Welcome, everyone, to the wonderful month of Novembeard. Also known (perhaps more popularly so) as No-Shave November, these thirty days are being celebrated by thousands of men across the country who, in order to raise awareness of their ability to cover their faces in keratinized dead cells, are shunning razors and scissors alike with energy that strangely mirrors the determination of many religious people in days of fasting.
The rules aren’t as hard to follow as those for Islam’s Ramadan or Catholicism’s Ash Wednesday, but they are no less strict. According to no-shave-november.com:
1. You do not shave in November.
2. You DO NOT shave in November.
3. If you shave, you are out.
4. No trimming, no waxing.
5. Not shaving can go on as long as you want it to.
Though my instincts tell me that this “manliness challenge” is nothing more than a thinly-veiled attempt to cover the beard-sprouting male population’s laziness — notice, if you will, that it was cold November that was chosen instead of a steamy month and that its alliterative quality makes the event easy to remember — I cannot help but admire the fellows who put their razors aside to let DNA do its thing.
In a culture where cleanly shaven, smooth-talking gentlemen are actively promoted — I’ve yet to see more than a five o’clock shadow on any male political candidate — men whose faces resemble wheat fields, snowy dunes or black forests are often regarded as a historical wannabe (Santa or Lincoln, anyone?), a hipster (you know, the kids in plaid who drink PBR like it’s water), a drunk redneck or, worse than anything, a pedophile.
Growing a beard, then, not only requires genetic predestination but also countercultural guts. For an American man to embrace his call to the wild, he has to ignore his mother’s gentle alternative suggestions (she only wants him to succeed, after all), his girlfriend’s protests (though mine have yet to change my boyfriend’s mind about his scruff) and his friends’ warnings that he will look like a child molester, all because our society has us trained to enjoy seeing skin in the place of where hair should be. In other words, a beard grows through much more than follicles and skin.
Why such resistance to this symbol of our natural selves? Are we ashamed of our primitive pasts? Have the razor and shaving cream companies won us over? Have our first-world lives of three meals a day and warm beds suppressed the part of us, whether we’re face-shaving men or leg-shaving women, that helps classify us as mammals? Are we afraid to be animals?
No matter the reason for our fear, I’m going to stand in solidarity with the beard-growing men who are letting their wild side roam. Luckily for you all, though, rules one through five are much less obvious under a pair of pants.
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