The soy boy grin has been around for a good few years. Typical characteristics: facial hair and glasses; eyebrows lifted, mouth agape:

I was always disturbed by this affectation of amazed jollity. I don’t remember anyone ever posing like this 20 years ago, when I was at university; or 15 years ago, when I was doing office work in England, or any time over the last decade in Germany and Italy. The closest I’ve come to witnessing this grotesque phenomenon was on the Facebook pages of my American colleagues: the men almost invariably sported a dead-eyed grin; I was a little freaked out by the utter lack of expression in the eyes but just put it down to Americans being American – back in the 1940s or 50s, WH Auden noted that Americans seem weirdly unaged and adolescent in their physiognomy, as if they all get plastic surgery in their late 20s. For example, compare a typical American face with a European; the American Matt Damon, in his boyish late 40s:

and the European man, Ernst Jünger:

There’s something smooth and unimprintable about the average American face, perhaps a reflection of the country’s relative youth. There are exceptions, but they are precisely that, exceptions. Perhaps it’s not so much the genetics as the land: for expatriates like Ezra Pound ended up looking as gnarly and engraved by fate & suffering as any European; it’s as if, living in Europe, palimpsest of battlefields, one naturally ends up looking like a warzone:

A far cry indeed from the soy boy look:

The soy boy face takes the ahistorical American look to its extreme: these grown men affect neotenous characteristics, attempting to look like surprised infants. Perhaps it is a sexual signal to dominant, paedophiliac homosexuals; or perhaps it is a submission signal, as it were saying “I’m just a baby, I pose no threat!”. The underlying cultural force is, I feel, even more disturbing: it isn’t merely an r-selected mannerism, or an attempt to retreat into infancy; it’s an attempt to retreat from life itself, to neuter & emasculate our mortal existence, to render both life and death meaningless, matter for frivolity, for a blank gaping rictus (the second skeleton from left):

The old Europeans faced death like Max von Sydow’s knight in The Seventh Seal, ready to play chess with the devil himself, almost unsmiling:

Anonymous Conservative recently wrote, in a comment on his blog:

John Jost showed in studies, mortality stimuli ignites K in the brain. Even a picture of a grave stone or a hearse makes people turn more conservative on questionnaires taken right after them. 

Death and pain are the great, unavoidable, tutors of our existence. The fact that the soy face looks so much like a grinning skeleton suggests, to me, something coming full circle in our culture. Mortality salience will bear upon the soy boy very differently to Von Sydow’s Antonius Block; Block coolly challenges Death to a game of chess:

Block knows death well, having fought in the Crusades, having killed. And even for him, the prospect of death is unwelcome, disconcerting. For the soy boy, the exemplar of our modern, degenerate post-civilisation, full mortal salience will come as a mind-shattering terror, as the approach of an unpropitiated god.