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Where did all the good beards go? 

Soon into this website project I noticed a few trends.  First, most men do not wear facial hair. Another interesting observation is that men in the past have almost always been depicted as wearing some type of facial hair.   So what the hell happened?  Facial hair is one of man’s secondary sexual characteristics.  We are all sexual beings so why should men not desire to grow facial hair and why should woman not desire men with facial hair? 

I believe these questions have many facets.  Clearly some societal force has demonized facial hair.  I use the word demonize because this situation has gotten to the point where even the bad guy in the movie often wears some form of facial hair.  Like the answer to many problems, perhaps this question can be answered by asking who would profit by people shaving?  The obvious answer to this question is the shaving companies.  While these companies certainly promote shaving though a variety of clever advertising campaigns, I believe something deeper is going on.  A look around the animal kingdom shows that facial hair is not a human trait.  We see facial hair on the face of most every dog, cat, goat or whatever.  Being one of the only bare skin species, it is obvious that in growing hair, we become akin to our animal brethren.  This poses a major problem because the human race is obsessed with the notion that we are better than animals.  After all, animals are dirty, foul creatures.  I mentioned that the source of the desire to shave may be found by determining who profits from shaving.  By shaving, our sense of superiority over the other animals profits.   I suspect this need for superiority over other animals predates civilization.  However, only recently in our existence has the mass population been able to shave off its animal like exterior.

So why do we think we need to distinguish ourselves from animals?  This stems from our desire for an important place in the universe.  The notion that we are alone in this inconceivably vast existence is not an appetizing idea.  So we have created elaborate explanations (often in the form of religions), many of which share a common theme;  We are special.  In some ways we are special.  We are easily the smartest animal.  However, our intelligence has skewed our perception of the world around us.  We have confused ourselves into thinking we are not animals.  But we are animals, and there are so many striking similarities between humans and the other animals that it has become difficult to perpetuate this lie.  So we as a race have devised ways to distance ourselves from the other animals.  One such way is to distinguish ourselves physically from them by shaving.

Maybe you are asking yourself if the need to distinguish ourselves from the animals has lead to our mostly hairless condition?  Somewhere during the course of our evolution,  individuals lacking body hair were sexually selected over their hairier counterparts.  There are several theories explaining this phenomenon.  The most compelling reason is that in being hairless,  we could engage in more vigorous physical activity while maintaining a constant body temperature allowing us to be better hunters.  This may or may not be true.  However, as stated earlier, facial hair is the male's secondary sexual characteristic.  Therefore, while the hairless body phenotype was being selected, the mature male facial hair phenotype was also preferred.  With all that said, I would like to conclude that our seeming distaste for facial hair is not inherent to the human condition.  Thus the desire to shave must be an artifact of civilization.  I propose that early societies demonized facial hair after realizing the need to distinguish ourselves from animals in order to maintain our “special” place in the universe.  The dislike of facial hair is a relic of older, less enlightened human ideas.  Like an unwanted hand-me down sweater, these ideas have been passed down from generation to generation, but it’s the 21^st century now and it’s time accept our hairy origins.