I Promise I’m Paying Attention — I Just Have Resting Bored Face
The gendered phenomenon that’s putting your Zoom meetings to the test
No really, I promise. I’m listening.
I know I look like I’m staring into middle distance, actively disassociating from your every word. And, okay, it probably looks uncannily as though I just rolled my eyes at you. Slowly. With a degree of awe-inspiring corneal articulation.
It isn’t what it seems.
This meeting is fascinating; I just have Resting Bored Face
By now, most of us are familiar with the concept of “Resting Bitch Face” — what the writer Corinne Purtill describes, in Forge, as “a catchall term for the unsmiling expression some people wear when they’re not thinking about communicating with their face.” It’s also, as Purtill points out, an idea that’s inherently sexist: “That it includes the gendered expletive ‘bitch’ tells us whose faces we’re policing this way,” she writes. These days, with our face-to-face interactions largely modulated through the imperfect technologies of laptop and phone cameras and our devices’ two-dimensional screens, another, similarly gendered phenomenon is primed to edge its way into our awareness: “Resting Bored Face.”
