Where we are informed that the 21st century American revival in interest in beards comes from the US military… and that it’s a bad thing:
Is beard-culture a result of Americans realizing that the beard-wearing “operators” from Afghanistan and Iraq were Manly And Awesome? Well, maybe. My own beard predates the War On Terror by more than a decade, but it does seem not unreasonable that the wider culture has been influenced by scenes of bearded badassery. Before the world Trade Center and the Pentagon were culturally enriched, beards were a rarer sight and quite often linked with dirty hippies; now they are on everything from Manly Men to freakin’ hipsters.
And that’s the truly weird thing. Beards are, at least for many ethnic groups, a perfectly natural thing for men to grow; the removal of a beard is something one must actively seek.
So it would seem that beards should be pretty widely distributed, but they *seems* to have fallen along two distinctly cultural lines… those men who are not afraid of masculinity, and those men who are readily describable as “soy boys” or “nu-males.” So while the authors of the New Republic piece above seem disdainful of conservatives with beards, because “Today, the face of horror bears whiskers. … the wholesale injection of facial hair into the American mainstream by veterans, law enforcement, and conservatives also fuels a familiar joyful cultural urge toward dominion and power,” they don’t seem to have a problem with, say, this guy:
And yet if a man has a beard that looks exactly like that one, but that man actually *likes* masculinity, that’s somehow a bad thing. It’s all terribly confusing, like those feminists who are angry at men who they think are trying to control them, and yet are equally angered by women who want to be feminine.
Beards are perfectly natural on men. They are *distinctive* of men, one of the most readily identifiable characteristics that separates men from women. Because with exceedingly rare exception, women don’t grow them. Other than some restrictive occupations (those that require good seals for gas and oxygen masks and the like), there are few good reasons why men *shouldn’t* have them if they want them. But what seems all too common at least with some people is an urge to try to get men to remove them. In some SJW cases, the drive seems to be to de-masculinize men, to try to make them less distinct from women. I think the reason why they give their own bearded nu-males a pass is because these men self-emasculate in other ways.
