Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (30 page)

In the twenty-first century, facial hair has attained greater social presence than in the previous century, but not to the extent that we can call it a new beard movement. The shaved face remains the established norm for sociable manliness. A bearded man must still face the slings and arrows of disapproval and distrust. Men still do not enjoy a fundamental right to wear facial hair, as civil and private institutions continue to enforce grooming codes. The primary statement a man makes with a beard, therefore, is that he autonomous, free to do as he pleases. Artists, musicians, and professors favor beards for this reason.

There are, of course, exceptions. For members of traditionalist religious groups, facial hair makes a statement about collective autonomy from mainstream society, not individual liberty within the group. And some men have more specific goals than the exercise of personal freedom. Culturally speaking, there are today four basic motives for growing beards besides personal autonomy: gender bending, social nonconformity, religious identification, and a special quest. These objectives often overlap in various ways. Men, for example, who are attempting to redefine gender, or to identify with a religious minority, are in many respects nonconformists.

The variety and uses of beards in the new millennium tells us a great deal about what men are thinking and how they are taking advantage of their hair to shape new understandings of manliness in a fluid and pluralist
world. One recent formulation of masculine identity, for example, is the “metrosexual,” a gender-bending type who finds self-expression in a carefully styled appearance.

On a sunny San Francisco day in June 2008, soccer star and celebrity icon David Beckham unveiled, on the front of Macy’s department store, a massive, seventy-five-foot-tall photograph of himself posing in designer underwear. Thousands of fans and shoppers cheered and shrieked as his sultry, stubble-faced gaze was revealed, followed by a muscled and hairless body, bulging in tight Armani briefs. Even Beckham himself was impressed, confessing in his blog that he “was amazed by the huge billboard poster outside Macy’s department store, but even more amazed by the amount of people who turned up to see it!”
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The unveiling was yet another demonstration of Beckham’s marketing star power, and another bold statement of his particular brand of masculine self-promotion.

Male athletes like Beckham have always put their bodies on display for the entertainment of others, but they have generally been admired for what they do on the field rather than how they look off it. Beckham was different. He wanted people to admire his body and his looks, and he positively invited discussion about the merits and demerits of a man’s physical appearance in a way that was once reserved for women. The controversy in the tabloids about Beckham’s suspiciously large bulge (was it real?) echoed past disputes about women’s skin or breasts. Surely it was padded or Photoshopped? And what about those smooth, hairless legs? What sort of man would subject himself to the slow and painful waxing required to clean up the nether areas around those brief briefs? The answer is, a man who, according to Beckham himself, is willing to embrace an element of femininity in himself. At the launch of the Armani campaign he declared, “I always wear the Armani underwear. I’ve worn it in every game since joining the [Los Angeles] Galaxy . . . because it is comfortable. It’s masculine but it has that feminine side.”
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Bulging but smooth: that is one model for masculine balance in the twenty-first century.

Beckham’s eagerness to bare himself as a sex symbol, and his unabashed passion for fashion, shopping, and grooming, cut against masculine stereotypes. For more than two hundred years, since the eclipse of wigs, silk stockings, and lace collars, the manly code rejected consumer indulgence as a form of feminine weakness and indiscipline. Luxuries made men soft and threatened to undermine the virtues of toughness, self-reliance, and hard work that helped a man fulfill his role as doer and provider.
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Beckham didn’t seem to care about all of this. If dressing well—and undressing well—meant that he was in some sense “feminine,” he was willing to accept that. He was, in other words, happy to bend more than his trademark free kicks to attain a goal. He also directed the conversation about masculinity and the male body in new, and often controversial, directions.

Trend spotters and social commentators fumbled around for new words to describe men like Beckham. Peter Hartlaub, the pop culture critic for the
San Francisco Chronicle
who interviewed Beckham during his visit, described him as “man-tastic,” particularly in respect to his crisp clothes and stylish facial hair. Years before, the British cultural critic Mark Simpson had coined a different term that was to prove more enduring. In a widely read 2002 article in the online magazine
Salon
, Simpson “outed” Beckham as neither straight nor gay but “metrosexual.”
4
Simpson was responding to Beckham’s recent publicity hat trick, when, while captain of the English national football team, he appeared simultaneously on the covers of three prominent nonsports British publications, the women’s monthly
Marie Claire
, the British version of
GQ
, and the gay magazine
Alliance
.
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The distinguishing feature of a metrosexual, according to Simpson, was his love of being looked at. This reversed the usual gender dynamic, in which men look at, and objectify, women. For Simpson, this reversal was not a good thing; it constituted a retreat to vanity, consumerism, and objectivization, in effect introducing into normative masculinity the worst aspects of traditional femininity and homosexuality.

