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I’ve been told I was once outgoing. On my first grade report card, my teacher wrote, “Monica is the life of the classroom, always chattering.” Anyone who knows me now would find that impossible to believe.
Looking back, my evolution from a lively young girl to a shy, withdrawn one coincided with the emergence of my adult teeth. From the moment they came in, they were strange. The front teeth resembled two squares of white chiclet gum. Where the second incisors should have been, I instead had tiny premolars set back a quarter-inch, which made my sharp pointed canines appear all the more fang-like.
With my mouth overcrowded and teeth prone to cavities, I spent hours upon hours at the dentist’s, then orthodontist’s office. I dreaded those visits. The rooms smelled of Listerine and latex. Each time, the doctor would bring a small group of residents by my chair to hover over me. “Do you see?” he would say, tapping my disordered teeth with a silver pick. “Isn’t it strange?”
I began to keep my mouth tightly clamped. On fourth grade picture day, dressed in the neat gray plaid suit my mother had picked for the occasion, I offered only a meager thin-lipped smile for the camera, no matter how much the photographer fussed. “Give me a real smile,” he said, voice rising in mild frustration. I politely shook my head until he gave in, firing the shutter with a reluctant sigh. Whether sitting at my school desk or the dinner table, I maintained a neutral expression, or so I thought. I kept my face still, hoping to avoid conveying any emotion.
Yet those who looked over my school pictures or sat across from me, studying my features like a Magic Eye picture book, always found something. Anger in the thinness of my lips. Displeasure in the downturned corners of my mouth. In my teenage years at our family dinners, my father would often comment. “Smile,” he would say. “Why don’t you smile? You look angry.”
“This is my face,” I would snap back, frustrated. Only recently did I begin to consider: Would we have fought less if I, like my mother and sister, displayed an easy smile on all occasions?
My expression, or lack thereof, became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I didn’t smile, which made people think I was mad, which made me mad. Or people thought I didn’t want to be approached, which made me shy.
As the years went on, I grew more and more anxious and aloof. Going outdoors made me tense. I became so accustomed to people avoiding me that I didn’t know how to act when they came my way. I found it exceptionally difficult to make friends. It took, on average, one full calendar year for people to warm up to me. Once they did, I was told I had initially come off cold. Intimidating. As though I thought I was better than everyone.
All because I thought my teeth were too strange to be shown.
Last month, I spoke by phone with Dr. Marianne LaFrance, a professor of psychology and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Yale, who has spent decades studying nonverbal communication.
Our discussion began with her core finding, which has been replicated “many, many times,” that women in general smile much more than men. The factors behind the phenomenon are overwhelmingly complex, and cannot be simply attributed to society or biology or culture. But, LaFrance told me, evidence shows the overarching truth that non-smiling women are regarded more negatively than non-smiling men. Not only that, but, as LaFrance pointed out, “men are not punished for not smiling, whereas women are.”
This is due in part to pervasive gender stereotypes and embedded expectations. “We expect women to be nicer, more emotional, more communal, more sensitive, more interactively astute, and we still don’t expect those qualities of men,” LaFrance explained. “One of the easiest ways to communicate that is to smile.”
“There’s a term called the ‘resting bitch face,’ which tells us that a neutral facial expression on a woman is less expected than a smile,” she added. “So people are working out of a framework that says, I expect a woman to smile, and if she’s not then there’s something not pleasant about her.”
When LaFrance explained that less frequent smiling tends to be associated with more stereotypically “masculine” traits like aggression and independence, an unsettling thought occurred. Was my entire personality a result of what people projected onto me because I hated my own teeth? Would I have turned out completely different—happy, bright, socially adjusted—if I had accepted my weird mouth and smiled as freely as I once did as a child?
Of course it’s not that simple. But according to LaFrance, there is considerable research that shows that people who tend not to smile are “perceived to be not particularly happy, confident, or sociable”—irrespective of personality. People like me—who tend to mask their smile because they dislike their teeth—are thought to be polite, not genuinely warm and friendly, no matter what our true emotions may be.
“Early data clearly shows that young adults who don’t show open mouth, top-teeth smiling tend to be less successful in life, alas,” LaFrance said. “The reasoning is that when people meet them, they’re assumed to be not likely to enjoy life, and people like to be around people who enjoy life.”
I asked her if making myself smile more would in fact make me happier. “It’s mostly the response one gets when one smiles,” she explained. “It’s not that smiling will make you feel happier, it’s that smiling puts you in situations where you get positive reactions from other people.“
Truth be told, all this only made me want to smile less. I hated the notion that these social pressures were more expected of women than men. But I found comfort in one small learning: That it didn’t matter if my teeth were perfect, only that I used them. They were strong, if misshapen, and a tool I could use to communicate with the world. And there was nothing wrong with trying to get along with the world a little more.
Still, habits are hard to break. My polite closed-mouth smile is second nature to me. I employ it everywhere: At the coffee shop, to my neighbor crossing the street, to my parents on Facetime. As practice, I made an attempt at taking some photographs, smiling with teeth. I still disliked the way they appeared small and crooked in frame. I thought my face looked unnatural, contorted into a goofy-looking grin. But maybe that was a good thing.
If all else failed, I could take comfort in one last tidbit LaFrance had told me—that the difference in smiling between genders all but disappears in old age. “That’s when the social pressure is off,” she said. Frankly, I can't wait.