Tuesday, February 10, 2009

San Jose Streets Outrage II

This has been happening to me a lot lately:

It's early morning, I'm tired and I'm late for class. I'm walking through the rainy streets, I can't wait to get to school and put down my stuff, get my schedule straightened out.... Some dude is sitting on his front porch (wth is he doing, anyway?), and he's like,
"Hey, you dropped something?"
I whirl around, startled. I didn't hear anything fall, so I'm looking at the ground in confusing. "Really?"
He says, "yeah, your smile!"

Or like the other day, I'm crossing the street. I'm rushing across in high heels, and some guy stops me. He's like "Smile! You're beautiful!"

I'm serious, this shit happens to me all the time. Why do people want me to be walking around smiling? Do they know what a person looks like, randomly smiling to themselves in the street? I'll give you a hint, it starts with "in" and ends with "sane."

1 comment:

timoni said...

I get this a lot, too. Dear Prudence recently got a question about it, and here is part of her response:

"I used to frequently get the same exhortation from male strangers. Let me assure you, even if you never change your default facial expression, this problem will eventually take care of itself because men say this only to unsmiling young women. Strangers don't care enough to see happiness suffuse the face of a crabby-looking middle-aged woman. Of course you're right, your facial expression is nobody's business, and there is a large element of sexism in this—I promise you these men are not encouraging young, brooding males to lighten up."