Having her own experience

One of the ways I find Bella fascinating is that she doesn't attempt to please people. She doesn't smile unless she has her own reasons to; she doesn't act coy or do what might endear her to strangers or earn their applause. She trusts her own experience, much of which appears to be internal. She doesn't indicate submission to the various strangers who come gushing up to her, exclaiming how "cute" or how "beautiful" or how "adorable" she is; how lovely her cheeks are; how lush her eyelashes. She is immune to all such overtures. This may of course change, as she learns how to use that kind of power, but for the present she regards gushing adults as alien beings speaking an alien language, and she screens them out and carries on with her own experience.

I took this picture Thursday night at a concert for children staged in a local park. It was pandemonium. Hundreds of children were leaping, dancing, racing about and screaming; the performers were singing folky kinds of kid-songs about elephants and alphabets; families had spread blankets and picnic baskets all over the grounds and were trying not to step in each other's potato salad, barking orders at their dogs and children not to get dirt on the pizza. Balmy summer evening, golden sun descending lazily through the evergreens: here was this child who is my heart and soul outside my body. She claimed her space on the grass, listened to the noise around her, and began to sway and move in her own way, not smiling.

In the years when I sometimes offered workshops in the performance of gender, I pointed out that one of the ways one indicates femininity and/or submission is by smiling. Women smile most of the time in public. Men don't. Julie Andrews knew this and used it to good effect in Victor, Victoria in 1982. When she was a woman, she smiled; when she was impersonating a man, she stopped smiling; when she was impersonating a man impersonating a woman, she smiled.

Notice who smiles in an elevator. Who smiles in a crowded restaurant. Who smiles when someone whips out a camera and points it at them. Notice when the smile has nothing to do with an inner radiance, a pleasure in being, a reason to laugh. Notice when the smile is a social message indicating submission. Notice when a smile is designed to put others at ease. Smiles are a form of performance in a culture in which smiling indicates submission and submission indicates femininity. Social smiling, like so many markers of gender performance, is a learned behavior. Bella hasn't yet learned it.