The Envy of Men: The Rooted Absurdity of Facial Hair

            I won’t lie. I have a glorious beard. I call it, The Envy of Men. It’s motor oil-black, thick as an Irish accent, and rough like sandpaper. When I wake in the morning, I don’t have bed head––I have bed face. Obviously, I’m a real man’s man: five foot ten, 140 pounds, Scrabble enthusiast, and slightly effeminate. If you slapped a football jersey or a flannel shirt on my back, I couldn’t be manlier.

            When I strolled into the Thai restaurant I work at, The Envy of Men blooming, my perplexed Thai coworker said, “Are you trying to look . . . ?” She couldn’t find the right word, so she clawed the air and gnashed her teeth like a ferocious tiger. “Are you trying to look fierce?” (I certainly wasn’t.) She and my other Thai coworkers didn’t think The Envy was too hot and told me to promptly shave. Perplexed, I wondered if more than just poor taste influenced their opinion. In Thailand, a beard could mean something other than the pinnacle of manhood––an unforeseen blow to my ego. Thus, I embarked on a quest to reinvigorate my machismo by discovering the meanings behind the scruff.

            While Internet searching, I stumbled on Beard Team USA’s Web site, featuring this country’s gnarliest group of beard- wielding mofos. BTUSA competes in the biennial World Beard and Mustache Championships, which to BTUSA’s dismay, the Germans dominate. While I spoke with self-proclaimed team captain Paul Olsen, he tried to recruit me for this year’s competition in England to help knock “the Germans off their high horse.” (Entry is only 20 dollars.) He could sense The Envy’s power through the phone. But I declined the offer. I’ve nothing to prove.

            Olsen, a 58-year-old semi-retired lawyer with a black bushy beard, says beards are men’s birthright; they shave because women who are jealous of male facial hair make them. (Whatever. Chicks dig The Envy.) Olsen has been growing his beard for eight years, but it stopped mid-chest. He’s envious of those who can grow longer beards. Take for example Jack Passion, who’s pictured clad in a pirate costume on BTUSA’s Web site alongside Olsen, dressed as a Civil War soldier. He’s 23 and has a gargantuan red beard nearly to his belt. “To me that is just an amazing beard,” Olsen chimed. “He could be a model that students at the University of Oregon strive for.”

            Olsen’s beard makes him feel distinguished. He says God, Jesus, and Moses all had beards. Revolutionaries like Carl Marx and Ché Guevara did too. Heck, half of Hollywood’s leading stars have beards. Villains like Osama Bin Laden also have beards, he says. “But for every bearded villain, there’s a bearded hero. It’s important not to over-generalize.”

            As Olsen noted, facial hair can be the sign of good and evil, divinity, strength, wisdom and manhood. Dartmouth European history professor Angela Rosenthal says, “Hair, both natural and artificial, human or otherwise, always serves to communicate.” Eighteenth-century European society discouraged facial hair. Modern men shaved. To modernize his empire, the Russian tsar, Peter the Great, taxed men up to a hundred rubles a year for going unshaven. Likewise, Alexander the Great required his soldiers to shave their beards before entering battle to prevent their enemies from yanking on them during hand-to-hand combat.

            In 1773, the French writer, Antoine Dulaure touted the beard. He said beards nearly prevented the sack of Rome and made the Chinese believe that Europeans were the first humans on Earth. He also insinuated that shaving creates homosexuality and quoted the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau saying, “Unless one be five feet six inches high, have a firm tenor voice, and a beard on his chin, he should not pretend to be a man.”

            By the mid-1800s, British bearded patriarchs, possibly channeling Dulaure’s vibe, denounced shaving. They said it was emasculating, ungodly and unsanitary. God made man in His image. Why defy His design? Clearly, His germ-filtering mustache design warded off tuberculosis. Truth-seeking scientists de-furred animals to prove shaving produced effeminate males. And in early American history, East Asian men like the Chinese were considered inferior and less cultivated because they weren’t follicularly endowed.

