“Hey, you should smile.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Don’t tell a woman to smile. It’s really shitty.”
“What’s shitty about that?”
“For one, it’s sexist. It perpetuates the idea that I have to be pleasant and happy all the time in order to make men feel more comfortable and at ease. It’s the same logic that carried to its conclusion would have men say I’m a bitch if I don’t smile enough or sweet enough or whatever.”
“That’s not what I meant though. I just feel bad when my friends aren’t happy.”
“I know. That doesn’t change the fact that the things you say exist in a preexisting context. Still, context aside, you still shouldn’t tell me to smile. That’s not to make me happy, I’m obviously not going to have wild change in mood or circumstance because you tell me to smile.
“The entire mentality is like the elevator music of the soul.”
“The what-now?”
“Elevator music. No one actually likes it. It’s shitty music that is so insistent that we should all feel calm and mellow and even-keeled. All it really does is make me want to beat someone with a wrench.”
“Right, so maybe I should just let you smile when you actually feel like smiling and handle my own emotions when your frowning makes me uncomfortable.”
“Good plan.”
trigger fiction. 