“Smiles are as important as sound bites on television,” insists producer and media coach Heidi Berenson, who has worked with many of Washington’s most famous faces. “And women have always been better at understanding this than men. But the smile I’m talking about is not a cutesy smile. It’s an authoritative smile, a genuine smile. Properly timed, it’s tremendously powerful.”

To limit a woman to one expression is like editing down an orchestra to one instrument. And the search for more authentic means of expression isn’t easy in a culture in which women are still expected to be magnanimous smilers, helpmates in crisis, and curators of everybody else’s morale. But change is already floating in the high winds. We see a boon in assertive female comedians who are proving that women can dish out smiles, not just wear them. Actress Demi Moore has stated that she doesn’t like to take smiling roles. Nike is running ads that show unsmiling women athletes sweating, reaching, and pushing themselves. These women aren’t overly concerned with issues of rapport; they’re not being “nice” girls—they’re working out.

If a woman’s smile were truly her own, to be smiled or not, according to how the woman felt, rather than according to what someone else needed, she would smile more spontaneously, without ulterior, hidden motives. As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in The Journal of My Other Self, “Her smile was not meant to be seen by anyone and served its whole purpose in being smiled.”

That smile is my long-term aim. In the meantime, I hope to stabilize on the smile continuum somewhere between the eliciting grin of Farrah Fawcett and the haughty smirk of Jeane Kirkpatrick.