No one seems to be talking about how the faces of most of the female population appear to have frozen. I increasingly find myself gazing admiringly at groups of young men – like some sort of proud avuncular patriarch – who seem the only people left capable of smiling. Like knights of old, they are protectors of an arcane tradition that is dying out.
Women form the bedrock of civilisation: without them on side, things ultimately go awry for any society
The so-called ‘bitch face’ look is chic at the moment. Look at billboards and none of the models are smiling. It’s all very Bret Easton Ellis. ‘There’s no love, and no real friendship: money, teenage sex and easy access to drugs open the door to a kind of gleaming nihilism,’ Easton Ellis says of Less than Zero, his debut novel about a moody 1980s California. ‘Part of the book’s appeal to young readers could be that they’d never been presented quite like this in contemporary American fiction before: as sophisticated teenagers who aped the attitudes of their materialistic and narcissistic boomer parents.’
This time, though, the malaise seems to go deeper, especially with the fairer sex. Now it’s not just moody teenagers – who increasingly aren’t just moody, rather seriously anxious and fearful – but spans the generations: at least up to grandmothers, some of whom are holding out on the arcane institution of smiling. It has got worse, too, since the pandemic and lockdowns. As French novelist Michel Houellebecq predicted of the world after Covid-19: ‘It will return to being much the same, just everything will be a little shitter’.
During the pandemic, people lived online to a degree that had never occurred before, and, as habit-forming creatures, our digital absorption has meant fewer genuine social interactions. We have started to lose the muscle memory involved in smiling (see also: church attendance, free speech).
This trend was happening before Covid, but two years of social engineering sped up the process: cue the downward turn for smiling. One of the bitterest ironies is that having managed to free ourselves from the dreaded face masks, so many people seem to have internalised blank, unsmiling countenances. Still, in countries like Spain, one encounters billboard displaying a more old-school advert, often depicting a woman with a gigantic angelic smile. You are left marvelling at how incredibly beautiful the smiling female face is.
No doubt some tiresome feminist would reply that I am a patriarchal man, demanding to be adored and placated by women. But as Bishop Fulton Sheen, who denounced the sexual revolution of the 1960s, wrote in Love, Marriage and Children, it’s women who form the bedrock of civilisation: without them on side, things ultimately go awry for any society.
‘The child breathlessly fixates on the mother’s face and imitates the expressions that play on it… in this way, it will feel what she feels,’ Belgian professor of clinical psychology Mattias Desmet writes in The Psychology of Totalitarianism. ‘The child achieves a kind of symbiosis with the mother through its creative imitations of her sounds and facial expressions… as it takes on its mother’s happy expression, it also feels her joy; if it takes on her sad expression, it shares in her unhappiness.’
This doesn’t end in adulthood. Desmet describes how ‘the human body is, in the most literal sense, a stringed instrument’ that responds to physical cues but also invisible frequencies and energies it encounters. Which could explain much of what is going on at the moment: ‘In a society where human relationships are impoverished and toxic, life will be difficult and unbearable, however “advanced” such a society may be in terms of mechanical-technological evolutions,’ Desmet says.
The same could be said about the advancement of female emancipation – despite all the ‘gains’, many women seem pretty miserable about it. The grumpathon doesn’t just apply to women, of course. Recently, as my train neared Waterloo station, another one heading the same way came beside us on a parallel track. I got a good look at carriages full of glum-looking men and women. Dotted among were groups of young children – most of them girls, incidentally – beaming away out of the carriage windows and waving at passengers on our train.
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