When a man decides to grow a beard or a mustache, he is taking part in a long and story tradition that goes back for millennia. But what he might not realize is that the decision to grow one comes with layers upon layers of cultural meaning. During different eras of time, beards have come to represent wisdom, goodness, evil, and social revolution. And our guest today has written a book that investigates the cultural history of the beard. His name is Alan Peterkin, and his book is called 1000 Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair.
00:05:40.640Well, it's a very enduring ritual, you know, and it's a ritual we learn from our dads and our grandfathers.
00:05:47.820And, you know, it's a ritual that's performed every day.
00:05:51.480We have special implements to do it, and the implements keep getting fancier.
00:05:55.820You know, there's a whole industry behind shaving now with, you know, five blade razors and about five steps to the kinds of potions you should use on your face.
00:06:04.640So, it's a very enduring ritual that goes right back to Greek times, you know, that when a young boy first developed facial hair, it was something to be celebrated.
00:06:16.040You know, they would keep the first clippings of it and sometimes bury them or, you know, sail them down the river.
00:06:22.840It was, you know, a mark of manhood, essentially, that the facial hair was sprouting.
00:06:30.080So, of course, in very early times, you know, there was no technology to do it.
00:06:37.400There's some evidence that prehistoric men used clam shells to sort of pluck out shells, pluck out the facial hair, rather, which would have been a kind of very painful thing to do.
00:06:48.040And then, you know, you have the Bronze Age and you have implements being created and increasingly with every, you know, century, basically, better means to shave.
00:07:00.500So, better razors, better steel, less dangerous kind of procedure.
00:07:06.520There was a time, you know, in Rome where really only the wealthy could afford to go to barbers and that was quite a social hub.
00:07:15.200But being shaven showed that you could afford it.
00:07:20.000As the technologies got better, of course, then it's something that you could do at home.
00:07:24.500And the big development is King Camp Gillette, who starts producing his razor in the early 1900s.
00:07:32.820And you have men going to both the First and Second World War, coming back clean shaven.
00:07:39.120And, you know, that's really where clean shavenness sort of took off.
00:07:44.840You know, the last fuzzy era was Victorian times.
00:07:48.180But after both World Wars, you know, the expectation was to be clean shaven and that clean shavenness was next to godliness.
00:08:21.700But then it was in the 90s that you saw kind of the grunge look and then the real reemergence of the goatee.
00:08:28.060And so, that was about the time that I was interested in researching the book because, you know, there were so many men wearing goatees and other kind of combinations of facial hair.
00:08:39.220Not so often the full beard, but, you know, maybe a bit of stubble with a full mustache or sideburns and, you know, a cookie duster or something like that.
00:08:48.840And so, it's just taken off since then and it seems like the permutations and combinations are endless and it's really showing no signs of slowing down.
00:08:59.420Hmm. And going back to the kind of the cultural meaning of shaving, one thing I remember reading in your book was that people would often shave for religious reasons.
00:09:09.980But also, if they were in times of mourning, I remember, and also, if a warrior was caught in battle, the captor would actually...
00:09:20.840Oh, yeah, that was Hadrian Emperor who told all of his men to shave because he thought that in hand-to-hand combat, you know, you'd have your beard tugged on.
00:09:29.800And I don't know if that's a particularly realistic view of things, but, you know, again, here's an example of a leader saying,
00:09:35.280okay, this is the reason you've got to shave, you better do it. And that's exactly what happened.
00:09:39.300I think what you're referring to with mourning is that it was more the opposite, that a man would stop shaving and stop tending to his appearance when in mourning
00:09:48.480and would often, you know, go stubble and, you know, look a little more scruffy just to show the world that he was in mourning.
00:09:59.420So that, I think, you know, men have often grown beards to mark transitions or shaman, actually, to mark transitions.
00:10:08.700So, you know, a guy who's leaving a marriage or you think of Al Gore growing his beard after he lost the election,
00:10:15.660that he was marking with his public faith kind of a change and a loss in his life, I would expect.
00:10:23.260And similarly, you have men who've had facial hair entering a new relationship and wanting a new face and, you know, to look a little more youthful and they shave their hair off.
00:10:34.760So transitions seem to be important in men's lives as to the decision to grow or not.
00:10:39.740We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:10:45.220And one of the interesting things I thought that you wrote about in your book, you dedicated a section about the psychological theories of facial hair that men like Freud and others have come up with.
00:10:55.820Can you explain some of these theories that they came up with that they thought facial hair represented or shaving represented?
00:11:02.060Yeah, that was a fun chapter to write because it was a little over the top.
00:11:04.980I found a reference by Dr. Berg, who was a psychoanalyst writing in the 50s.
00:11:10.160And he, of course, was very much into classical psychoanalysis and Freudian interpretation and the Oedipal complex, etc.
