LARRY DERFNER WRITES: Some men look great in them, like Sean Connery. But if a guy’s beard is weedy, he looks like one of those acidheads grooving in the mud at Woodstock. Time for a reassessment.
By Larry Derfner
IT’S HARD TO to find a man without hair on his face these days. Beards have become so mainstream, so standard, that you can’t guess anything about a guy who’s got one, any more than you can about a guy who doesn’t. No, actually it’s gone further than that – now it’s the clean-shaven man who sticks out, who’s the nonconformist, the one about whom you say, “What’s up with him?” It’s that fellow without stubble, the one who still shaves every morning, who’s getting the stares. “Maybe he’s in a cult,” people say.
The inimitable Larry Derfner publishes Stay Negative on Substack, which is absolutely a must-read for people of a certain inclination. Highly recommended.
It used to be that beards were associated with men of left-wing opinions. Now everybody from communists to neo-Nazis, from radicals to moderates to the non-aligned, have beards. The dudes from the Democratic Socialists of America want to look like Marx or Che Guevara or somebody, the MAGA guys want to look like survivalists, mountain men. I can’t think of a single demographic where the men are still typically clean-shaven. Hedge fund managers are going around with beards. Mormons are going around with beards, including some of the Osmond Brothers. Nobody saw that one coming.
SO IS THIS a good thing or a bad thing? It’s a bad thing. Beards look great on some men; Sean Connery looked fantastic in a beard, but before that he looked fantastic without one, better without one, and when he was young and raw he had the good sense to shave; it was only when he got old and bald that he grew the beard, which rounded out his cool King Lear look. I think it’s fair to say that any young or middle-aged guy who has a handsome face looks better without a beard. It’s only once they’re old and their face has gone to hell that a beard might be an improvement.
I emphasize might because it all depends on the beard. Why did old man Sean Connery look good in one? Because it was thick, i.e. good, meaning not patchy or scraggly. Imagine if Sean Connery had had a wispy, flute-player’s beard – you’d have felt like throwing up. And this gets to why the current generation’s mandatory beard rule needs to go – for the simple reason that not all men look good in beards. About half of them don’t look as good as they would clean-shaven, and among that half, a lot of them look plain ridiculous.
If a guy’s beard is weedy, his face looks like the faces of those acid-fried, mud-smeared, shirtless, scrawny freaks doing the Elaine Dance at Woodstock. And if it’s too thick and bushy and also untrimmed (95% of beards today are untrimmed, I think), he looks like an old-time hillbilly or a wandering schizophrenic. The hipsters with their thick, squared-off-at-the-bottom beards look like hipsters; enough said.
A good-looking beard, on the other hand, might make an unfortunate face look okay, or an okay face look pretty good. Again, I emphasize might, because you see some guys and you just want to take a scissors and razor to that blight they’ve grown on their punim. That’s what I did in the early ‘70s when I was about 22, after seeing a photo of myself in a full, untrimmed beard. Made me look even scarier than I do clean-shaven, so I just hacked and scraped that thing off for good, and since then whenever I go to a park or shopping mall, the kids seem somewhat less likely to cower.
IT WASN’T JUST me who shaved his beard in the early 70s. The hippie thing was in decline and toward the end of the decade, by which time the hippies had aged into yuppies, virtually all men under 60 were wearing moustaches, typically thick ones that dipped down at the ends, “Zapata style,” together with longish sideburns. Then, as the Reagan ‘80s hit their stride, men tidied up and thinned out their moustaches and sideburns until these were gone, too. Even guys who wore long hair kept it so clean, healthy and neatly trimmed at the edges that they might as well have gone crew cut. The ‘80s were a real bitch.
The ‘90s started out as more of the same, but with the approach of 2000, guys had gotten tired of the plainness and monotony, and they noticed that Mr. Cool America, Bruce Springsteen, was going around with a few days’ growth. Then a couple of Mr. Cool America runners up, Brad Pitt and George Clooney, started doing the same, and from there the brooding, rebellious, stubbly Darkness At the Edge of Town look just spread.
