Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair - Softcover

Oldstone-Moore, Christopher

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022647920X ISBN 13: 9780226479200

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Beards—they’re all the rage these days. Take a look around: from hip urbanites to rustic outdoorsmen, well-groomed metrosexuals to post-season hockey players, facial hair is everywhere. The New York Times traces this hairy trend to Big Apple hipsters circa 2005 and reports that today some New Yorkers pay thousands of dollars for facial hair transplants to disguise patchy, juvenile beards. And in 2014, blogger Nicki Daniels excoriated bearded hipsters for turning a symbol of manliness and power into a flimsy fashion statement. The beard, she said, has turned into the padded bra of masculinity.

Of Beards and Men makes the case that today’s bearded renaissance is part of a centuries-long cycle in which facial hairstyles have varied in response to changing ideals of masculinity. Christopher Oldstone-Moore explains that the clean-shaven face has been the default style throughout Western history—see Alexander the Great’s beardless face, for example, as the Greek heroic ideal. But the primacy of razors has been challenged over the years by four great bearded movements, beginning with Hadrian in the second century and stretching to today’s bristled resurgence. The clean-shaven face today, Oldstone-Moore says, has come to signify a virtuous and sociable man, whereas the beard marks someone as self-reliant and unconventional. History, then, has established specific meanings for facial hair, which both inspire and constrain a man’s choices in how he presents himself to the world.

This fascinating and erudite history of facial hair cracks the masculine hair code, shedding light on the choices men make as they shape the hair on their faces. Oldstone-Moore adeptly lays to rest common misperceptions about beards and vividly illustrates the connection between grooming, identity, culture, and masculinity. To a surprising degree, we find, the history of men is written on their faces.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Christopher Oldstone-Moore is a senior lecturer in history at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.

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Of Beards And Men

The Revealing History of Facial Hair

By Christopher Oldstone-Moore

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2016 Christopher Oldstone-Moore
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-47920-0

Contents

Introduction: Male-Pattern History, 
1 Why Do Men Have Beards?, 
2 In the Beginning, 
3 The Classic Shave, 
4 How Jesus Got His Beard, 
5 The Inner Beard, 
6 The Beard Renaissance, 
7 The Shave of Reason, 
8 Beards of the Romantic Imagination, 
9 Patriarchs of the Industrial Age, 
10 Muscles and Mustaches, 
11 Corporate Men of the Twentieth Century, 
12 Hair on the Left, 
13 Postmodern Men, 
Conclusions, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

WHY DO MEN HAVE BEARDS?

Civilization is at war with nature. That is true at least with regard to facial hair. In the heat of this centuries-long battle, on which billions of dollars are spent each year, few have paused to consider how the war began in the first place. Why did nature give men — and some women — beards? How did they end up with a band of hair on their cheeks and chins that society requires they scrape off every day? If one hopes to discover the meaning of beards, it makes sense to start with these basic questions. And that will require us to peer into the mists of the evolutionary past.

It is tempting to think that beards are a holdover from our much hairier progenitors, that for whatever reason this trait survived as we developed into the naked ape. Yet bonobos, our closest relative in the animal kingdom, lack hair around their mouths — precisely where the human beard grows. It would seem that, if anything, human beings have added hair to their faces, even as they lost it most other places. Even if our ape ancestors had had hairy faces, a question would remain: Why did women lose this hair while men retained it? As it is, a hairy chin and upper lip are virtually unique to the human male.

The beard is also distinctive as the last of the sexual traits to manifest itself in a man's development, other than baldness. Biologists have determined that both beard growth and baldness are stimulated by androgens, such as testosterone, and that the rate of growth varies according to naturally occurring cycles of hormone secretion. One scientist reported in the journal Nature in 1970 that he had measured an increased rate of beard growth (by weighing the clippings from his shaver) on days before he traveled to visit his distant lover. He surmised that his androgen levels spiked as he anticipated sexual activity, causing his beard to grow faster. Later studies found that androgen production followed a five- or six-day cycle, as well as a daily cycle, with facial hair growth reflecting its variation. A California scientist reported in 1986 that both illness and jet lag affected the rate of his beard growth, apparently by disrupting these hormonal rhythms. More recently, biologists have mapped some of the endocrine pathways that link androgens with hair follicles in the face and scalp. It is clear that male hormones are part of the mechanism of beard growth and hair loss, but this does not explain why these androgens have evolved this function.

The Evolution of Beards

Beginning with Charles Darwin himself, evolutionary theorists have pondered the origins of the beard. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin described a process of sexual selection that operates in tandem with natural selection in shaping the course of human development. Natural selection changes a species by favoring individuals with traits that enhance their chances of survival and procreation. When it comes to procreation, however, there is another level of selection as individuals within a species compete with one another for the favor of sexual partners. Darwin reckoned that, for the purposes of this competition, animals evolved many secondary sexual characteristics that functioned either as weapons to defeat sexual rivals, such as horns or tusks, or as ornaments to attract potential mates, such as colored hair and feathers. Individuals with the more appealing ornaments or stronger weapons would succeed in reproducing themselves and propagating their distinctive traits. Darwin assigned the human beard to the category of ornament, and imagined that it had the power to attract women. Over the millennia, the theory goes, bearded men were more successful in procreation than their smoother competitors, and the human beard evolved into its present form. In short, men now have beards because our prehistoric female ancestors liked them.

But Darwin saw a problem with this idea. Anthropologists of his day reported that human populations varied widely in the fullness of the male beard. It was believed that Native Americans, for example, were nearly incapable of growing them. Darwin surmised that some ancestral women in some particular places must not have liked the beard and because of that prejudice continually selected against it. That is, the beard functioned as an ornament only among peoples who in fact considered it to be an ornament. To help resolve this conundrum, Darwin invoked still another evolutionary process: the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Before Darwin, Jean Baptiste Lamarck had argued that species change over time by passing along newly acquired traits to their offspring. If a giraffe, for example, spends a lifetime stretching its neck to reach food in the treetops, its progeny will be born with longer necks. Though many a schoolteacher or professor might dismiss the the inheritance of acquired characteristics as un-Darwinian, Darwin repeatedly invoked this this principle in The Descent of Man, and did so again on the matter of beards. Noting anthropological observations of peoples who were relentless in plucking unwanted facial hair, and referring to (very dubious) experiments that appeared to show that surgical alterations in animals could be passed on to the next generation, he concluded that "it is also possible that the long-continued habit of eradicating the hair may have produced an inherited effect." In other words, men who cut or pulled their facial hair would beget boys who grew less facial hair as adults. The inheritance of acquired characteristics thereby completed a process begun by sexual selection, leaving some groups of men with great thick beards and others with almost none. This analysis assigned women a great deal of influence over beard evolution: they chose more or less bearded men according to their tastes, and men plucked their hairs to accommodate them, which in turn led to permanent physiological changes.

By making the evolution of beards a matter of taste rather than survival, however, Darwin failed to provide a truly Darwinian explanation, that is to say, an answer based on the process of natural selection. In fact, his tactic raised more questions that it answered. What made the beard a strongly attractive ornament for some but loathsome to others? If it was simply a matter of taste, why were the passions it stirred strong enough to cause some prehistoric women reject would-be mates? Was it simply a matter of vanity? In the face of such questions, evolutionary biologists after Darwin had their work cut out for them.

As it now stands, theorists have proposed three basic solutions to the beard conundrum. The simplest, which Darwin himself considered and rejected, is that beards have no purpose at all. Accidents happen in evolution as in everything else. A gene preferred in natural...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022647920X
• ISBN 13: 9780226479200
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 345
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar