Dear C;
I have RBF (Resting Bitch Face) and it’s ruining my life.
People think I am pissed off all the time. I’m not! It’s just that when I am not even thinking about anything at all, my face naturally looks bitchy. I didn’t even know RBF existed until my roommate told me. I looked it up in Wikipedia. OMG, that’s ME. In high school, I used to wonder why every girl but me would get picked for a team, or asked to dance. No one invited me to prom. It sucks. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it.
I don’t know what my face looks like. What am supposed to do, carry around a mirror?
Bitch Rebecca
Dear Bitch;
Before 2013, this condition didn’t exist. But people love a good meme, so now we have a catchy name to objectify those threats Mom used to make: “If you keep frowning, your face is going to stick like that!”
Do not think, however, that I am taking your complaint lightly. Even the world of science has come to recognize that Resting Bitch Face is a real phenomena. In studies using FaceReader software, researchers picked images of people with unsmiling neutral faces and ran them through the computer. The software registered each face and gave a percentage of the underlying emotions it picked up. An average reading registered a face at 97% neutral. But about 3% of underlying expression would reveal traces of emotion — sadness, happiness, anger — but people who have RBF had double the amount of readable emotion, and most of the emotion expressed is that of contempt. It can make other people feel they are being seen as worthless or deserving scorn.
Here’s what I found interesting: Resting Bitch Face is seen as a predominantly female phenomena by the general population, but the computer disagrees. FaceReader is an unemotional piece of software with no excess baggage, so it is immune to gender bias. It detected an equal measure of RBF in both male and female faces. It seems that, as a society, we are fairly accepting of contempt and scorn in men but we reflexively expect women to be nicer.
There are those who are offended by this cultural bias. Tatyana Fazlalizadeh’s portrait project, “Stop Telling Women to Smile,” has grown into a nationwide street art campaign aimed at stopping street harassment. Captions reveal the comments women hear when walking down the street. Men often tell women to smile. The condescension implied by the request is understandably annoying, but I gotta say — it honestly wouldn’t be a bad idea if EVERYONE smiled a little more.
Making a conscious decision to smile and setting the muscles into motion can both change your mood and lower your blood pressure. There’s something about the act of smiling that has a magical effect on people who do it. I don’t know if it inadvertently connects one with happier memories, or if it changes the pressure inside your cranium, or what, but it works.
Let’s not overlook another undeniable fact: Women live longer than men. We might take it as an insult that men want us to be warm and friendly while they get away with surly crap, but men’s “allowed” negativity sure isn’t doing them much good. They should take some of the advice they keep handing us.
My sister has Resting Bitch Face. She always looks like she’s about to kill someone, or like she hates you and wishes you were dead. Then she’ll open her mouth and say something like, “Look how cute my kitty is!” in a happy, little girl voice. It can be very off-putting to strangers. Perhaps that’s why she lives alone, with a cat. She’s a genius at mathematics despite her lack of social skills, so she IS often disgusted with the people she works for, who are idiots when it comes to their bookkeeping. I think that, over time, her face fell into a permanent expression of unhappiness. It does make me wonder if RBF is always entirely misleading. It doesn’t show ALL the emotions a person has, but it may show the ones that we dwell upon the most.
My advice to you, Bitch? Smile. Practice in front of a mirror if you have to. But don’t do it because men will find you more inviting. Do it to feel better. And maybe, if you keep smiling, your face will stick like that.
