Why have women stopped smiling at me?

No one seems to be talking about how the faces of most of the female population appear to have frozen. I increasingly find myself gazing admiringly at groups of young men – like some sort of proud avuncular patriarch – who seem the only people left capable of smiling. Like knights of old, they are protectors of an arcane tradition that is dying out.

The so-called ‘bitch face’ look is chic at the moment. Look at billboards and none of the models are smiling. It’s all very Bret Easton Ellis. ‘There’s no love, and no real friendship: money, teenage sex and easy access to drugs open the door to a kind of gleaming nihilism,’ Easton Ellis says of Less than Zero, his debut novel about a moody 1980s California. ‘Part of the book’s appeal to young readers could be that they’d never been presented quite like this in contemporary American fiction before: as sophisticated teenagers who aped the attitudes of their materialistic and narcissistic boomer parents.