Via Heartless Doll, I’m pleased to report that Dear Abby has finally taken on an issue of paramount feminist concern: The etiquette of reacting to the strange man who insists that you smile for him.

Abby, to her credit, suggests that the recipient of the “smile!” command drop the formalities and get the eff away from her harasser. But not before she engages in some dubious psychoanalysis of the “Smile, Baby Guy.”

But first, the letter:

Offended in Gilroy is actually posing two questions here: Why are these strangers telling me to smile? And what should I do about it?

Interestingly, Abby’s response to the second question—-get yourself to safety—-contradicts her answer to the first question, which positions the “Smile, Baby Guy” as a hapless social misfit, not a harasser.

In Abby’s view, strangers who demand that women smile are harmless, “clumsy” romantics who are just following standard behavior or what “happens in markets.” Interestingly, Abby comes around when she addresses the behavior of the “older people” who tell people to smile. Abby theorizes that harassment from the elderly is born of a sense of entitlement.

Actually, anyone who instructs a stranger to smile does so because they feel entitled to exert their power over another person’s private emotions. The fact that these casual, grocery-store power plays disproportionally target youth and women says a lot about how our social hierarchy works—-and the harasser’s dismissal that it’s “only the grocery store” shows how this sexism is far-reaching enough to be excused as “normal” behavior.