Hey mom not to play the genetic blame game but I have a feeling that you have a lot to
do with my bitchy resting face.
First off I'd like to acknowledge the fact that I am so late to the game in talking about
bitchy resting face. If you haven't seen The Broken People video about bitchy resting face
stop what you're doing! Wait don't stop what you're doing. Finish this video and then afterwards,
go watch Taylor Orici and Broken People's video about bitchy resting face which went
viral online and everybody was like ohh, bitchy resting face, I've totally got it. So for
those of you who have been living under a bit of a rock lately, no judgment, bitchy
resting face denotes who looks thoughtfully sad or angry for no reason. There have been
many times in my life when my face that looks like this has been mistaken for me wanting
to rip something to shreds when in actuality my mental state might look more like this:
[singing] This is the best day in the world, someone gave me a rose. Because bitchy resting
face is kind of old news I wasn't even going to talk about it on Stuff Mom Never Told You
until! Until. The Today Show did a segment about it. And invited a plastic surgeon on
to talk about the phenomenon as he called it of bitchy resting face and what women can
do to cure it. Because some women have frowns that actually look like frowns this plastic
surgeon named Anthony Yeon came on the Today Show to suggest that women with real live
bitchy resting faces could go a procedure called a 'grin lift'. Instead of just maybe
being mistaken for a little bit angry sometimes and your face looking like this, you're going
to get a grin lift and look like this all the time. Somehow this is more desirable in
our society. If that doesn't say something then you're just not listening. Now as someone
who does have a bitchy resting face or as I thought of it in the past as murderous thinking
face, I can relate to the fact that it is really annoying sometimes when I might be
just going about my business literally at work and going about my business and someone
comes up to me and asks if I'm okay. For women in particular that's something that we get
a lot more of than men anecdotally speaking at least, I don't have any hard data to back
this up. Men if you're watching and you have experienced people telling you to smile, just
at random, please comment below because I feel like this is something that is more exclusive
to women. So based on that I did some research--nerd alert--and found women do smile more than
men but only in public settings, when men and women are alone doing their own thing,
we aren't walking around like [singing] Everything is incredible. It's funny that women are expected
to smile more and do in fact smile more in public where on the back end of things, our
rates of anxiety and depression are twice that of men. Now that's a video for another
time and if you would like me to do a video on gender differences in depression and anxiety
go ahead, comment below. I'll do it. How do I know that women smile in public more than
men do? Well this is all thanks to Yale psychologist Marianne LaFrance who has done a ton of research
on men, women and smiling behavior. She looked over more than 162 studies on smiling and
found that yes, women do it more than men when we are in public. When we're by ourselves
that gender difference disappears which means that there's something at work in terms of
the socialization of how we present ourselves to the outside world. And this brings up something
called display signs which in the case of smiling is an outward symbol that we are likeable
and approachable and often feminine as well because this smiling happy behavior is usually
considered more of a feminine thing than a masculine thing. This is what LaFrance told
'Wired' magazine in 2011: 'Now women even when they are not feeling much are strongly
encouraged to look and sound as though they are. Spend some time around young teenage
girls and you hear a lot of, "Oh that's wonderful. Love it! Fabulous!" Women who are not very
expressive,' bitchy resting face, 'are regarded with some suspicion. They seem cold, withholding,
depressed. Acquiring the rules of how expressive one should be with their face is a very socialized
process.' So basically what LaFrance is proposing is that girls from a young age especially
in western societies like the United States are socialized to smile more. It's a more
feminine, likeable quality to be smiling rather than to just have maybe a plain face which
could be interpreted as a bitchy resting face. Now LaFrance also found an interesting flipside
to the fact that women smile more in public and it is that women perhaps because we're
so used to faking and forcing smiles, we're better at spotting fakes. Men to be honest
you're not all that great at spotting fake smiles, a lot of times when it comes to women
smiling, men interpret it as either being genuine or flirtatious or flirtatiously genuine.
So for that I say better to display a bitchy resting face than a bitchy smiling face. This
is my face, bitchy or not. In rest and in play. And to close while I am so happy that
the bitchy resting face video has gone viral and that it's gotten Taylor Orici all of this
attention because it's really funny and it's well thought out but listen news outlets out
there, don't make bitchy resting face into a thing that needs to be cured. What is that
cure? It's going under the knife and getting surgically altered so that you can look like
this. Case and point: Because of that today show, there is a headline over at the Daily
Mail that said, 'Why Bitchy Resting Face IS' in all caps, 'A real Phenomenon. Experts reveal
why women DO look sad or angry for no reason and what you can do about it.' Pay money to
have the shape of your face altered. And to that I give one last massive bitchy resting
face. Do I look like I'm about to murder someone when I'm thinking? Yeah sure. And maybe that
should scare you away to not talk to me because I'm busy thinking. Maybe about happy things,
but still I'm thinking. Do you have bitchy resting face? Leave a comment here. Are you
sick of the whole bitchy resting face thing? I know I am so late in the game talking about
it, like I said I wasn't even going to do a bitchy resting face video but that today
show segment seriously, it pushed me over the edge. It pushed me over my bitchy resting
face edge going from just being a happy person with a bitchy resting face to being someone
legitimately angry and it wasn't even a bitchy resting face it gave me like a bitchy angry
face when I saw it. Leave a comment and for guys as well is this something that you've
encountered, do you tend to maybe sometimes encourage women to smile a little bit more?
If you have, on behalf of women with bitchy resting face everywhere, please stop. I'll
smile if you do. It's a fake one.