I’ve taken a lot of crap over the years for choosing to express my masculine identity via an obvious — and in these parts, at least, uncommon and frequently mistrusted — visual signifier, i.e., a beard. As I’ve discussed before, I’ve experienced a fair amount of rejection because of it. But more often I’ve been met with simple puzzlement. Many of my fellow Utahns can’t conceive of why a person would want to have fuzz on their face, and saying that I just want to be myself rarely satisfies their curiosity. Well, now I have something else I can say the next time some well-meaning conformist asks the inevitable:
And if that’s not enough for you, there are nine more reasons where that one came from. Thanks to my fellow beardite Andrew Sullivan for pointing me there.
So very awesome.
The question isn’t why a man would want hair on his face, but why a man would want to scrape a razor blade on his face every day. Who first thought of this?? The latter sounds more bizarre to me.
Robert, you reminded me of Zira’s reaction when Charlton Heston shaves near the end of Planet of the Apes: “Why did you scrape all the hair off your face?!”