Updated: Sun Feb. 05 2012 7:26:53 AM
CTVNews.ca
After 60 years of bigotry against full facial hair, Disney recently decided to allow its male front line employees to greet vacationers at its theme parks with neatly-groomed beards.
It’s yet another blow to the shaken clean-shaven hierarchy, as the last half-decade has seen a prominent shift in society’s attitude toward facial hair.
In Canada’s urban centres, young men head out to the bar dressed beard to toe, as if suffering from a long day of logging. Even pretty boys like George Clooney or New York Rangers goaltender Henrik Lundqvist have decided a beard doesn’t distract from their hypnotizing eyes.
On our faces anyway, brash masculinity is in, and has been for several years.
Concordia University sociologist Marc Lafrance, who teaches courses on masculinity and gender issues, says in his profession no trend is an accident.
In the “mancession” era, when statistics suggest women are outperforming men in many economic markers, is it a coincidence that men are revolting in a way that only having a Y chromosome allows? Is it easier to read an Atlantic article called “The End of Men” while stroking a gloriously furry chin?
“Facial hair has long symbolized virility and manliness and today, that’s no exception,” Lafrance said in a telephone interview from Montreal.
Lafrance notes the beard’s popularity has risen in the same era that interest in other hyper-masculine activities such as bodybuilding (an area of research for him) has.
“This boom is indicative of men trying to find a place for themselves in this society, and trying to claim that place in a very traditional masculine way,” he said, adding that men are feeling a lack of strength and security in their jobs and lives.
Vancouver fashion writer JJ Lee, the author of the critically-acclaimed “The Measure of a Man,” notes the beard’s return has coincided with a renewed interest in old-timey men’s fashions. The Hemingway sweaters, pipe smoking, fedoras, the “Mad Men” suits.
“People are attracted to a very normative masculinity,” Lee said. “It’s fatherly, it’s kind. The beard falls into that.”
Lee suggests there’s a dichotomy among beard wearers.
“It’s the same trend expressing two ideas. One is to restore normative manliness, people who can actually run corporations . . . and be actual breadwinners,” he said. “But there are the bearded men who identify more with back-to-nature types — the reclusive, the mountain man, the poet,
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