Hair Today, Even More Tomorrow

Sydney Morning Herald

Friday January 24, 1992

BOB BEALE

YOWCH | I just plucked out a hair from my new beard. Not out of masochism, just curiosity as to why this filament of facial fungus should attract so much attention, criticism and ire, as painful personal experience and the letters page opposite - which has carried a surprisingly hot debate on beards - have recently shown.

This beard hair seems ordinary enough: a bit thicker than the stuff on my arms and legs, curlier than that on my scalp, longer than the eyelash and eyebrow variety, and denser than the scattered patches in the chest, armpit and pubic departments. But it's the same old hair and roughly the same colour- bar a few stray auburn, fair and (sob) grey ones - that emerges routinely elsewhere on my body and draws nary a comment.

Over Christmas I simply stopped shaving. The heck with it. Why spend good money on razors, soap and brushes? Why start each day by dragging a sharp metal blade over soft cheeks, puckered lip and tender throat in a blood-letting, rash-making ritual? It's as irksome and repetitive as washing the dishes, only far more pointless. Electric razors suit me no better. And what a waste of time: zoologist Desmond Morris calculates in his book Bodywatching that a man of 60 who has spent 10 minutes shaving each day since he was 18 has used up a total of 2,555 hours - 106 days - of his life.

Most of all, though, it seems an inexplicable act. Why do men do it? Most of us don't daily denude our scalps, root out our eyebrows, scrape our armpits naked or mow our chests. We may get haircuts and, with advancing age, feel moved to trim the odd wayward strand from eyebrows, noses, ears or whatever. But we don't harvest the entire crop every day. Not even the most fashion-conscious women, who have embraced the hair-removal cult with far more vigour, do that.

I took my stand. After enduring the usual itchy, George Michael, scratchy, public-enemy-number-one, scrapy, "don't-kiss-me-Dad" phases, my new thatch grew soft and neat. The plan was to keep it short and tidy, avoid the Ned Kelly syndrome, routinely remove all breadcrumbs, and not offend others by twiddling it or using the moustache as a drink-strainer. I would save much angst, time, trouble and red corpuscles.

Fat chance.

Put it this way: it's hard to persuade some people - women especially -that in itself a new beard does not overnight make a man become subversive, rebellious, layabout, arty-farty, excessively hetero or homo, demonic, unclean, older, younger, quieter, more aggressive, wiser, dumber, fatter or slimmer. He doesn't suddenly hit the bottle, harbour dark secrets, become more likely to start pub brawls or offer bags of boiled lollies to little children. He is not wearing an Identikit face: he just looks the way his genes and hormones, left to their own devices, are primed to make him look.

OK, so why do men's beards grow? Theories abound but Morris asserts that a beard probably has had just one important biological function during the evolution of our species. Being keenly attuned to visual social signals - like our closest relatives, the chimpanzees - thick facial hair is a most conspicuous sign of gender and sexual maturity. Women and boys don't have it. Left untrimmed, an average man's beard - except in those races adapted to cold climates - will grow 30 centimetres every two years, and its curliness accentuates its bulk. Shrubbery like that is quite enough to leave even distant observers in no doubt that they have encountered an adult male - a useful thing, given our age-old aggressive tendencies.

For most of history, it seems that letting beards grow has been the norm, especially for men of high status. Morris notes that ancient Persian kings cultivated large beards (often dyed, perfumed and adorned with jewels) and that the Egyptian pharaohs wore long false beards on ceremonial occasions to highlight their rank. At one time Elizabethan society even had a beard tax, enabling the upper classes to flaunt their wealth.

Conversely, shaving has often been an act of submission: prisoners of war were shaved to humiliate them, or men who joined religious groups shaved to show humility and devotion. Shaven men have often been the mark of militaristic cultures as well. Alexander the Great, among others, ordered his foot soldiers to shave to deny enemies a grasping point in combat.

So why in more recent times has shaving - which, if Morris is right, removes a man's most obvious badge of maturity and masculinity - become so popular? He suggests that it has become a sign of submission in a new way, a strong signal of conformity that flags to other men and women a man's willingness to socialise, suppress his ancient pugnacity and be co-operative. Does shaving anticipate our evolutionary path?

Shaving also has other attractions today, Morris says. It makes men look more "juvenile" and "well-groomed" in an era when youth is promoted over age, and good hygiene and image-consciousness are valued. Significantly, shaving also makes a man's face more womanly, enabling clear expression of a full range of emotions.

In short, it would seem that lopping off his beard helps a man give the impression that he is friendlier, cleaner, neater, younger and more feminine. By preferring shorter head hair than women, men seem to have adopted a new badge of gender to make up for the removal of face hair.

Fine. I'll go along with all that. But until someone invents a better way to shave, I suspect many of us will stick with beards, even if it does make us look like dirty old men.