Simpson and other observers agreed that metrosexual eagerness to impress was driven in part by the increasing power of women. Men who wish to attract independent women must, as one group of sociologists put it, “learn some new tricks,” in terms of grooming, appearance, and attention to their feelings.
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Both the cause and the effect of these
shifts in gender behavior have discomfited many men and women. Simpson viewed metrosexuality as a form of masculine surrender, and others have voiced their consternation as well.
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Morgan Spurlock’s 2012 documentary
Mansome
, for example, presents a critical and sardonic assessment of male vanity. One anonymous woman opines on-screen that “I think if you try really hard, it looks really bad.” At another point a man declares, “Looking good for yourself . . . I find really fucked up.”

More sympathetic observers, agreeing that codes of manliness are moving in a more feminist or queer direction, have seen the shift, and Beckham’s role in it, in a positive light. Rather than casting Beckham as a poster child for narcissist self-indulgence, these critics have focused on other aspects of his personality that depart from the hypermasculine culture of elite sports. Rather than boozing it up with the “lads,” for example, Beckham has preferred shopping and vacations with wife and children. By all appearances, he has abandoned the impulsive misogyny and homophobia of the locker room and pub, expressing instead a perfect ease with his role as a sex symbol for both women and gays. His “feminine side,” the smooth nudity, the smoldering gaze, and even an occasional willingness to wear makeup and nail polish, are deliberate affronts to normative masculinity. Beckham biographer Ellis Cashmore enthuses that the soccer star has modeled a life in which “traditional insecurities over sexuality melt away” and “the traditionally rigid male/female divide disappears.”
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The academic David Coad goes still further, arguing that at the core of metrosexuality is the idea that power can be shared between the sexes, rather than being seen exclusively as a sign of virility or as naturally pertaining to the male sex.”
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In this sense, the new urban man is a progressive response to modern feminism. Still other academics have looked ahead, fantasizing about a new and improved version of metrosexuality to come. Sociologists Marian Salzman, Ira Matathia, and Ann O’Reilly have trumpeted the coming of the “übersexual,” a straight man like George Clooney who has all the sensitivity of the metrosexual without the self-doubt and narcissism.
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Is metrosexuality regression or progress? As with other examples of masculine reconfiguration, it is helpful to consider what hair can tell us about meanings and motives. Simpson himself made disparaging reference to the shaving of face and body as signs of male renunciation and passivity. If, however, Beckham is to be taken as the quintessence of
metrosexuality, beards play an important part in the image of the new man. At the time the steamy Beckham banner was unveiled in San Francisco, journalist Peter Hartlaub reported that Beckham’s hair was “cut short and simple, ceding attention to his long stubble, which covers his face except for two Band-Aid-size vertical stripes shaved clean on either side of his goatee.”
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As a male sex symbol, Beckham has devoted a great deal of thought to every aspect of his presentation, and almost always sported some form of facial hair. A survey of his style over the years confirms that though the length and shape of his beard have constantly changed, it is as important to him to have hair on his face as it is to remove it everywhere else.

The metrosexual is not averse to the beard. Far from it. Michael Flocker and other metrosexual style gurus have encouraged its growth even as they urge careful and extensive removal of body hair. “Beards, goatees, soul patches and moustaches provide endless options,” Flocker has instructed, “but should always be kept reasonably trimmed and cleanly edged. Even when going for a casually stubbled look, shaving beneath your jaw line is a subtle way to keep it looking clean and strong.”
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As Beckham and other borderline metrosexual celebrities such as Brad Pitt and George Clooney demonstrate, beards have enjoyed a small renaissance on the faces of fashionable men in the early years of this millennium.

