The widespread phenomenon of men telling women to smile isn't exactly a secret — if you're a woman. But, apparently, some people think the behaviour is so odd that it can't possibly be a thing that actually happens.
So when the Independent Worker's Party of Chicago tweeted, "who 'tells you to smile randomly on the street?' No one of course, you made that up," in a thread on 7th October, plenty of women on Twitter were quick to shut the tweet down.
Lmao retweet if a stranger has ever told you to smile https://t.co/O5KygbESb9
— Molly Shah (@MollyOShah) October 8, 2017
Twitter user Molly Shah retweeted the tweet asking others to also retweet it if a stranger had ever told them to smile, BuzzFeed reports. Clearly, this is not an uncommon experience. The tweet has more than 70,000 retweets and 1,400 comments at the time of writing.
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Some women are sharing their stories with Shah, and what they have to say shows just how ridiculous these moments can be:
One that comes to mind is when I was picking up my dogs shit. Literally bent over with poop in my hand & dude walking by says to smile. ? https://t.co/CppRBqdSan
— Company Town Girl (@littlejordan) October 15, 2017
...face' politely and kept walking. He got really shitty and yelled at me
— Furcoat (@FurcoatNaeNicks) October 9, 2017
I had never been more delighted to greet a friend with a huge smile when she finally walked in the door.
— Loree Stark (@loreestark) October 8, 2017
Haven't had it happen in over 7 years.
— J ?Freddy? Kruger (@thekroog) October 9, 2017
::flips calendar back to a big "transitioned to male" circle in red ink::
I wonder why that is.
‘Cause, SERIOUSLY, I can’t even escape that shit playing a video game BY MYSELF?
— PushingUpDaisies ? (@dyrdaisy) October 8, 2017
Got told to smile while suffering from an abscessed tooth. I glared.
— K. Sanderson Sister (@KathleenDorsey6) October 9, 2017
As many of the women responding the the thread pointed out, it's almost always men who tell them to smile. While the thought might seem nice at first glance — after all, he just wants you to feel happy, right? — it's a common form of street harassment and becomes menacing when you realise that a man telling a woman to smile is just another way for him to police her body and her emotions.
The problem is so widespread, it even inspired a popular street art project aptly called "Stop Telling Women To Smile." Artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh uses her own blank, unsmiling face in her artwork to bring awareness that men asking women to smile isn't just them trying to be nice — it's about the power they believe they hold over women.
Street harassment like this "leaves women feeling vulnerable and unsafe in their communities, as if their sole purpose in leaving the house each day is to entertain men," Fazlalizadeh told CNN in 2014. "It makes women think twice about what they wear, the routes they take, even their body language."
The truth of her statement is clear from some of the stories women have been telling on Twitter. One woman, 22-year-old Ally Schroy tweeted that a man screamed at her to smile from his car while she was running one day and it caused her to change her route.
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"After that day, I started driving several blocks away to run at a nearby park to avoid getting shouted at again," she told BuzzFeed.
More than 70,000 people retweeted Shah's tweet, which means there are probably more than thousands more women who have experiences like this. So, the original tweeter's disbelief that strangers really do randomly tell women to smile has effectively been proven wrong. Now, we need to do something about it.
Refinery29 has reached out to Shah and will update this post when we receive a response.
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