Several years ago, I wrote a short piece for an online academic publication about having a beard. Newly appointed as department chair, I did the only logical thing possible and stopped shaving. I have always hated shaving, opting only to shave on days I taught or had a meeting with someone higher up than me in the academic hierarchy. The cuts. The blades. The hassle. I found no meaning in shaving. This decision to stop shaving provided me with great insight regarding beards and departmental leadership. It also gave me exigence for a quasi-funny piece that fellow academics denounced for not dealing with more serious academic issues such as assessment or why Vice Provosts of something or other can make us change what we are doing overnight even though they are already applying for new jobs the day they show up on campus.
When I was married, I often offered to shave my beard in solidarity with those who don’t like food particles or hair in their face when attempting intimacy. Do women prefer beards? Do they prefer men clean shaven or somewhat shaven as if stubble — the suggestion of a beard but not really a beard — suggests sex appeal? For me, shaving meant razors cutting through my skin, scraping my face, pushing blood to the surface of my skin. My beard is not Miami Vice or a guy on the cover of GQ who still has all of his hair. Sometimes I dream that I have accidentally shaven my beard. By accidentally, I mean, in the dream I suddenly find myself in front of a mirror with a razor in hand and half my beard gone. I panic. I think: how the hell did this happen? What have I done? Then I wake up and realize I’m ok. There is still hair on my face.
Beads suggest the sinister. Think of Bluto in Popeye. Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name in the spaghetti westerns, who is not the villain, but hardly a good guy either. Pai Mei’s long, flowing white beard he strokes as he tortures The Bride and Elle with rigorous training and humiliation in Kill Bill. All of the important Greek gods, it seems, had beards. Satan, of course, is depicted as having a beard. No one, we are told, is more sinister than the prince of darkness. But Jesus has a beard too. This point should not be overlooked. Is a beard, then, good or bad? What is more symbolically sinister, the mustache twirling bad guy in black hat tying the damsel in distress to the railway tracks while diabolically laughing or the bearded guy maintaining hell for your arrival or promising eternal salvation if you dunk your head in water?
The beard also suggests cosmopolitanism, dignity, and dashing maturity. Abe Lincoln, Walt Whitman. Chadwick Boseman. Who would dismiss their clean, close to the face, and mature looking beards? Because my beard is spotted with gray, I like to think that I am a dignified 50 year old man; not a 50 year old man who wears t-shirts and drinks beer. David Letterman’s retirement beard makes him look like a mountain man. Ted Kaczynski’s beard reaffirmed his lunacy. When a man reaches middle age, he may grow a beard as if to say: I’m starting anew. I’m covering up one part of my life in favor of an imagined, other, new exciting part. In my religion, men grown long, unkempt, and I suspect, without beard oil, beards. The stereotypical image is of a man stroking his beard thoughtfully while contemplating an important passage in the Talmud or Torah, such as why does it say “the” instead of “a” in a particular passage. Another stereotypical image, and sadly true, is of the man having his beard cut off by others as a sign of persecution or forced assimilation. I am not religious, though. I did not grow a beard because of a passage regarding the covering of the corners of my face. I have a beard because I hate shaving. Did my ancestors, living in either the Russian shtetl or the European city sport beards? Did they hide their ethnicity by shaving off their beards? Did they want to cover their ethnicity by removing the facial hair that, in fact, did not hide who they were but made it obvious to their gentile neighbors and overlords? In this case, to hide among the masses meant to shave. To remain covered meant to be revealed as other.
Beards also suggest craft beer and or craft culture. The Mast brothers, of the famously fake Brooklyn craft chocolate, spun their confectioner narrative partly around their hipster beards. Hassid or hipster is a common joke based on beards. Is it ironic that James Beard, the canonical food writer, had a mustache but no beard? I have long thought that having a beard and tattoos makes me a perfect pretend craft brewer who could easily blend in with other craft brewers if I gained another 100 pounds. ZZ Top have always been identifiable by their beards (except for drummer Frank Beard who does not have a beard). James Harden’s nickname is “The Beard.” Cindy Lauper’s manager, Captain Lou Albano, twisted rubber bands into his beard. The head brewer of Rogue, John Maier, once brewed a beer with yeast taken from his beard. Some studies suggest that the typical man’s beard contains fecal matter. Our faces are covered in shit; we are not just full of it as is often the case.
Beards itch. They can capture heat in the summer. The skin underneath can flake. Hairs grow in bizarre directions. Across the country, there exist contests for who has the longest or most beautiful beard. Twirly beards. Mutton chop beards. Cropped to the face beards. Long biker beards. Beards cajoled and teased into various shapes. The beard becomes art form. I maintain my beard by periodically trimming it with a pair of tiny scissors I bought in the woman’s hair and body section of Target. When Gillette, the multinational company that produces razors, aired a commercial against toxic masculinity, many men, such as talk show host Piers Morgan, threw out their razor blades in anger and expressed their outrage online over the accusation that they may be engaging in or helping to support toxic masculinity. To object to being called toxic, they acted toxically. When I was in the army and briefly stationed in a tiny outpost on the Lebanese border, we only had a few jerry cans of water with us and not much of anything else. I decided, far from the main base and its regulations as well as running water, I didn’t need to shave. At one point, the commander pulled up in a jeep, saw my unshaven face and screamed at me for being unshaven. “But the conditions,” I offered as excuse. “FUCK THE CONDITIONS AND SHAVE!” he screamed.
