I have got you so beat: The Johnson Administration. And yes, it got me fired in 1969.
When I read the thread title I assumed this was about mustaches being taboo TODAY.
The only people I see with mustaches are cops. It goes with their horrible cop haircut. No one wears them now, unless you’re going for the 70’s porn star look. Mustache + Beard = OK. Mustache alone not so much.
The first time I ever saw anyone (except for some old derelicts) with a beard was when I visited my soon-to-be-ex girlfriend in NYC and she was living in a large apartment at 102nd and B’way with, IIRC, seven women and 2 men, one of whom had a beard. When I expressed shock, she explained that he was an actor and had a part that required it. Okay. That was in about 1957 or 1958. In 1962 I was living in NY as an instructor at Columbia and one of the grad students was full-bearded. I twitted him about it, but got used to it eventually. We are still friends and he has never shaven. But beards were still unusual and comment-worthy. In two more years, I was newly married and tried to grow a beard in the summer of '64. Summer is not a good time to grow a beard; too itchy. So I waited till Christmas vacation, 1964-65 and grew a full beard. Which I have had ever since.
The first time, I visited my wife’s small town in southern NJ after growing the beard, I almost caused accidents. People would drive by with their heads hanging outside the window to stare and jeer. It was amazing. Eventually they got used to it. I don’t know what my mother-in-law thought, but she was so starchy that she resented the fact that I often walked around her house in socks. But she never commented on the beard. In a few years beards got to be much commoner. But note that Johnny Damon was forced to shave his face and cut his hair short when he moved from the Red Sox to the Yankees. One of the many reasons, I am a Yankees-hater.
I have heard before that one reason mustaches disappeared was revulsion agains Stalin and Hitler. At least some sects of Amish (e.g. the ones that run an Amish supermarket on 9th Ave. around 50th in NYC) are full-bearded with no mustache and it was explained to me that this was an anti-Hitler movement.
I have boycotted Disney, at least partly for their policies. Why should I patronize a company that wouldn’t employ me? Probably many of you remember the story in the 90s when Disney bought a Mississippi Riverboat company and fired one of the captains because he refused to shave. Imagine that! The fact that Disney himself was bearded is irrelevant; he was distinguished by the fact that he was the only one in the company with facial hair. I believe that in Cuba only Castro is permitted to be bearded.
I have never gone to a casino so this gives me another reason to keep out of them. If I may be permitted a hijack, the Amer. Math. Soc. once had their annual meeting in Las Vegas. When it was over, they were told to never come back because the mathematicians didn’t lost enough money! I imagine there were some card-counters at blackjack and maybe some poker players who provide a small but steady income for the house, but few gamblers.
No, you don’t see mustaches on men under 40 theses days, but that may be so that Gen X can distance itself from the baby boomers. (Here I go with the Napoleonic Wars again), but after that era, the mustache was as much a symbol of a man’s rite of passage as the crew-cut had been to the generation who’d come of age in the Second World War. And you boomers remember how you viewed anyone with close-cropped hair: that rite of passage was so passé.
Now, at least here among the suburban hipsters, the male archetype is a pudgy white guy with shaved head and goatee, a Gen-X look that says “I’m not an 80’s hair-gel yuppie.” A while back a young woman with whom I was in a discussion lamented that due to self-esteem issues, she’d given orgasms to hundreds of men with no concern for her own. In consolation, I offered the opinion that she shouldn’t feel embarassed by the numbers if most of them were pudgy white guys with shaved heads and goateee, since she might as well count them all as the same guy.
I think we might be missing a link here: the female opinion. Most women I know* these days don’t like the look of them. Hence, if a guy is looking to get with a chick, and most chicks don’t like mustaches, he won’t have a mustache.
*these are women I know through work, school and friendships, of varying ages. In my years I, personally, have found maybe a half dozen women that actually prefer mustaches. … I think I’ll start a poll on this subject just to test it.
I just posted the poll here. Tell the ladies to check it out to test my hypothesis in a totally non scientific way.
Speaking of crewcuts: Isn’t it interesting that they did not come into civilian fashion until well into the '50s? They’re really more of a Cold War artifact (suggesting an increasingly militarized civilian society) than a holdover from WW2 (when most military men still wore the short civilian style of hair).
Mrs. J. would beg to differ with you.
Speaking of missing links, let’s not forget the canine opinion. Dogs love men with mustaches and beards. No matter how fastidious you are, molecules of whatever you’ve eaten in recent times wind up in your facial hair, and this fascinates dogs. “You had a corned beef sandwich two weeks ago! Mmmm…”
I grew my goatee at the request of a former girlfriend. Although we are no longer together, I’ve kept it because several people remarked that it made me look like “Evil Spock.”
Just to say it is not entirely true about younger (gen Y?) men not wearing moustaches.
I often have young guys working for me and a lot of them gleefully embrace the 'Movember" thing, growing moustaches for this month at least.