There are several reasons beards have made a comeback on the toney streets of major European and American cities. To an extent, heterosexuals like Beckham have taken their cue from urban gays, many of whom turned to beards in recent decades to help counteract cultural affiliations between homosexuality and effeminacy.
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Men in touch with their “feminine side” can affirm their masculine side with their hair. Another reason for metrosexual men to grow moderate facial hair has been the sense that it might make them more sexually alluring. Studies of women’s attitudes, discussed in
chapter 1
, bear this out. Many young women have expressed a preference for men with short or stubbly beards. Not too much, mind you, but also not too little. This has been Beckham’s approach precisely. Whether fashion celebrities like Beckham have influenced female respondents in psychological studies, or the other way around, there does seem to be something of a consensus of the sexes on this score.

This is not the whole of it, however. The metrosexual beard is extensively groomed and is treated much like clothing. As with clothing, the wearer can shape and experiment, trying out different effects from month to month or year to year. For this reason there has been no single metrosexual style for facial hair. Change and variation are the guiding principles. In the late nineteenth century, by contrast, men favored beards as a sign of unchanging masculine qualities, and a beard’s natural fullness was its most helpful and popular quality. The fashionable men of our day have a different agenda. They wish to please as well as impress, and to draw attention rather than deflect it. A modern man uses his hair to project individual distinctiveness more than masculine privilege. In this respect, the metrosexual beard is a paradox: while a well-groomed beard is undoubtedly manly, it also epitomizes a concern with looking good for oneself and for others that Beckham and others view as expressive of a man’s “feminine side.” To some extent this paradox arises from the contradictions of uncritically labeling behaviors as “feminine” or “masculine.” It is not necessary, after all, for sexual display to be feminine, and that is really the point Beckham and his kind have been trying to make. The carefully maintained beard bridges the theoretic gender divide.

While urban men have experimented with facial hair, they have relentlessly fought body hair. It is tempting to think, as Mark Simpson has, that this antipathy represents a feminine quality, but readers of this book will know better. Body shaving, since Eugen Sandow, is all about muscle. In his
Metrosexual Guide to Style
, Michael Flocker enunciates this principle, urging his readers to trim their chest, stomach, and underarm hair “to enhance a well-defined body.” Advertisements for home exercise equipment, he notes, consistently show the “before” look as chubby and hairy, the “after” as muscular and “miraculously hairless.”
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In Spurlock’s film
Mansome
, Shawn Daivari, an American professional wrestler of Middle Eastern descent, is shown laboriously shaving his extensive body hair to meet the expectations of his television audience. Admiring his newly shaved torso, Daivari explains that “it gives somewhat of the illusion of being in better shape than I actually am.”
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Shaving is about the shape of the body and also, in a classical Greek sense, the vitality of youthfulness. The metrosexual’s interest in body shaving is not essentially feminine, or really new, but rather, an infusion of old ideals into the bloodstream of popular culture.

Cultivating facial hair while eradicating body hair, then, is a coherent approach to enhancing masculine physical presentation. The beard can help, but muscles are important too. To these the metrosexual adds still another form of masculine display, as evidenced by Beckham’s famous bulge. As this aspect of male anatomy has drawn more attention, it too has become subject to hair removal. So-called Boyzillians, or depilation of “crack, back, and sack,” have become increasingly popular in the new millennium. In 2012, the
New York Times
reported the increasing popularity of men’s Brazilians in New York: “It’s the gay community, it’s the straight community, it’s very conservative guys, it’s very liberal guys,” said the president of a prominent depilation provider. “All different age groups are coming in. It’s much, much bigger than we ever thought.”
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Sales of specially designed body grooming electric razors have also surged. Surveys in Germany have found that about a fifth of young men regularly remove their pubic hair, declaring it dirty and unhygienic.
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An editor at British
GQ
theorizes that “there’s a cleaner look that is really present in fashion today, and people pick that up in their subconscious.”
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Another salon director states the point more graphically: hair removal around the genitals “accentuates it, because there’s nothing to obscure the, you know, implement down there.”
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The competition between hair and genitals has joined that between hair and muscle. To remove hair is to remove that which might obscure the form underneath, even if, in the case of Beckham’s giant poster, that “form” is covered by designer underwear.