Stop Telling Us To Smile: The Lie of Empowerment in a Broken World

Positivity is not protest. Empowerment is not performance. Here is why you do not owe the world a smile.

The Smile That Silences

In the age of Instagram-ready feminism and corporate girlboss branding, empowerment has been reduced to little more than a marketing slogan. Pasted across pink water bottles and self-help books, it has been stripped of its radical origins and coated with a layer of performative positivity. You are told that smiling through the struggle is strength. You are told that grit, grace, and gratitude are enough to dismantle oppression. However, here is the truth: you do not owe anyone a smile while surviving a system designed to keep you down.

This forced optimism—this pressure to always be "inspiring", is not just emotionally exhausting. It is a tool used to pacify marginalized people, especially women and femmes, under the guise of "empowerment." Real empowerment is angry. It is loud. It is tired of pretending.

The Cult of Positivity

What began as a self-help trend has metastasized into a cultural mandate: smile, stay hopeful, and never, ever make people uncomfortable. This cultural insistence on “good vibes only” is more than annoying - it’s oppressive. Psychologists have identified the phenomenon as toxic positivity, the invalidation of authentic emotional experiences in favor of constant cheerfulness (Quintero, 2020).

This is particularly dangerous for marginalized communities. Women, especially women of color, are routinely expected to be calm, nurturing, and emotionally accommodating - even in the face of violence or discrimination (Dixon, 2021). Expressing anger is seen as aggressive. Showing sadness is dismissed as weakness. So instead, people internalize their pain, smile for the camera, and call it resilience.

However, survival is not empowerment. Moreover, forced silence is not strength.

Empowerment or Exploitation?

Mainstream media loves an "empowered" woman, so long as she is not too loud, too angry, or too radical. Real empowerment - the kind that questions systems and challenges power, is sanitized and sold back to us in palatable, corporate-friendly packaging. Feminism becomes a hashtag. Resistance becomes aesthetic. Furthermore, women are encouraged to channel their rage into skincare routines and spin classes instead of direct action.

In her critique of neoliberal feminism, Catherine Rottenberg (2018) explains how modern empowerment culture shifts the burden of systemic inequality onto individual women. You are not underpaid because the wage gap is real, you did not negotiate hard enough. You are not exhausted because of unpaid labor, you need better self-care. The result? Structural violence is obscured beneath the illusion of personal choice and attitude.

This is not empowerment. It is gaslighting.

Emotional Labor as Expectation

Women - particularly Black women and other women of color—are expected to perform emotional labor not just in their personal lives but also in the public sphere. They're supposed to educate others gently, listen patiently, and resist beautifully. And when they don’t? They're punished. They're labeled bitter, ungrateful, or aggressive.

The "strong Black woman" trope, for instance, celebrates resilience at the cost of vulnerability. It dehumanizes by turning survival into a spectacle. As scholar Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant (2009) argues, this stereotype robs Black women of the right to express weakness, rest, or ask for help.

Meanwhile, white feminism often co-opts the language of empowerment while ignoring the systemic barriers that still divide women across race, class, and ability. A white woman’s "empowerment" selfie can go viral while a Black woman’s outcry for justice gets shadowbanned.

A Radical Reclamation of Power

True empowerment is not found in how well you smile through oppression. It is found in saying, I am not okay - and I should not have to be. It is found in anger, grief, exhaustion, and protest. It is in calling out injustice without apology. It reclaims the right to be complex, contradictory, and fully human.

We need to shift the cultural narrative. Empowerment must be defined not by how well one adapts to a broken system but by how boldly one works to dismantle it. That means validating discomfort, centering marginalized voices, and refusing to package resistance comfortably for the oppressor.

It also means recognizing that collective liberation, not individual resilience, is the goal. One woman CEO will not undo patriarchy. A thousand women breaking silence, refusing compliance, and demanding systemic change? That just might.

Enough with the Smiles

You don't owe the world a smile when you are drowning, and you do not owe positivity to a culture that profits off your pain. Real empowerment does not always look pretty - it looks like protest signs, angry poems, raw voices, and communities rising together. It looks like saying no loudly. It looks like taking up space.

If we want a world where empowerment means something, we must stop asking people to smile through their suffering and start asking what systems caused their pain. We must stop celebrating survival as the goal and start fighting for justice as the baseline.

So next time someone tells you to smile, do not. Glare back. Speak up. And remind them: this system is broken, and you are not here to make it comfortable.

Sources:

1. Beauboeuf-Lafontant, T. (2009). Behind the mask of the strong Black woman: Voice and the embodiment of a costly performance. Temple University Press.
2. Dixon, T. (2021). The burden of being strong: Emotional labor and the myth of the resilient woman. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/03/emotional-labor-women/618341/
3. Quintero, J. (2020). What is toxic positivity? Healthline. https://www.healthline.com/health/toxic-positivity
4. Rottenberg, C. (2018). The rise of neoliberal feminism. Oxford University Press.
5. Service95. (2023). Toxic positivity and performative feminism. https://www.service95.com/toxic-positivity-performative-feminism
   
   
   

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