02.25.2008
Beards as badges: Men who won’t shave
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Jordan McGee, age 20. MGNS photo |
After 20 or so years of a clean-shaven life, Elliot Strunk grew a beard seemingly out of the blue when he went to Hawaii on vacation.
The beard’s to blame for his quitting his job and starting his own company.
It’s a badge of liberation, of self-reliance and self-discovery and independence. It’s a break from the shackles of shaving. It’s a souvenir from two weeks in the sun - a souvenir he still has, four years later.
Yeah, all of those things.
The truth is that Strunk sometimes even forgets that he has a beard. His tidy, short golden-brown beard just ... is. And he likes it.
“I don’t what it says exactly,” he said. “I don’t know if I’m making any sort of statement beyond a personal statement. I’m not even sure if I’m making a personal statement, because I tend to forget I have a beard half the time.”
“I think it’s nice that it’s easier to get out of the house in the morning,” he offered.
From cubicles to college campuses, beards appear to be back. The grungy goatee trend of the 1990s has grown into something more substantial, taking us into hairier times.
Time magazine has written about them. So has the Chicago Tribune.
George Clooney and Justin Timberlake dabble with scruff. Late-night talk-show hosts Conan O’Brien and David Letterman recently grew beards (then shaved them off) in solidarity with striking Hollywood writers. The governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson, grew a beard after he dropped out of the presidential race. It wasn’t long ago that Al Gore wore one as he transitioned from politician to environmental activist.
Jordan McGee, 20, is a student at Forsyth Technical Community College. He already has a lush beard that would make Santa jealous. He shampoos and conditions it daily. He carefully brushes it each morning, and gets a little irritated if kids try to grab or people touch it - that gets it out of place. “It just looks awesome,” he said. “I guess it makes me feel a little more manly.”
Even if human nature drives us to link some greater meaning to beards, some men can’t say exactly why they get the urge to grow one. Welcome to the post-modern conundrum of beards.
“Some men grow facial hair, and they can’t always tell you why,” said Allan Peterkin, a psychiatrist at the University of Toronto and author of One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair.
It could be rebellion. It could be a protest. It could be that a man just didn’t feel like shaving anymore.
“We all have this history with the beard,” Peterkin said, “and when we look at the face, we project that onto the wearer.”
The way that beards and mustaches, sideburns and soul patches have been viewed has varied widely thoughout the ages, with some cultures and eras looking down on facial hair as a sign of being unhygienic and unsafe. Others lauded them as a symbol of masculinity and virility.
Adolescents in Imperial Rome dedicated their first beards to the gods, according to the Encyclopedia of Hair by Victoria Sherrow. Some cultures added gold threads or dust to their beards, or tinted them black or red. Abraham Lincoln became the first American president to have a beard, in 1861.
Beards were commonplace in Victorian England. Whiskers were in.
“It was a very, very bushy time,” Peterkin said.
Alexander the Great banned beards among his soldiers after losing battles with Persians. Persian troops captured some of Alexander’s soldiers by grabbing their beards and pulling them off their horses. “The meaning of it really flip-flops,” Peterkin said. “At times it’s celebrated. At other times it’s thought to be demonic and subversive. So it’s either Santa or Satan. It’s something that’s godly, or communist or terrorist.”
Today, beards continue to carry symbolism across religions, cultures and continents. Male Hasidic Jews are required to grow beards, and it is encouraged among some Muslims.
The Winston-Salem Police Department is one of many around the country that require officers to follow grooming guidelines. Trimmed mustaches are about the only facial hair allowed, and even they are regulated. They can’t go 1/4-inch below the upper lip and 1/2-inch beyond the edge of the mouth. (The Beard Liberation Front, a British group that campaigns in support of beards, would probably call that “beardism,” or discrimination against men with beards).
In corporate America, beards are still the exception rather than the rule.
When Alan Doorasamy was job-hunting in Winston-Salem in 2002, a friend prodded him to look more “presentable,” to trim his beard and cut his hair before visiting R.J. Reynolds to meet with employers there.
Doorasamy has had a beard for most of his adult life, and now 43 and a self-employed lawyer, he flaunts an independent streak even if he works in within the realm of suit and ties.
“I’m not going to change it because they want me to change it,” he said. “I’m not going to change the way I live because somebody else feels better. So if having a beard is going to be obnoxious for some people, just too bad.”
His beard - full but neatly trimmed, dark and streaked with silver near his ears and along the sides of his face - is as part of him as his hands and feet, he says. It’s also become a trademark and a marketing strategy for his law firm, an idea that came to him after he read a book about Don King, the boxing promoter known for his flamboyant hair. Doorasamy’s photo appears with his ad in the Yellow Pages, and his beard is part of the distinguished look he cultivates.
“In other words, people can identify me from a mile away,” he said. “You have to look out there and market yourself in such a way that people identify you.
“My wife has asked me several times, she’s challenged me, ‘Why don’t you take it off? I can see how you really look, just once,”’ Doorasamy said. “I’ll consider that, but right now, it’s just not on the table. It’s part of the identity.
“It doesn’t make me feel more powerful,” he added. “It doesn’t make me feel more important. It doesn’t make me feel more handsome. For me, this is my beard, it’s on me, I just love it.”
Strunk, the 34-year-old graphic artist, associates transition with his beard.
Within a year after that vacation, he had quit his job at a graphics-design firm and opened his own.
“Maybe the beard’s to blame for that, because the beard sort of kicked everything off. It was almost empowering, I suppose. It was like well, hell, I’ve grown this beard, what else can I do?” he said.
