On Beards The Australian entertainer said, I will never shave off my beard and moustache. I did once, for charity, but my wife said, Good grief, how awful, you look like an American car with all the chrome removed. From the earliest days of the Islamic and orthodox Jewish faiths, beards were considered adornments created by God and not to be shaved at the risk of violating Allahs or YHVHs commandments. In Islam, beards were said to indicate Masculine beauty and not to be altered. Orthodox Jews expressed similar views but of course didnt invoke Allah. They had very specific rules about which parts of beards could or could not be trimmed, (e.g. corners) and exactly how. Beginning in 1054 the Roman church decided it was a sin the grow long hair or a beard so it was easy to tell to which clan a man belonged. In 1535 at his beheading, Sir Thomas More reportedly set his beard away from his neck on the chopping block. My beard has not been guilty of treason, he said. It would be an injustice to punish it. that same year King Henry VIII began taxing beards as a form of punishment. in 1864 the humor magazine punch Published a series of caricatures of the different kinds of Anglican clergy beards in the UK, noting that theyre not found among Catholics or dissenting Christians (like Baptists and Congregationalists). The Barbine Movement is altogether the property of the Establishment, the satirical paper wrote. No Popish priest in this country has entrenched upon this prerogative. The Dissenters shave in gloomy silence, leaving this noble field of ecclesiastical adornment to the Clergy of the Establishment. In 1871 the Hornet magazine, long defunct, published a very hairy caricature of Charles Darwin when his Descent of Man, was published. In 1942 it C.S. Lewis stated: We have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all the females—and there is more in that than you might suppose. —C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters. When I was growing up in Minnesota in the 1940s and 50s, beards were considered unkempt in civil society. No business men, store clerks or professionals ever wore beards. The only exceptions were lumberjacks who worked in isolation among themselves in the woods of northern Minnesota, usually wearing an untrimmed full beard, thereby confirming their masculinity. My mother often said beards were disgusting and unpleasant and she couldnt imagine why a woman would ever kiss a guy with a beard. During the 1950s some African American jazz musicians wore beards, like Thelonius Monk, Dizzy Gillespie (very short beard and mustache) and Charles Mingus, as did some White Beat compatriots, like Alan Ginsburg, but others like Kerouac and William Boroughs had beardless faces. Miles and Bird never wore beards, though Sonny Rollins did. The anti-war dope Haight Ashbury Hippie Woodstock Movement, seemed to demand long shaggy beards and equally unkempt hair as identity devices. It is obvious from a safe distance, they were often foul repositories of a weeks meal leftovers, from which they greatly enjoyed seeing middle class people recoil in revulsion. They claimed middle classed people had irreparable hang ups. Though blue collar men seemed to despise hippie hair and beards during the early years, before long truck drivers, factory workers, farmers, bikers, and all manner of tough looking blue collar guys adopted the beard as a symbol of masculinity. It was an odd reversion to the belief that long hair and facial hair were assumed to be indications of high testosterone levels, and the various attributes that allegedly accompanied that. There continues to be a world of difference between the squeaky clean handsome Christlike Jim Morrison and latter day movie stars, and the utterly decadent atavistic practitioners of hallucinogenic hipdom, resembling homeless panhandlers. A popular trend in Western Europe and cities in the US and Canada is the perpetual three day beard. It affords the wearer with a cheap announcement of their maleness and testosterone level, without the disgusting filth of a long, obviously unwashed panhandler beard containing pieces of yesterdays scrambled eggs. Indeed, there are frequent ads mens magazines for expensive clothing worn by a handsome three-day-beard guy. Yes, I wore a handsome short to medium length dark beard for a decade.
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 17:22:30 +0000