Women's Accepted Emotions

I saw this article about women’s emotions in Hollywood. It was about how most actresses never show any more emotion than a few tears, or a basic pout to pass for anger. This seems true for society in general. From what I’ve seen, the expectation to be beautiful or pleasant overrides everything else. If women don’t have a certain expression on their face, people, mostly men, act offended. I’ve heard from other people that they’ve had total strangers come up and tell them to smile. That’s happened to me as well, and it is always irritating. It’s as if they can’t tolerate an emotion that isn’t happiness, and it’s specific to women. I can’t imagine a man going up to another man and telling him to smile. In fact, it seems almost effeminate for a man to be really visibly happy, while walking around on the street. But women have to keep their faces’ appearance in mind, even when displaying emotion, or especially, while not engaging in something. I think that these people feel compelled to tell a woman to smile, because they feel uncomfortable with realizing she actually has emotions, and it isn’t her sole purpose to be a hostess.

I’ve seen other things along this line, in magazines mostly. One article was about how to look sexy while lying in bed. It advised women to be aware of their body’s position, to look the most alluring. The positions would seem uncomfortable and unnecessary, unless posing for a picture. Another piece of advice was not to sleep with your face touching the pillow, because it causes wrinkles. Then it recommended that women wear tape on their wrinkles while sleeping, so they can’t frown and make the wrinkles deeper. Basically, a person could go insane trying to follow all this advice. The degree of self-consciousness seems almost pathological. You have to spend all your time positioning your body, keeping your face smiling, and essentially never being comfortable, because that would cause wrinkles or look non-sexy. Of course, not all women do this to that extreme. Except with dieting, clothing, make-up, anti-aging creams, implants, surgery, and so on, so some degree of extreme self-consciousness is affecting women. Basically, all this neuroticism is done to live up to the expectation that women’s goal of beauty should override everything else in their life.