Folliculitis
A girl smiled at me today. The event is rare enough that I dwelt on it until I realized why it happened: I was cleanly shaven. In the fastidious attendance of my Anglofritz duties, I don't always keep my personal grooming to, let's say, Roman standards, and so I might have a bit of breading about the face before the weekend comes along. Then the experiment is over and I'm accepted back into society, but before that -- I get the funny vibe.
To wit: I showed up to a monthly party a few days ago, and one of the girls I saw there was super-friendly and, daresay, canoodly. Which wasn't that strange in itself, but I was confused because this same girl was vaguely uncomfortable and -- distrustful, maybe? in my presence last time. I mean, I was even DJing last month -- shouldn't that translate into an advantage, if anything? Then I remembered: I had been sick for weeks prior to that last encounter, and yes, I had a full beard.
What's the problem with beards anyway? They're rather natural, after all, aren't they? Ben quoted me a study where bearded people are seen as calculating and deceitful, which is why politicians never have them. All well and good when you're an older gentleman and it's a straight correlation, but what about the rest of us? We apparently can't have a beard unless we're willing to be saddled as a deviant or, even worse, some sort of cast-off caitiff operating on the fringes of society. I always thought if you're attractive enough, that's all it takes, which is why models get away with shaving their heads and wearing drapery. But some psychological battle line has been drawn at beards, and I'm at a loss as to where the social and ethical implications come from.
It can't be that simple, can it? Yes, it can. In Germany, this is exactly how it works. Homeless people have beards and young, approachable men do not, to the last. Und es gibt keine Kompromisse.
Check the cutaway for an insightful beard excerpt from Cryptonomicon, Anglofritz's book of the month.
Charlene has recently finished a scholarly article, deconstructing beards. In particular, she was aiming at beard culture in the Northern California high-tech community—Randy’s crowd. Her paper began by demolishing, somehow, the assumption that beards were more "natural" or easier to maintain than clean-shavenness—she actually published statistics from Gillette’s research department comparing the amount of time that bearded and beardless men spent in the bathroom each day, proving that the difference was not statistically significant. Randy had any number of objections to the way in which these statistics were gathered, but Charlene was having none of it. "It is counterintuitive," she said.
She was in a big hurry to move on to the meat of her argument. She went up to San Francisco and bought a few hundred dollars’ worth of pornography at a boîte that catered to shaving fetishists. For a couple of weeks, Randy couldn’t come home in the evening without finding Charlene sacked out in front of the TV with a bowl of popcorn and a Dictaphone, watching a video of a straight razor being drawn along wet, soapy flesh. She taped a few lengthy interviews with some actual shaving fetishists who described in great detail the feeling of nakedness and vulnerability shaving gave them, and how erotic that was, especially when freshly shaved areas were slapped or spanked. She worked up a detailed comparison of the iconography of shaving-fetishist porn and that of shaving-product commercials shown on national TV during football games, and proved that they were basically indistinguishable (you could actually buy videotapes of bootleg shaving-cream and razor ads in the same places that sold the out-and-out pornography).
She pulled down statistics on racial variation in beard growth. American Indians didn’t grow beards, Asians hardly did, Africans were a special case because daily shaving gave them a painful skin condition. "The ability to grow heavy, full beards as a matter of choice appears to be a privilege accorded by nature solely to white males," she wrote.
Alarm bells, red lights, and screaming klaxons went off in Randy’s mind when he happened across that phrase.
"But this assertion buys into a specious subsumption. ‘Nature’ is a socially constructed discourse, not an objective reality [many footnotes here]. That is doubly true in the case of the ‘nature’ that accords full beards to the specific minority population of northern European males. Homo sapiens evolved in climatic zones where facial hair was of little practical use. The development of an offshoot of the species characterized by densely bearded males is an adaptive response to cold climates. These climates did not ‘naturally’ invade the habitats of early humans—rather, the humans invaded geographical regions where such climates prevailed. This geographical transgression was strictly a sociocultural event and so all physical adaptations to it must be placed in the same category—including the development of dense facial hair."
Charlene published the results of a survey she had organized, in which a few hundred women were asked for their opinions. Essentially all of them said that they preferred clean-shaven men to those who were either stubbly or bearded. In short order, Charlene proved that having a beard was just one element of a syndrome strongly correlated to racist and sexist attitudes, and to the pattern of emotional unavailability so often bemoaned by the female partners of white males, especially ones who were technologically oriented.
"The boundary between Self and Environment is a social con[struct]. In Western cultures this boundary is supposed to be sharp and distinct. The beard is an outward symbol of that boundary, a distancing technique. To shave off the beard (or any body hair) is to symbolically annihilate the (essentially specious) boundary separating Self from Other . . ."
And so on. The paper was rapturously received by the peer reviewers and immediately accepted for publication in a major international journal. Charlene is presenting some related work at the War as Text conference:
"Unshavenness as Signifier in World War II Movies." On the strength of her beard work, three different Ivy League schools are fighting over who will get to hire her.