This is my FP on this message board, so please be gentle.
My Query:
What exactly is the point of facial hair? If it served some purpose in antiquity, why is facial hair so much more prominent on men than on women? From what I recall, head hair=insulation, groin/underarm hair=big sponge for pheremones, but I haven’t seen any explanations of what facial hair is for. Am I overlooking something ridiculously obvious?
I always assumed that men had facial hair (to keep their faces warm) because they went out into the cold world to fend for their families, while women remained by the fire to care for the little kids.
That would also explain why facial hair only appears at puberty, when the man would be about ready to go hussle grub himself.
But maybe that’s just my latent sexism thinking.
There seems to be this chronic misunderstanding that everything about the human body is “for” something. Ain’t necessarially so.
For that matter, there are numerous male humans today who have very little facial hair - Native Americans, for instance, and Inuit (and if anyone could use a natural face-warmer, it’s the Inuit living up in the Artic Circle).
As for it being some sort of natural scarf - men report that having ice freeze in your beard is pretty darn painful, which makes them something less than practical in freezing weather.
Beards and such may, in fact, be more for sexual display, like a lion’s mane or a peacocks tail, than for any “practical” reason. The beard signals sexual maturity in the male and may be attractive to females.
As for the “women sit by the fire” myth - that’s what it is, a myth. Oh, it’s true that in many ancient societies women tended to stay inside more than men, but most women had to go out at least occassionally, even in winter. Among nomadic peoples (and nomadic lifestyles proceeded all settled lifestyles) women were outside as much as the men,
But women were classically the gatherers in the hunter/gatherer setup. Wouldn’t women benefit from facial hair as protection for the face from scratches and the like while foraging through dense undergrowth?
As long as I’m splitting hairs (so to speak), wouldn’t men LACK facial hair to aid in sweat evaporation while on those long hunts chasing down wooly mammoths? If heat retention was so important, wouldn’t extremeties such as fingers and toes be sufficently hairier than more dense areas like the arms and legs?
A lot of this is devil’s advocate stuff, but I’ve had this bouncing around in my brain since I last shaved.