Why DO men think beards are SEXY
BOOK OF THE WEEK OF BEARDS AND MEN by Christopher Oldstone-Moore (The University of Chicago Press £21)
We LIVe in bearded times. The wheel of fashion has turned a nd s uddenly, it seems, British cities are full of young men sporting slicked-back hair, thousands of tattoos and huge W. G. Grace beards, as though the safety razor had never been invented.
A year ago we were calling them ‘hipsters’ and imagining it might be a passing trend. But I think it runs deeper than that.
each new fashion makes a statement, and this one says: ‘I can’t get a proper job, so I have grown an enormous beard and am serving you this overpriced latte with a side-order of contempt for your conformist, mortgage-paying, cleanshaven ways.’
Whereas we, the smooth of face, look upon their kind as pathetic fashion victims with no personalities. The mistrust is mutual and absolute.
Christopher Oldstone-Moore’s timely book is subtitled The Revealing History Of Facial Hair and charts the changing status of beards across the centuries.
Men have been shaving for thousands of years, which means that for nearly as long there has been a decision to make: to shave or not to shave? Grow a full naval or a natty little Bee Gee beard? Or how about a moustache? Clark Gable or Freddie Mercury? Why not a Jimmy edwards-style handlebar?
Oldstone- Moore i s an American academic, so he is more concerned with theory than some of us might be.
His first principle of beard history is that ‘ the face is an index of variations of manliness’.
HIs seCOnd is that ‘facial hair is political’. And the third is that ‘ the language of facial hair is built on the contrast of the shaved and unshaved’. This probably sounds great in a lecture hall full of bum-fluffed undergraduates, but approaches the status of the bleedin’ obvious when written down in a book.
Once he gets going, though, he has a fantastic story to tell.
Beards have come and gone over the years, signifying ‘ slow, seismic shifts dictated by deeper social forces that shape and reshape ideals of manliness’.
Before Alexander the Great, for instance, all Greek men had beards. After him, they were all clean- shaven, f or 400 years. Alexander, who had excellent PR instincts, wished to appear as though he was a demigod, and because painters and sculptors of the day portrayed gods and heroes in the immortal splendour of youthful, beardless nudity, he did his best to follow suit.
He kept his clothes on, but he shaved off his beard for good. And before a vital battle against a huge Persian army in 331 BC, he ordered his Macedonian forces to shave off their beards, too. The Persians were defeated, and so were beards.
Only philosophers held out. In f our centuries of s having, ‘ professional phil osophers
routinely suffered abuse for their defiantly woolly faces’.
Different beards denoted different schools of philosophical thought. The sophists favoured well-groomed and curled beards. Aristotle’s followers preferred trimmed Noel Edmondsstyle bristles. Stoics grew long beards and cynics the longest and most tangled ones of all. Did Jesus have a beard? Probably, but his familiar image — longish brown hair and neatly trimmed beard — goes back no further than the 7th century.
Monks were assiduous shavers: ‘Medieval Christianity embedded in the European mind a link between shaving and goodness, and secured the ascendancy of the razor in Western civilisation.’
In the 12th century, a Cistercian Abbot named Burchard wrote Apologia De Barbis, the first ever book about beards. He thought facial hair was ‘a marvellous demonstration of God’s creative power’ and he answered a question that had bothered religious thinkers for centuries.
When we died, did we keep our beards in heaven? Burchard said we did. ‘All saved men, clerical and lay, would eventually enter i nto the bearded brotherhood of heaven.’
And so it goes on. In the late 16th century, after 100 years of concentrated beardedness, European men started shaving again. In Russia, Peter the Great instituted a beard tax.
Most men preferred to shave than pay the tax, though some Russian workmen were so traumatised by the loss that they kept the removed hair, intending to have it buried with them after they died.
By THE mid-19th century, though, hairiness was back in. The celebrated German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was unimpressed.
‘The beard,’ he wrote, ‘being a halfmask, should be forbidden by the police. It is, moreover, as a sexual symbol in the middle of the face, obscene: that is why it pleases women.’
Abraham Lincoln, campaigning for the U.S. presidency, did not yet have the mighty whiskers for which he would become famous, and it was a letter from an 11-year- old girl that persuaded him to grow them.
‘you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin,’ she wrote. ‘All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husband’s [sic] to vote for you and then you would be president.’
Do women like facial hair on a man? Some do, some don’t, and that has ever been the case.
I should add that on the rare occasions I have allowed my own mangy facial fuzz to grow for more than a couple of days, the women in my life have made it unambiguously clear that I should remove it at the first opportunity, if not before.
Hygiene, of course, is a problem. In a 1907 experiment, a French scientist found that the lips of a woman kissed by a moustached man were polluted with tuberculosis and diphtheria bacteria, as well as food particles and a hair from a spider’s legs.
Whole ecosystems must thrive in the average hipster’s beard. I’m sure I’ve seen the odd rodent scurrying around in one or two.
Oldstone-Moore sees things other historians ignore and makes useful, even original connections. On Hitler and Stalin, he suggests that ‘an analysis of moustaches might have alerted the Western allies to the real possibility of German-Soviet agreement’.
Perhaps wary of being pigeonholed, he supplies two author photographs, one with a beard and one without.
It’s typical of the care, attention and dry wit to be found throughout this wholly admirable book.