This is an anti-military thing dating back to the 18th century when the Amish/Mennonite movement began. Moustaches were the almost ubiquitous distinguishing feature of soldiers in the area of Europe where the Amish originated.
I have been bearded since about 1980, starting off in the mid-Seventies* with a moustache which expanded through long sideburns and muttonchop whiskers into a full beard. The majority of my friends have at least a moustache, and in most cases a beard, to the extent that we have sometimes referred to ourselves as the “portly, bearded, middle-aged men club”.
(*Actually I started in the late Sixties when I showed up for the first day of high school as the proud possessor of a newly-sprouted moustache, only to be hauled aside by the vice-principal and ordered to shave it off before the next day or risk suspension. I regret that I didn’t have the presence of mind (or chutzpah) to reply “Cool! You mean that now I have reached puberty and have developed facial hair, I don’t have to attend school any more?”)
I shaved off my beard when my girlfriend complained it made her thighs itch.
When I brought my bearded, sandaled boyfriend home to meet my parental units back in the day my mom opened the door and exclaimed: “Oh my God, Harry, she’s brought home Jesus Christ this time!”
Hee, 37 years later he still has a beard, our son has a beard, and our son-in-law has a beard. I still loves me some facial hair.
I was filled with wonder after going to the Sasquatch music fest in Seattle a few years back, and decided I had to see what I could foster. I’ve pretty well had a full beard since then, only shaving for the odd family engagement where my grand parents generation will be about. SO loves it.
“Readings” of the symbolic power of facial hair change over time. The clean-shaven 50’s (a look born of military service) morphed into the rebellious 60s, so moustaches that harked back to Zapata or the Civil War South were worn as a sign of that rebellious streak.
That movement (and sexual liberation) triggered the 70s notion of the moustache as a powerful symbol of masculine sexuality. Indeed, all male body hair became such a symbol. Look at Silent Movie (1976) again to see Burt Reynolds and James Caan taking every opportunity to show off their chest hair. This stabilised into the Porn Star moustache. So successful was this that young policeman were encouraged to grow moustaches in order to give them the look of authority.
This look was, however, very rapidly subverted. The logical conclusion of the line of reasoning leading to it was the adoption of strong masculine sexual imagery by the gay community. Who can forget the Village Peoples’ contribution to facial hair art?
And with that in very rapid order came the demise of the moustache in the heterosexual community for fear of being identified with Teh Gays. (Not saying this is a good thing - just noting what happened.)
Where I am, not even police officers wear plain moustaches anymore - too many Village People jokes at their expense kind of kills the liking for them.
In the grunge era, the Mephistopheles look emerged. It partly referenced the South again, but more so the villainous look of sinister movie characters, and did so without the baggage of the Persons of Village. But as always with anything associated with fashion, once guitar playing Sunday school teachers started wearing them, their power to actually represent the cutting-edge cool that their wearers hoped to convey collapsed under the weight of popularity.
With the advent of Movember, men have been given a licence to experiment with all that symbolism again, this time with the freedom that a Good Cause gives to ironic play. It has hit the reset button on many of the stereotypes. Although the rules are that one is not supposed to start growing the mo until 1 November, there is a growing number of men who are trying to get a running start early, and hanging on late on various pretexts. Maybe that will extend over time. Who knows? Maybe the mo will become popular again just for its whimsy rather than because of any symbolic power its wearers hope to project.
According to the pollso far, more women voted for no facial hair than anything else.
Not everyone said that, but a lot did…
I have seen my husband without his beard and mustache exactly twice since we met in 1988. The first was before we were an item; we worked together and one day he showed up with just the mustache gone. He said he was experimenting, but I and the other two women in the department begged him to shave off the whole thing and start over, which he did.
Then abut 10 years ago, we were getting ready for a Halloween party for which he wanted to dress in drag, but keep his beard. But when we got him all dolled up, he decided he might as well go all the way.* For the next week or so, until enough hair grew back to at least suggest a beard, I had trouble looking him straight in the face; it was like there was a stranger in my house.
- Apparently, shortly after we got to the party two women watched him for a bit and one said to the other, “Big deal, so she ratted her hair a bit. What kind of lazy costume is that?” (He was wearing a really cheap, awful wig.) Then they heard him talk and realized that the costume was much better than their initial impression.
Charles Evans Hughes was the last presidential candidate with a beard, and Teddy Roosevelt derisively called him, “the bearded lady.” When he was Chief Justice in the 1930s, New Deal supporters criticized the court as Nine Old Men, and mocked Hughes’ beard as a symbol of a bygone era.
Who was the last mustached candidate? Thomas Dewey?
Before I got married, I had a beard, mustache, and a pony tail. After our marriage, my wife asked me to shave and get a haircut, just to see what I looked like. (I was tired of the ponytail anyway.) Her first word upon seeing me: “Yuk.” :eek:
It certainly is.
I had a similar-but-not-identical experience.
I shaved off my mustache on a whim when my daughter was three, or thereabouts. She took one look at me, and burst into tears, sobbing, “Daddy - put it back!”
So I did.
Regards,
Shodan