try to appease aggressive men with a smile and lightness of tone that belies a racing heartbeat.
The science backs this up. Too often, a smile for women isn’t about the organic expression of a joyful emotion.
Rather, it is about acquiescence. Frank McAndrew, a professor of psychology in Illinois, says that the human smile evolved from our primitive ancestors.
“In primates, showing the teeth, especially teeth held together, is almost always a sign of submission,” he explains.
One female leader who has refused to acquiesce is the climate activist Greta Thunberg. Appearing at the UN in 2019, her scowl directed towards President Trump went viral. Trump responded sarcastically, saying, “She seems like a very happy young girl… looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!”
Thunberg’s refusal to smile and appear pleasant was hailed as an act of defiance. Why should she smile when the world burned, and the US president called it all a hoax? What was there to be smiling about?
The president’s insistence on diverting the media’s attention away from the substance of her argument and towards her appearance was an act of misogynistic cowardice. He deployed the exact same tactic in the Oval Office the other day with Kaitlin Collins.
I spoke with Hazel Chu, the Deputy Leader of the Green Party, about her experience of being a woman leader in this context.
“Men have told me to smile, be less combative, put a hand in front of my face to shush me. And I’m 1000% certain most women in politics or public life had some similar experience.”
Chu’s experience reminded me of the way Hillary Clinton was treated when she ran for president in 2016. She has spoken at length about the challenges women leaders face when it comes to striking the right tone.
After her victory in the Democratic primaries in March of that year, Joe Scarborough, the well-known host on MSNBC, tweeted:
“Smile. You’ve just had a big night.”
While the tweet caused considerable controversy at the time, Clinton was asked about it a day or two later.
Smile. You just had a big night. #PrimaryDay
— Joe Scarborough (@ScarboroughNow) March 16, 2016
Her response?
“I don’t hear anybody say that about men.”
My concern is that we still have an expectation for women to present as smiling and facile, even from a young age, but that the same expectations don’t exist for boys or young men.
Consider the fact that the Rose of Tralee persists every year. People will defend it until the cows come home, arguing that it isn’t a “lovely girls’ competition”.
But can you imagine a contestant winning who didn’t offer a massive beaming grin? Even the lyrics of the song, which gave the contest its name, come loaded with expectations of female amenability.
The cool shades of evening their mantle were spreading,
And Mary all smiling was listening to me;
The moon through the valley her pale rays was shedding,
When I won the heart of the Rose of Tralee.
Nadia Adan says that she has had men telling her to smile in the past [although she says she is naturally a smiley person, so it isn’t something she encounters a lot].
She says this phenomenon alludes to a broader issue. If a male customer didn’t like the quote for a car they had their eye on in her showroom, they would sometimes ask to speak with the man in charge.
She then has to tell them that, actually, she is the one who “makes the decisions around here.”
So, men… let’s put an end to this dreadful phenomenon. Let’s remember that linguistic conventions like this are often rooted in a patriarchal power dynamic that continues to repress women.
Of course, if we say this to certain men, they will more than likely tell us to calm down and smile.
Simon Tierney is a journalist and writer.
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