In the early 2010s, the term “Resting Bitch Face,” or RBF, became popularized and spread on social media. I remember seeing it in jokes, memes, and hearing some people bringing it up in conversation. I tried to laugh about it when the jokes were made, but something rubbed me the wrong way. Why is the term “bitch” in there at all? A word that for so long has been used derogatorily towards women – and for men when people want to equate him to a woman – was now being used against women for simply having a neutral expression. I hoped the term would die off, like many micro-trends in pop culture before, but it has floated around like a specter of an insult disguised as teasing.
I must confess – and if you know me in person, please act surprised at this declaration – that I have an RBF. By the time I was in my senior year of high school, I had been told quite a few times. The first time, a classmate brought it up during a group project in English class. I was writing on the big poster paper that we were to present later in class while he goofed off with some of his friends. I almost laughed, having been conditioned to dismiss those kinds of remarks and stroke men’s egos by showing amusement at their bad jokes and offensive comments. But since he felt perfectly comfortable pointing it out, I decided to match his level of comfort and challenge him about it.
‘Why?’ I asked in my most curious voice.
‘Because you’re not smiling,’ he said with all the confidence that a sweaty football jersey can give a young man.
I still can’t bring myself to remember his response beyond this. People around us simply agreed with him.
Apparently, my neutral expression had been categorizing me as someone with RBF. I might have been plotting a kitten rescue, or to volunteer at the local firehouse after school, but that did not matter. I was considered to have RBF for the simple fact that I was not providing entertainment in an environment where men were getting bored.
As I get older, the layers of how girlhood and womanhood are to be performed reveal themselves to me with similar encounters such as the ones in my teenage years. Fast-forward to 2023. I’m new in my remote job, with daily morning meetings and one-on-one meetings once a week because the supervisors just can’t get enough of the workers’ faces. At the time, I was part of a team formed of mostly women, and one man who, as the universe would have it, was the same age as me down to the same month. Things looked to be going well: I did my job, attended the meetings, met and surpassed expectations, and got to have work experience that would benefit me when I wanted to move up the corporate ladder.
Then, during one of the morning meetings, my supervisor – let’s call her Jan – was talking to another co-worker, and they brought up the term RBF. Uh oh. We all smiled, as one does to a supervisor who goes on power trips and treats those in lower positions as if we were children. She was known for being passive-aggressive to some people in other teams, but I minded my own business and stayed in my lane during work hours. As the conversation progressed, Jan said that she had an RBF, and that I had one too, but that it was fine because she and the team were sure that I’d ‘talk more’ eventually. The co-worker even commented that I looked angry.
Excuse me?
The only man in our team said he also looked angry when his face was relaxed – i.e. he also had an RBF. Knowing that he was trying to go in on the joke, I smiled tightly but held my breath. Can you guess what the co-worker who had called me angry-looking said to him? It’s fine, you’re just a serious guy.
I wanted to glare into the lens of some imaginary camera as if I were in The Office. We were in the same meeting, he and I were the same age, had similar demeanors – the quiet person who only cracks jokes when comfortable, and were smiling slightly—at least me—just enough not to look like a serial killer. But I don’t get to be called a serious person, instead I’m accused of having RBF because I’m focusing during a work meeting?
Turns out, I later learned during one of those dreaded one-on-one meetings, that I had been an enigma to my co-workers for some time because I didn’t smile enough. Oh, yes, my face had been a topic of discussion between Jan and the co-worker who had called that guy a serious person. I thought that I was doing well, meeting targets and being friendly to my team, showing respect, all that stuff, but in my evaluation there was a note about my unfriendly face and suggestions on what to do about it.
You need to smile more, Jan’s face was saying from my oversized monitor screen. Maybe join in when we talk about our children, or tell a funny story that happened to you. Just to make the rest of the team know you better, you know.
I didn’t know. I had not appreciated I was there to be the comedic relief, but as a woman of color, I have learned that if I’m not falling into the box of Spicy Latina, then I’m Angry Black Woman. Oh no, now I had become the Angry Black Latina that wouldn’t play the clown to entertain my co-workers!
I spoke about it with someone who had more work experience than me, and she said something similar had happened to her when she first started working at that place, and that it seemed to be the reason a lot of people there smiled mindlessly.
If a man’s neutral expression seems unpleasant or annoyed, that’s just him getting to be a person. The words of Samantha Grossman in the article The insidious sexism of ‘resting bitch face’ ring true when I remember those two significant events. The sexism of the term creates further insecurity in women, because no woman wants to be considered a bitch because of the connotations of that word. Then why is it okay to jokingly use the term and continue to give people who view women as a performance the chance to call us by that name? Why are we being pushed into disliking and insulting ourselves and each other, simply because we are not accommodating other people’s preferences for our facial expressions?
There are deeper things percolating under the idea of a woman being referred to in unpleasant terms when she is merely existing and minding her own business. In both instances, I had been working and thinking, and that gave people the excuse to mark my expression as an RBF. The antiquated yet still ongoing idea of women’s submission to men (not talking back, that women are to be seen and not heard, smiling on command, and making men feel welcome while we work service jobs) is enforced by the pressure not to escalate the situation and become a victim of bullying or violence.
Being aware of having a resting bitch face when my muscles are relaxed is not something that is constantly on my mind, as that is my face and I love it—also, I’m too busy to notice – but it has forced me to train myself into looking more approachable if I want to become friends with new people. I no longer go along with someone who jokes I have RBF, but I worry that the constant pressure on women to perform, lest we be judged and called derogatory names, continues to push us into the mold of comedic relief or visual pleasure. I do not want women to worry that a neutral facial expression is making people uncomfortable, or for us to dislike our own faces when we are merely existing.
Work cited:
Grossman, Samantha. “The insidious sexism of ‘resting bitch face’.” The Week. January 10, 2019
Yeiri Farias is a multi-genre writer living in California. You can keep up with her work on Instagram @yeirifarias.writes
Illustration via Unsplash