Forced smiles (28 Oct 2008)

I've noted before Dialectic of Sex author Shulamith Firestone's fatwa against smiling. Firestone responds to the way men often demand smiles from women (and children) and mask their aggression with this request that seems to them innocuous, almost a favor (she’ll be so much prettier if she smiles!) by calling for “a smile boycott, at which declaration all women would instantly abandon their ‘pleasing’ smiles, henceforth smiling only when something pleased them.”

She wouldn't be happy with this article by Carl Zimmer in Discover magazine, noted by Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution. The article suggests that women with their faces frozen in a smile by Botox are possibly happier because they are always smiling, and they are also consequently making others happy with their contagious expression:

People with Botox may be less vulnerable to the angry emotions of other people because they themselves can’t make angry or unhappy faces as easily. And because people with Botox can’t spread bad feelings to others via their expressions, people without Botox may be happier too.

It's easy to imagine this being distorted into lending support to the sexist idea that women owe the world their smiles, lest they become guilty of transferring negative emotions to the world. Maybe Botox is less about wrinkle eradication (a mere alibi) than it is about making women into dolls that can only express placid agreeableness. Zimmer sensibly warns, "Making faces helps us understand how other people are feeling. By altering our faces we’re tampering with the ancient lines of communication between face and brain that may change our minds in ways we don’t yet understand."

The ability to use our face to express what we feel -- the ability not to smile -- seems fairly significant. When you are being leered at, for instance, it's probably comforting to have a sneer in your arsenal to discourage others from consuming you as an object. The idea that what our mind feels can be altered or dictated by what our body is doing involuntarily is sort of scary and probably should be resisted, not abetted. Freezing our faces into a nonexpressive mask just doesn't seem like a good way to enhance our interactions with the world, regardless how pleasant others may find it when we are incapable of expressing displeasure.

No smiles (30 March 2008)

Watching Saturday Night Fever got me thinking about this. The film's usually remembered as the film that launched disco into the mainstream, but it's a pretty disturbing, dark film, full of class-inflected racism and misogyny. It climaxes with a gang rape in the backseat of a car while Travolta, thwarted in his own rape attempt, sulks in the front seat. Then the Bobby C., the kid who got a girl pregnant but doesn't want to be forced to marry her, jumps off the Verrazano Bridge, seemingly trapped by her refusal to get an abortion. The woman-hating is pretty raw and only partially redeemed by the implication of the final scene, that Travolta escapes juvenile mediocrity and working-class self-sabotage by learning to have a mature friendship with a woman, his dance partner who has already made the symbolic leap to Manhattan. The unpleasant ending all but obliterates the vicarious liberation supplied by the peerless dance sequences (now no longer kitschy but just incredible), leaving viewers feeling trapped with a bunch of narrow-minded bigots and misguided dreamers who don't have enough sense to hope for the sort of things that we watching can approve of. It's uncomfortable, but does it serve any useful purpose to confront us so starkly with the limited horizons, the doomedness, of the people it has chosen to depict and give an aura of reality to? Is it some kind of implied critique, or are we still vicariously thrilling, only to something else, something meaner, the kind of harsh reality we are happy to see inflicted on other classes (making us feel a bit immune from it)? In Fear of Falling, Barbara Ehrenreich argues that the film fits in to the late 1960s-early 1970s "discovery of the working class" by the middle class interests that control the media and have a lot at stake in fashioning a working class other to demonize and contrast themselves with. And it certainly sets up admission to the middle class as maturity, the prize for rejecting the hedonistic life of the disco and the immediate gratifications it caters to. But is there also a critique of misogyny in all the female hating throughout the film, or simply a reinforcement of its alleged inevitability, or of the hopelessness of trying to changing it?

I want to give the film the benefit of the doubt and view it as exposing underlying misogyny that most films have built into their structure. Something Shulamith Firestone points out throughout Dialectic of Sex is that sexism often manifests in forms we're trained to regard as appealing and pleasant, or as harmless fun; this is how it gets replicated and reproduced for generation after generation. For example: "Because the class oppression of women and children is couched in the phraseology of 'cute' it is much harder to fight than open oppression." Cuteness is a form of infantilization and self-trivialization, but there can still be something irresistible and fun about cataloging cute things and cooing over them. It would be curmudgeonly and false to deny their appeal, only they have become intimately connected with setting out the boundaries of gendered behavior. Firestone responds to the way men often demand smiles from women (and children) and mask their aggression with this request that seems to them innocuous, almost a favor (she'll be so much prettier if she smiles) by earnestly calling for "a smile boycott, at which declaration all women would instantly abandon their 'pleasing' smiles, henceforth smiling only when something pleased them." Of course, I, like most white middle-class men, have been enacting the smile boycott my entire life and never understood it to be a politically motivated action. The freedom to express one's feelings naturally is not automatically granted. In fact, it's finding out who experiences that freedom and takes it for granted is a good way to identify who has privilege in a society.

The end of the sexual class system, circa 1970 (7 March 2008)

It's an indicator of the degree to which women's liberation was at the forefront of American culture in the early 1970s that a book like The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone (subtitle: "The case for feminist revolution") was not only issued in a mass-market pocket-size paperback by Bantam Books but also sold enough copies to now routinely turn up in thrift stores from Arizona to South Dakota to Delaware, where I bought it for probably the fourth time. I'm trying to imagine this book on a Rexall's rack in 1970, and what sort of consumer would have been drawn in by this cover line: "The HUMAN ALTERNATIVE to 1984 -- a slashing attack on male supremacy that charts the end of the sexual class system." It's hard to conceive of our culture being this interested in feminism, to the extent where a fairly radical version of it could be advertised as a selling point rather than be regarded as an awkward embarrassment. Women's lib was a mainstream consideration that must have seemed omnipresent relative to our own "post-feminist" epoch.

But was that just because its novelty could be exploited commercially by the media industries? I wonder if transforming women's lib into Bantam paperbacks wasn't some way of attempting to neutralize the threat, turn feminism into another shoddy, sensationalized product that could be consumed as fantasy by some Stepford Wife who had the little book stashed away in a handbag and could secretly thrill to exhortations to abolish childhood and traditional sex roles, or could be dismissed as mass-produced crap, as pop psychology or specious self-help, or could be read as an alarming warning of the crazy things these women's libbers had in mind. (It's generally a good reactionary strategy to find the most extreme voices for the reform you oppose and try to popularize the idea that they are representative of the movement as a whole.)

In general, the mass-produced paperback format has the effect of bathing the work in the aura of disposable entertainment. Similarly, today's ubiquitous trade paperback (for me anyway) has an effect of gentrifying ideas, making them into dainty knick-knacks on my intellectual mantelpiece. Because publishers are so complicit with capitalism, their material products end up embodying capitalist ideals, even if the ideas in the pages are undiluted Marxist propaganda. Maybe that means the Web will be a better source for the promulgation of radical ideas?