00:11:18.360So he thought that, you know, growing facial hair was an expression of libido and sort of lust and drive and competitiveness and showing you that you're more of a man than the one next to you or than your father.
00:11:32.060So, but that would produce conflict in some men because they thought, oh my goodness, I can't compete with, you know, my boss, my father, etc., my authority figure.
00:11:41.560So the act of shaving became kind of an act of self-castration, as he saw it, that you'd actually be keeping all these impulses in check by going through the ritual of shaving every day.
00:11:53.520And, you know, I think that's kind of far-fetched, but it was certainly fun to read.
00:11:58.140I think some of the other things, though, because psychologists, more modern psychologists, have actually looked at this question of facial hair.
00:12:06.780And they've done studies like have women rate photographs of men with or without facial hair.
00:12:13.360And invariably women and other respondents, including men, will find that the bearded face is a more virile, powerful, masculine one.
00:12:23.460But then if you go a step further and ask the women if they would want to date the man in the picture, they tended, at least in the 60s and 70s, when these studies were being done, to say no, that although it was very masculine, there was also something kind of threatening about it.
00:12:38.940And there's this whole notion of kind of what could the evolutionary purpose of the beard be.
00:12:45.100And, of course, apart from protecting our faces from the elements, there's something about the beard making our jaw look larger and our teeth look more prominent.
00:12:57.360And that goes back to apes who are, when they're in combat, stick their jaws out.
00:13:05.160And they show their teeth and stick their jaw out, and it makes them look more ferocious.
00:13:09.580So there's something also about, you know, the bearded face kind of lending a certain ferociousness.
00:13:15.500And that probably served us over millennia.
00:13:17.960You talked a little bit about how the beard is on or facial hair is on the rise.
00:13:25.640You know, it's the trend is everyone's starting to grow beards and facial hair.
00:13:28.360But it seems that, you know, my kind of experience that when a man decides to grow a beard these days, particularly young men, they do it to be ironic.
00:13:43.960I mean, what is the future of facial hair in, you know, postmodern society?
00:13:48.440Well, you know, I sort of thought about what the postmodern beard is because, you know, as I said, we used to take our cues from the people at the top, clergy, monarchy.
00:13:58.880Nowadays, we take our cues from popular culture.
00:14:02.160So it could be, you know, athletes, musicians, movie stars, porn stars.
00:14:08.020I mean, that's where young men, you know, men in general kind of take their cues on how they should look, how their bodies should look.
00:14:14.780But I think for the most part, it really is both an act of rebellion and playfulness at the same time.
00:14:23.100And, you know, it's also, I think, significant that some of the men I interviewed said, well, this is something that I can do that women can't do.
00:14:30.740So, you know, kind of maybe a bit of a, you know, backlash to feminism on some level.
00:15:25.780And then there's the whole notion of it being kind of, again, virile, masculine, sexy, that I can be unabashedly all those things as well with my facial hair.
00:15:39.420There was a time here in America when a president could have beards or mustaches.
00:15:44.540And we had several famous presidents that had beards and mustaches.
00:15:47.500Do you think as beards and facial hair becomes more popular that we'll be able to make its appearance again into the political scene?
00:15:55.960You know, it's really hard to say because, you know, in modern times, the beard has taken on sort of more connotation.
00:16:03.600So there's the notion of it being revolutionary, communist.
00:16:08.340You know, people always think of Fidel Castro.
00:16:10.060And then after 9-11, of course, there was this whole notion of, you know, maybe he's a terrorist if he's, you know, not, if he's of color, et cetera, and has facial hair, then maybe he's a terrorist.
00:16:24.420And that was borne out by, for example, Indian and Pakistani men with beards being stopped more often at the border or at security gates at airports.
00:16:37.760So it's taken on that, you know, that, ooh, this is sort of Bin Laden territory that we're talking about.
00:16:47.500I think it would take a long while before you would see North American politicians and even European politicians wearing beards.
00:16:56.160Because the whole notion is, what's he hiding?
00:17:00.040You know, there must be something a little suspect, a little sinister.
00:17:04.480You know, all of our leaders in the last century have been clean-shaven, or at least, yeah, for large parts of the 20th century have been clean-shaven.
00:17:16.480In business, it's sort of the same thing, that, you know, in banking, you're expected to be part of a team and not to stand out and to kind of be predictable.
00:17:25.540And uniform in your conduct and your appearance.
00:17:29.560So, you know, if a guy started having facial hair, then maybe something's up.
00:17:33.580And actually, I got a call last week from the Wall Street Journal that an American banker came back from his holidays with a beard.
00:17:39.500And everybody said, aha, this must mean he's on his way out.
00:17:43.480And indeed he was, because you just don't have facial hair in that arena.