Razor blade and shaving cream sales took a hit over the next decade and a half, and then in the early 2010s the industry ran into an iceberg: wokeism. This cult religion was well entrenched on liberal college campuses, and right about 2013 the number of woke graduates finally hit critical mass in the workforce. These were some hairy sons of bitches, they were out to “break shit,” and they just took over. Neat and clean wasn’t cool no more, it was racist and bougie. The shift could be seen on young men’s faces: Stubble turned first into thin, austere moustaches and goatees, later into rectangular hipster beards, and finally into the untamed look. Which is where we are today.
BUT HOW DO you get from wokesters to the MAGA crowd, where the men are no less wooly? Like I said, they look to survivalists, mountain men, maybe Old West pioneers for inspiration, and I’ll add one more source: the bearded cowboys of outlaw country music. Waylon Jennings. Willie Nelson. Hank Williams Jr. They literally changed the face of country; it definitely isn’t as smooth as a baby’s ass anymore. Another model: Southern rockers. The Allman Brothers. Lynard Skynard. Hairy-faced motherfuckers all, and Trump Country heroes, dead or alive.
A bearded MAGA man has even made it to the White House, if only in a little corner office. JD Vance is the first vice president with a beard since Charles W. Fairbanks (1905-09), and Fairbanks only had a moustache and goatee, though they were a good deal longer and thicker than what Vance has got. (In photos of Fairbanks, you can’t even tell if he’s got lips.) As for presidents, there hasn’t been a bearded one since Benjamin Harrison (1889-93). In fact, the last president with so much as a moustache was William Howard Taft (1909-13). (At 340 pounds, Taft was also America’s tubbiest chief executive.)
ica’s tubbiest chief executive.)
Vance only grew his beard a few years ago, when he got into politics. I figure he was trying to send the message: “You see? I’ve got a beard. This shows I’m a regular, down-to-earth guy, I like to hunt, fish and whittle, just like y’all.” While that may have been the statement he hoped to make, billions of MAGA-averse people around the world read a different message in his new look, something like: “I, JD Vance, am a sleazeball who’s grown a beard.”
THE BIG QUESTION, of course, is: Do women tend to like beards, and do gay men? Different surveys give different answers. But I’ll tell you this: During all the many, many decades in modern times when beards were a rarity, women and gay men were not sighing, “Oh, I wish all guys would grow beards, I can’t handle another clean-shaven man.” And for damn sure they were not pining for a guy with a few weeds and little clumps on his face. If the fellow is already handsome and the beard gives him that pirate look, like Johnny Depp in that pirate movie, okay, understood. Otherwise, I think women and gay men could definitely do without bearded boyfriends, like they did very happily for so many generations. It’s just that in this generation that’s not such a viable option, so they’ve learned to live with a steady diet of bushy or scratchy faces in their face.
I’ll tell you another thing: Beards make you look older. Do guys want to look older? Do women want their men to look older? (Well, maybe, sometimes.) Fellas, you know what else you can do to look older? Smoke a pipe. That used to be a big thing with intellectuals, wearing a beard and glasses, and smoking a pipe. And saying “indeed.” They all looked like they were born at 56. You want that, go ahead. Good luck getting laid.
Things change, though, fashions change, I’m sure beards will go out of style again before long, and we’ll go back to being a society with a few bearded nonconformists and the rest of us living lives of quiet, clean-shaven desperation. We’ll be able to separate the sheep from the goats again, we’ll each of us know where we stand.
Meanwhile, for all the bearded men I’m seeing, I haven’t seen any with the old Puritan-style beard – long and full as possible all around, but with a shaved upper lip. Picture it. In all my adult life, from the late 1960s until now, that particular look has not returned. Which gives me hope.
Larry Derfner is a veteran journalist and the author of “No Country for Jewish Liberals” and “Playing Till We Have to Go — A Jewish Childhood in Inner-City L.A.” He is the lead singer for The NightCallers, a classic rock ‘n’ soul cover band, and publishes Stay Negative on Substack.