            While East Asian men aren’t the world’s hairiest, they can sprout impressive whiskers. However, Derrick Louie, a UO student growing a thin black goatee, says Asian culture typically prefers men clean-shaven. The first time he went home with facial hair, his mom, who moved to the U.S. from China in the 1960s, said he had to shave for work. He said it was probably a generational difference because he remembers “wise old men from the movies” having “long ass white beards.”

            Elsewhere in East Asia, it wasn’t uncommon for emperors in seventeenth century Japan to sport mustaches. Warriors grew facial hair to appear tougher. After the seventeenth century, beards delineated status. They weren’t allowed in proper society. Since then, Japan has wavered on whether facial hair is a status symbol or not. In 2004, the Japanese military ordered soldiers in Iraq to grow mustaches so they would fit in with the locals. Beards, however, were prohibited as they interfere with gas masks.

            For some religious men, facial hair is not a status symbol but a show of faith. From the day the first peach fuzz sprouts from an Orthodox Jewish boy’s pubescent face, he lets his mug flourish as The Holy Bible: King James Version commands, “Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard.” Likewise, Islam forbids shaving. It’s considered Haraam, or sin. Islam instructs Muslim men to grow fist-length beards like the prophet Muhammad. Otherwise, one may be mistaken as a Westerner or a hermaphrodite. Sikhs, often mistaken as Muslims, grow beards because they believe it’s God’s will for hair to grow naturally. However, Amish men are a bit more razor happy. They stay clean-shaven until they’re married or until they’re forty. Their beards are like wedding rings and signify passage into manhood.

            Facial hair even extends beyond the spiritual and religious into fantasy worlds created by authors of comic books and novels. Along with their long cloaks and pointed hats, wizards are often characterized with magical, long, white beards. Practically the two most powerful wizards of all time, Middle Earth’s Gandalf The Gray and Hogwart’s Albus Dumbledore, both have brilliant beards. And everyone’s favorite mutant superhero, Wolverine, sports the meanest looking chops this side of the Marvel Universe. Without the fuzz, these characters wouldn’t be the same beloved kick-ass idols worshipped by nerds abound.

            On a less geeky note, sports superstitions surround facial hair. On one occasion, USA Today sports columnist, Jon Saraceno, actually decided that because of their combined scruff, Ben Roethlisberger and his Pittsburgh Steelers would win Superbowl XL. “The guy hasn’t shaved in two months,” Saraceno wrote. “The Steelers haven’t lost since he reached for his Norelco.” It turns out, the Steelers won. The basis behind Saraceno’s prediction, which has spread to the NFL, NBA and MLB, stems from the NHL’s playoff beard. As soon as superstitious hockey players enter the Stanley Cup playoffs, they stop shaving and don’t pull the razor back out until their team wins or is eliminated. They believe that the playoff beard is a deciding factor in the Cup’s outcome. “The guys who don’t have a beard right now wish they did,” Anaheim Mighty Ducks forward Todd Fedrouk said during the 2006 playoffs. “If you don’t look like a Grizzly Adams right now, as a hockey player, you know your year has been a failure.”

            The various facial hair histories, religious connotations and superstitious mumbo jumbo rendered me confused as to where my manhood lies, if not in the voluptuous, robust Envy of Men. If modern European men shaved, what’s a postmodern guy like me supposed to do? I decided to visit the Red Rooster barbershop in Eugene whose owner, Pete Peterson, has been a barber for forty years and was recommended as among the most knowledgeable people on hair in the city. Unfortunately, Peterson no longer does clean shaves for his customers. Apparently, blade sterilization and disease transmission is an issue in the barbering world. “When you’re shaving someone with a straight razor, you’re using the same razor over again,” he said. “No way am I messing with that.” Plus, barbers haven’t been in high demand for bearded folk since Gillette’s invention of the double-headed Trac II razor in 1971. But Peterson still trims the hedges.

