The Student News Site of University of Louisiana Monroe

The Hawkeye

The Student News Site of University of Louisiana Monroe

The Hawkeye

The Student News Site of University of Louisiana Monroe

The Hawkeye

Man defends his facial hair

Dear editor,

I “Mustache” You a Question and I Will Not “Shave It” for Later: In Defense of Facial Hair
The other day I was being a good student and reading the school newspaper when I stumbled across an article about facial hair.  I thought to myself, “Hey, I’m a guy; I can get into this,” but as I read deeper into the article I couldn’t help but feel as if my heart was being torn from my chest.  How dare you tell me that I need to cut my beard!?
I know this might be hard to understand from a female perspective, but you don’t just tell a guy that he needs to cut his beard.  That would be like if I went up to a girl and said that her hair was ugly and she needed to chop it off.
To better understand how monumentally important facial hair is to a man, one must first understand the illustrious history of the beard.
Since men first walked this Earth, beards have been a sign of respect and honor.  In ancient times men grew beards to show their dominance over other men, since it made the jaw line seem wider and more profound.
It was a great disgrace to have your beard shaved and the shaving of one’s beard was often used as a punishment.  In ancient Sparta, parents would throw their son off of a cliff or feed them to the wolves if they did not grow a full beard by the age of 17.
I don’t know about that last one, but it sounds true enough to me.  The respect for the beard was so high that if you touched another man’s beard, he had the right to draw his sword and cut you down where you stood.
To quote Chip from Talladega Nights, “Jesus was a man! He had a beard!”
So that takes care of the beards, but what about mustaches?  I felt personally attacked and was greatly offended by the defamatory comments made towards the mustache in this article.  I have a mustache; my father has a mustache.  Does that make us creepy?  Does the fact that I rock a sweet ‘stache mean that I kidnap women and tie them to railroad tracks? No!  It makes me a MAN!
Saying that all mustaches are creepy is stereotyping and is wrong.  In defense of the mustache, I have compiled a list of famous mustaches from history: Tom Selleck, Burt Reynolds, Charles DeGaulle,  Albert Einstein, Frank Zappa, Salvador Dali, Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, Teddy Roosevelt, Dr. Phil, Walt Disney.  Need I go on?
So to my fellow men, I ask, nay I charge you, put down your razors and trimmers; let your beard grow, and your manliness with it.  Disregard all of the naysayers who berate the proud tradition of the beard and mustache, because if a man cannot grow a beard, then what kind of man is he?

Steven Smith
Junior history major

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