This story may go away, but for now...
Smiling is a great hack one can use to appear more attractive, it's true, but that's not to say people — especially women — should be forced to smile. "Men tell women to smile because society conditions men to think we exist for the male gaze and for their pleasure," activist Bené Viera explained to HuffPost. "Essentially what a man is saying when he tells a woman — one he doesn't even know — to smile, is that his wants outweigh her own autonomy over how she exists in the world." When you smile is up to you and we'd venture to guess that it's never going to be while walking down the street and at some rando's request.
That said, if you want to smile, science has backed up the notion that flashing a grin does indeed have a positive influence on one's attractiveness. In one study, it was discovered that photos of smilers were not only rated as more attractive than those with a neutral expression, but they were also perceived to be kinder.
The Smile Perspective
The "A Smiling Face" page gets my goat, of course, because it harps on the narrative that men tell women to smile because they somehow own them, or whatever. I've never witnessed this myself, and I've only ever been told to smile, maybe once, by a woman. So this activist Bené Viera (in Huffpost) may suffer from the same problem as me, i.e., overly small dataset. At least one man has been told to smile (by a woman), so is that an outlier, a datum that breaks your theory, or what? Inquiring minds and minds pushing for the actual liberation of women want to know!
The Immunomemetic Perspective
I would say, however, that there may be something to it in that telling a woman (or anybody) to smile is an immunomeme, i.e., something that men (or anybody) can do without fear of retribution, i.e., it's kind of a social "slam-dunk" in terms of forcing another person do something.
Frowning as Violence
Frowning in a social setting is in a sense an "attack" on others and on society in general. It's saying things like "I'm more special than the rest of you" or "my problems are more important than all'a your-all's" or just to be in a state that makes others uncomfortable, or draws attention to oneself (rather like loud talking, manspreading, yelling, smoking, being smelly, or dressing ostentatiously) and forces others to put up with it. It telegraphs the idea that something is wrong with the world and everybody has to either agree with me or go against me, and that is uncomfortable.
Since it's uncomfortable for everyone to have someone frowning for some unknown reason (which might affect them if they knew it, which causes secondary worry) everyone in society is basically on board with somebody telling the frowner to knock it off. That is, there is a paucity of immunomemes that operate against the telling-women-to-smile meme, and so it's fair game, and that's really the problem that the "don't tell me to smile" camp are complaining about.
Male Responsibility for Female Welfare
Another dynamic which may be in play is the idea of immunomemes that act between men, i.e., bullying opportunities that men have against one another, and these tend along the line of men's being programmed to serve women. If a woman is sad, disappointed, bored, or unsafe or in danger, men are programmed to feel that they must do something to make it better, that they are personally responsible for fixing it. If a woman is glowering, then men are allowed to bully one another about not having done anything about it, or to garner status if he is the one to step up, and thus be recognized by the other men.
Please spare me the comments that "men shouldn't act/feel that way." That's the way it is. You could maybe make the argument that it makes sense biologically, but in the end that's the way men are trained in our society, by their parents, in the schools, in church, etc. Tell the mommies of the next generation if you want it to change. Hopefully enough said on that, for now.
Of course, the wag will immediately observe the self-serving angle of this male behavior, i.e., that a lack of immunomemes around telling women to smile, i.e., the bullying opportunity to do so, represents an unfettered opportunity to "access" women, i.e., to make a social overture, however brief, petty, annoying, and offering little chance for continuance. Men crave access to female society, even if it's administered by the droplet. My hypothesis is that men can "accumulate" these miniscule servings of female attention, so for instance, a half-dozen doors opened for a woman, a dozen polite "good mornings" returned, letting a woman go ahead in line a few times, helping a woman pick up dropped items, or showing concern when a woman seems down. Except now showing concern when a woman appears sad or angry or whatever is automatically seen as a pick-up or sexual harassment (I guess these are the same thing now...?), so we're reduced to telling the woman to "smile!" In the end enough droplets adds up to a bucketful that is somehow equivalent to a full day's loving attention from and interaction with a single woman. I assume that women don't work this way, I don't know, but it could explain the kinds of misunderstandings we see, e.g., everything that men do that annoys women is just harassment because they are horrible and mean or "bad". I'm not arguing that men aren't horrible and mean, and that they shouldn't immediately knock off a lot of what they are doing, but just that a lot of the feminist activist rationales are puerile, false on the face of them, and complete unfalsifiable and unextensible, and so will not lead to women's liberation and will only lead to male as well as female unhappiness.
Summary
So, to sum up, as per yoozh, the "feminist activist" line posits an overly complex explanation for a phenomenon, in this case, that men somehow think that women exist "for men's pleasure" and so somehow telling frowning women to smile is an expression of this. Ultimate this is question-begging, by the way--the buried supposition is that men are "bad" in a petty and selfish way--and then anything and everything can be explained by this supposition.
It is the pinnacle of laziness.
Let me just say that I consider women's liberation to be the most important socio-economic cause in the world--not a word of exaggeration. It's not because women are "weak," and need "help," as such, by the way. Everything that is plaguing our world and/or will destroy us as a civilization would get better by making things better for women. That's why I find it infuriating when people make vapid arguments, get all vociferous about them, blame the wrong people and institutions in the wrong way, and when they alienate potential allies. Please just shut up, you people! And yes, women are unfairly oppressed, still, in so many ways, that we really have our work cut out for us, including just prioritizing what to do, and if we could discard these false narratives and pull our collective heads out of our collective assholes and hit the ground running, after a few decades or centuries we could start to make a dent in building a society where...well, actually I don't know what it would look like since we're so far from it right now. It's not the "opposite" of what we have now, whatever that even means, which seems to be what some people are talking about.
Moving on.
If there are few immunomemes around a behavior like telling somebody to smile, then it becomes attractive (for men or women, targeting either men or women) to do it. Lack of immunomemes tends to be the case, since public dourness
Men crave access to female attention. If telling someone to smile is under-immunized, i.e., there's little chance for negative pushback from society, then it's an attractive meme. Maybe it's a mutation of the meme of actually showing concern for a frowning woman, since that's considered to be unwanted invasiveness (that may be a "choice" made for us by militant feminist activism--thanks for that!).
Men also feel either collectively responsible for women feeling sad, bored, afraid, disappointed or that women experiencing these things represents an opportunity to make a social overture, which as mentioned, is prized by men. Also, men bully each other over whether they are being "sufficiently attentive" to women who are perceived as "available." This can either take the form of concern all the way along the spectrum to things like the dreaded "cat-calling" and such.
The first scene where Debra Winger and Richard Gere first meet at the Air Force dance. Winger and her friend enter the dance, are spotted by Gere's friend who says, "Look over there. What are we going to do about it?" I find this very telling.
Epilogue: Beautiful Women
All this may apply double to super-attractive women (whatever that means). I kind of wanted to link to this video.