            The three most popular facial hairstyles Peterson sees in Eugene are trimmed full beards (like The Envy), unkempt beards and goatees. He sports a commanding silver mustache, the kind that Magnum P.I. (and porn stars) in the 1970s made sexy. But he doesn’t have the foggiest why he grew it. His son said he looked dorky the last time he shaved. However, a stoic walrus would be proud to don his current stache.

            Humans, like walruses and all other mammals, have hair all over their bodies. But why humans grow hair is an enigma. Scientists speculate that hair evolved to keep us cozy. Others suggest that hair evolved from scales. While yet another says hair is a form of sexual selection and facial hair evolved to intimidate foes and attract the ladies. However, shaving has been around since at least 100,000 B.C. when Neanderthals used seashells to pluck and shape their facial hair into the latest styles. Picture the Geico caveman.

            Since then, beards have cross-culturally evoked confidence and power the way Peterson’s mustache does. Abraham Lincoln didn’t grow a beard until he became president. And everyone knows that wrestler Hulk Hogan’s handlebars compensate for his yellow tights. Even though Egyptians regarded body hair as bestial, their pharaohs wore long braided beards and their gods were depicted with the same style curled at the end. After the death of her husband, Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut wore a false beard when she became pharaoh to express her power.

            Like Hatshepsut, women have occasionally embraced facial hair. The beautiful, talented Mexican painter Frieda Kahlo rocked a petite mustache and unibrow. And there’s Vivian Wheeler who holds the world record for the longest female beard at eleven inches. The men’s record, set by the beastly Norwegian Hans Langseth, is seventeen and a half feet. Generally, women are considerably less hirsute than men. Even still, female facial hair in the media is only found on bearded women in carnival freak shows. Mainstream Western culture says women must remove facial hair. Pluck, bleach, wax, depilate, laser, you name it; women do it. “Whatever you do, don’t shave!” Cosmo Girl says. “Scruff is only cute on boys (wink!)”

            In response to an article in The New York Times describing the comeback of male facial hair in Hollywood, one reader, Emily Alice Katz, responded: “I’m afraid that there will be no analogous move away from the plucked and straightened aesthetic that remains de rigueur among fashionistas and female celebrities, and thus for women everywhere. The reigning look for women is as punitive and perverse as the Victorian corset, and encourages conformity in place of the raucous individuality that marks true style.”

            However, facial hair culture, style and mores evolve with every generation. University of Illinois doctoral student Grant Kien experienced a generational change in male facial hair while traveling with a beard in South Korea. “It’s rare to see anyone with facial hair in Seoul except for the odd, rebellious college students and musicians,” he says. While on a subway car in Seoul, Kien met one of these bearded rebels and asked him why men in Korea don’t grow beards. Only haraboji, or grandfathers, grow them in Korea, The Rebel said. Kien guessed that The Rebel was a grandfather, but The Rebel just didn’t care what anyone thought.

            The Rebel represents an anti-culture. Men in this culture would have sticks and crumbs nestled in their beards rather than shave. I recently spent an afternoon on the UO campus and asked men growing everything from neatly manicured soul patches to gargantuan Paul Bunyan beards why they grow facial hair. I got many responses: “It’s a departure from fashion publication masculinity like Abercrombie & Fitch.” “I hate shaving.” “I feel more connected to the wild.” “Because I don’t own a razor.” “It’s an accessory.” “I just think it looks better and the girlfriend likes it.” “Shaving is a waste of time.”

            But some men disagree. They want their faces to feel like a baby’s bottom. Who doesn’t like silky smooth skin? The Thai women I work with do. Thus, I’ve concluded that I can still be a brazen man with a beard or clean-shaven. So long as when I shave The Envy of Men, I do it with a dull, rusted knife, using turpentine as shaving cream, as I imagine Clint Eastwood would, stogy in mouth. But all machismo aside, The Envy means little to me. I have sensitive skin, and I grew it because shaving gives me razor burn and acne.    KD

Link to the original article in KD Magazine: ethos.uoregon.edu/archive/07-Spring.pdf/