Stroll about Bushwick, or Williamsburg, or Fort Greene long enough, and you can’t help but to notice that a lot of the menfolk have beards. Moreso than the population at large, it seems.
A beard conveys many things. It asserts masculinity. It imparts a certain sense of seriousness, maturity even. But one thing your beard may not carry, at least according to some scientists (or social scientists anyway), is sex appeal.
Women actually don’t like beards, they argued. These psychologists* showed women photos of men with beards and then showed them some photos of the same men without the scruff, and the women preferred the beardless look. When questioned, they responded that men with beards seemed older and aggressive looking, intimidatingly so.
The idea that beards are more about fronting than sex appeal carries some favor with earlier research as well. During the Civil War, for instance, the preponderance of beards had more to do with menacing the enemy rather than alluring the ladies.
This argument, however, seems to carry little purchase with the Brooklyn women we know, we’ve since found out. After we posted a link to the story, we heard immediate rebuttals, both from within the ward and from around the country. “haha hmm? I like em sometimes,” b-doug tweeted, adding that she appreciates “a bearded man who smells of sandalwood, enjoys the mushrooms of the land yet never gets food in his stache.”
The bearded artist at work
“Um, I only love guys with beards,” Bushwick Nation’s own Tipsy angrily tweeted, threatening to kick our ass for even posting such a wrong-headed story. “Beards, tattoos and a gentlemanly approach,” she later wrote approvingly. It “Has nothing to do w/hipster just style & manners.”
To this sentiment others testified their approval. “I’m a sucker for it every time,” Molly Irwin agreed. Only Brooklyn artist Ana Lola Roman expressed dissatisfaction, with the handle bar mustache specifically. “I’m not feeling the 1880s romance,” she wrote.
In many ways, the discussion goes deeper than just facial hair itself. The beard should be a natural outgrowth from a deeper understanding of the righteous way to navigate one’s way through the world.
For Tipsy, a beard is a representation of manliness, a characteristic she might seek in a lover**. She bemoans how many men she meets who, on the surface, look rugged and appear able to service her household appliances in a manly and intelligent way, but when she gets to know them a bit, she finds that they are not mechanics, nor lumberjacks, nor even artists, but aspiring actors waiting tables at the Times Square Planet Hollywood, or someplace equally awful. It’s like they grew the beards for a walk-on part on the next Bon Iver video.
The beards of such specimens aren’t the least bit mangy, as would befit a mountain man coming down to town once a year for his hunting license. No, these beards and mustaches and soul patches are carefully tended to, too much so, tellingly. Brooklyn artist Man Bartlett put it best on Twitter, “Good God that man’s beard was more manicured than a lawn in a fancy suburb.” In redneck argot, their shit’s all pussified.
A man without a beard
Now, personally, just for myself (Zach), I simply don’t entertain the idea of sporting a beard. My girlfriend’s skin easily chafes from the needle-like prickles of my whiskers whenever I express my affection for her. And that’s all the reason I need for keeping the chin shiny.
Did you know, by the way, that in the Texas band Z.Z. Top, the one guy without a beard in the band is named Frank Beard? Two beards and a beard:
ZZ Top – Sharp Dressed Man by Warner-Music
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*”The beard is a strikingly sexually dimorphic androgen-dependent secondary sexual trait in humans,” the authors quipped. Seriously!
**We apologize for not knowing how the manicured beard plays with our gay brothers. Obviously, more happy hour research is needed on this topic.