A beard is a cover. The beard stands in for something else, symbolic or real. Woody Allen’s The Front was about 1950s screen writers blacklisted over communist membership. Allen’s character acted as a beard for their writing so that they could work. A woman, prior to the rise of LBGTQ rights, might act as a beard for a gay man afraid of openly expressing his sexuality. The bearded lady has long been a circus or sideshow amusement. We laugh at the woman with a beard but admire the man with one, it seems. What does the bearded lady cover up? That she is no longer the same as others? The life of the anomaly? The outcast or other? That she takes on “masculine” traits such as facial hair? This sounds like a cover up, an excuse, a poor rendition for cheap, immature entertainment. In life, we often cover up our emotions, our pain, and our anxiety with many acts and “things” in order to avoid being detected for who we really are, but do we call any of these coverings “beards?” Is the bearded lady a cover for masculine insecurity or masculine vulnerability or even masculine toxicity? One object, facial hair, is credited with distinguishing gender difference or otherness The difference between Superman and Clark Kent was basically a pair of glasses. His glasses served as a beard. They covered his true identity, his otherness, his alien nature. Does my beard divide two different mes in the same manner?
To shave. To remove. To scale back. Each time a razor cuts across a face, it cuts off a piece of a person. Not flesh. But hair. Hair symbolizes strength and power, two traits I do not search out. In the movies, a common disguise is to put on a fake beard. Woody Allen, again, in Bananas does so in order to pass as a Fidel Castro like dictator. In one scene, wearing a fake beard, he tells a group of American donors a dirty joke about a farmer and his incestuous relations with both of his daughters. Castro’s beard supposedly was the symbol of revolutionary movements. Stalin, on the other hand, wore a mustache. Allen wears the fake beard to symbolize revolution, but all we get are jokes. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss is the great revolutionary joke, beard or sans beard. Actors, already covering for another personality, can use the fake beard to cover that personality with another layer, a hairy prop borrowed from wardrobe that seldom looks real. Often, in a movie, when a man goes off to find himself or deal with his issues, he eventually emerges from hiding with a beard on his face. All of that thought and pondering led to facial hair, it seems. With nirvana, we might think, comes a beard.
What do we not cover up or over in our mundane lives? Cover ups abound. The beard is the personal cover up. We live more and more in a time of covering up. Pretending there isn’t a pandemic. Pretending the president isn’t incompetent. Pretending racial injustice doesn’t exist. Pretending the Holocaust never occurred. Pretending we know more than the next person because we posted something “profound” on social media. Pretending revolution. To pretend is to cover up, to reject what really exists as opposed to what we believe should exist. This is not my “real face;” this is a beard. There is no shortage of people using a “beard” to cover up their insecurities or simple stupidity. When I feel I need to cover up emotions or pain or anxiety, I turn to humor. Jokes. Facebook posts of my kids being ridiculous. Twitter jokes that don’t go anywhere. A meme sent to someone in a text. Dad jokes at home. A short piece in an academic publication. It is not uncommon to cover one’s issues with jokes. A joke is a better beard than alcohol or drugs, a beard others turn to when they can’t face their issues, mistakes, self-sabotage, emotional breakdowns, or bad decisions. The insecure have alcohol; I have jokes.
That first quasi-academic short essay about my beard was maybe about my own insecurity regarding heading a department for the first time or taking on a job I had never performed before. I joked my way through a short piece in lieu of writing something significant or supposedly serious. After all, academics are supposed to be serious and not write about mundane topics such as beards. I covered up my lack of experience with humor. This is not atypical for me. My social media presence hovers around the idea that I may be sometimes funny, even if I am not. I cannot spend my days reposting depressing CNN headlines to Facebook or expressing online every disappointment with this planet that I have. Such activity is too much for me. I have my digital beard, the joke, to provide some sanity, if only for the minute it takes to make a post and wonder if it is ever read.
Sometimes, I ask my kids: Do you remember what I looked like without a beard? No, they answer. For the last two years or so, I’ve asked myself what I look like as well. With beard. Without beard. It doesn’t really matter. As this kind of person, as that kind of person. Does it even matter? We look the way we think we look. So profound, I know. But as I scroll through Instagram and Facebook and Twitter posts each day, I’m struck by how many self-help, self-realization, self-motivational, self-improvement and related posts are being shared across the digital universe. Statements to believe in yourself. Statements to move on. Statements to trust yourself. Statements to recognize one’s own worth. Statements to be mindful over one’s emotions. Statements to not give in to despair or disillusionment or the betrayals we often face. People are continuously asking about their emotional and psychological appearances; they want to believe that they are not covering something up, something deep and profound and hurtful and intense. People are continuously using social media to believe in something outside of themselves, some type of otherness that supposedly will uplift their spirits or calm their anxieties. These types of posts, too, are beards. They are meant to cover up insecurities. That is neither good nor bad. If we didn’t cover up our insecurities ever, i.e. wear a beard, we’d be psychotic (a McLuhan point). But when we only cover up, who are we? We become the social media post, a projection outward of self-help, an infographic or repeated quote, a belief in something that covers, not what may exist under the beard, the face long forgotten and unrecognizable — to our kids and to us as well.
