DoucheArt

Quite often, victims of street harrassment are told to smile. It's this whole idea that women are put on the Earth to be pleasing to the eye. Now, before you argue, just consider it. Without knowing why we may be down or angry at the time, without knowing us at all, a perfect stranger feels the need to walk up to us and tell us to smile...smile so you will be more pleasing for me to look at; I bet you have a pretty smile. Do you see random men running up to homeless people to do so? Do you see men go into a mental hospital telling people to smile or walk down the corridors of a hospital feeling the need to tell people to smile? At a funeral? After a tragedy? You can't possibly know what is going on in someone's life at any point in time yet women are constantly told to smile. The end point is that we aren't here to be pleasing to the eye. We have complex lives that come with baggage and problems and issues just like any other person's. When we have a reason to smile, damnit, we will.

I had a friend on Facebook relate a story just the other day of a man BLOCKING her entrance to a store telling her to smile. He actually felt the need to block her path while she entered a store to tell her to smile...a man, a strange man she had never met. That's fucking frightening in public or not especially after he resorted to name-calling when she wasn't thrilled with having to deal with this kind of bullshit.

And when we do smile, we get messages like this one. Great. --jenniy