There's this huge parallel between the UK and Sudan when it comes to smiling.
Smiling can be considered as a professional gesture in the UK. You smile when you meet a potential employer as a way of communicating that you are happy to be there. You are also reassuring them that you are a nice person which is essential when job seeking. You smile at children, some people walking past you on the street and when you meet someone for the first time.
Smiling professionally in the UK can sometimes signify resilience; you can smile when you're needed to, regardless of how you're feeling and this is an essential skill. It shows that you are able to distinguish between your personal feelings and the feelings you need to display for the job/person/situation.
I laugh at the memory of myself smiling at potential employers in Sudan. Smiling is always informal here (with the exception of those influenced by the west), but Interestingly, Ethiopians and Eritrean's understand smiling very much like westerners, yet the Sudanese (perhaps it is the Arab influence) understand smiling as flirting.
When a man smiles outside of a correct Sudanese social cue, it can be seen as the beginning of flirting/harassment, or alternatively it is in response to some sort of signal from the other party. When a woman does the same she is seen as sexually inviting. In a culture where nearly all aspects of individual freedoms are limited by the needs of the group, some people have come up with their own secret non-verbal language which policy makers selectively ignore, so long as the participants never challenge the status quo.
In Sudan, social taboo is far stronger than law and order. What the neighbours say about you holds far more weight than what the police or government say about you. This is because it is general consensus that freedom of speech is heavily monitored and government critique can have serious consequences. This often denotes that verdicts reached by the government and civil service are not taken seriously by the public. The reputations of those in question remain privately untarnished as they are given a social forfeit in which they are assumed to have stood up to the government in some way.
The neighbours however are a different story. What they see and what they say will be detrimental to your family name. It will be the reason your children marry or don't marry (a highly regarded social status in Sudan), it will dictate who accepts you for work and it will most certainly dictate your position in social society. The higher your position is social society (your social capital), the more restrictive you're likely to be with your wife, and children, particularly your daughters as hearsay weighs heavily on your status.
By the unreasonable and outdated logic that dictates 'women entice and men follow'. Modern Sudanese society places heavy responsibility on women and their 'moral' behaviours. A woman's choice has the power to destroy the entire social capital that a family has worked centuries to build in a split second, while a man's actions are nearly always excused; with the assumption being women hold all the power and men, are, in this regard, helplessly submissive.
Not only is there a cultural difference in how we perceive smiles, but the weight of a smile is significantly different depending on the gender of the person smiling.
