By Chris Bowman
I’m doing some research right now which includes a lot of pictures from the 1870s and 1880s. Times were tough in old Canada back then; you had to be pretty rugged if you weren’t some city slicker from Ottawa. She’s an unforgiving country, though fair if you’re willing to work for her favour.
Studying these pictures, I notice a definite trend among the men: thick, black moustaches, lustrous and glistening in the winter sun — a symbol, if you will, of integrity and strength. These men had earned their stripes; they had hacked and burned and hammered their futures out of an unrelenting environment. And they wore the result across their top lip.
My father has sported a moustache for as long as I can remember. The only picture I’ve seen of him without one is a black-and-white in which he’s goofing off with some army buddies. He is 16. Once, when my brothers and I were very young, he decided to shave it off. My mother says we screamed in terror, and then cried every time he was in the room, until it started growing back.
So the moustache is, for me, an emblem of male authority. But not for me only. A couple of years ago, I grew a moustache for the benefit of a Hallowe’en costume. I was working construction at the time, and we were building a concrete highrise in downtown Vancouver, so a lot of time was spent running hoses and craning buckets of cement from street-side. My job was to land the buckets behind the cement trucks that were pulled up on the street. Ordinarily, when someone comes to a jobsite with a delivery or any administrative duties, that person heads to the office, regardless of who’s milling about on the sidewalk. However, as I had this moustache, time and again delivery guys, truck drivers, and even developers and architects would approach me as soon as they jumped out of their trucks. It was bizarre; the moustache was their automatic totem of leadership. You could almost see them thinking, “Ah, that must be the superintendent.”
Such power is not wielded easily. It’s like going into Tim Horton’s with a broadsword on your back. People fear you. It’s no accident that we associate moustaches with the police. I’ve got a book titled Mountie: 1873-1973 A Golden Treasury of Those Early Years. It’s a photographic record of . . . well, the title’s pretty informative. Anyway, the book is crawling with hard looks and black moustaches. If there’s a cop or even a citizen without a moustache in any of the pictures, he looks really young, and scared. A moustache, on the other hand, seems to cause the eyes to toughen. They squint. They gaze through you, past you. Onward to the horizon. Oh, he’ll give you directions, the mountie will, maybe even help you find a hotel for the night or a stable for your horse. But his concerns are larger than you, and you recognize this with one glance at his lip-decor.
I look around me today and I see this thing which I call the half-beard. It’s like a beard, but it’s not. In between the smooth cheeks and pink neck is this shadow region of very short, very styled hair. The half-beard is beyond stubble (don’t even get me started on the half-stubble-beard), but skin is still visible beneath: it’s anywhere from two millimetres to one or two centimetres long. There are no stray hairs top or bottom. It looks careful and time-consuming. It looks like a Lego beard.
I suppose it’s meant to portray both an inward ruggedness and an outward sense of social propriety. You, there, with your half beard. You think you look like a gold miner freshened up for a crazy weekend in town, spending some of that gold dust before heading back out into the wilderness. But I see you, man. 
You’re in line at the grocery store, sighing quietly to yourself and wondering if maybe you should put that second bag of Doritos back. Yes, they’re on special, but you don’t even really like Doritos. You can’t decide. Do you even have room in the pantry? You better sigh again while you think about it. It’s not like the line’s moving.
Like, come on man. Do you want a beard? Do you want to shave? Just make up your mind, because you’re annoying me. Those mounties didn’t fight crushing blizzards and scorching prairie summers and deliver diplomacy at gun-point to maintain order during the growth of this country so you could spent 45 minutes perfecting the line across the middle of your tender neck-flesh in comfort. Next time you get pulled over, tell that cop that you respect his facial prowess. And if you have a moustache or a full beard of your own, maybe you’ll both hear, faintly, the howl of a prairie wolf out there on the horizon.
Yo Freeb–that you refer to us as “Boys” speaks to our need to assert a strong male adulthood and fight being infantilized by a culture that sees men, especially fathers, as stupid boobs (Homer Simpson et al.).
Yes, this article is directed at men (horror of horrors!). No, we don’t expect you to understand. So maybe you should write about what you know, as they say, like the comeback of the disco bush or something like that.
We’re not “waxing romantic”–we’re waxing our moustaches!
It was bizarre; the moustache was their automatic totem of leadership. You could almost see them thinking, “Ah, that must be the superintendent.”
Yes, and not a woman who of course wouldn’t be seen that way automatically due to a lack of the all important facial hair authority and other reasons.
“Next time you get pulled over, tell that cop that you respect his facial prowess. And if you have a moustache or a full beard of your own, maybe you’ll both hear, faintly, the howl of a prairie wolf out there on the horizon. ”
Gad! You know many of the cops in my city are women who I doubt will appreciate that sentiment much. Nevermind, clearly this romantic article of male “authority” symbols in aimed at half the population and is seen somewhat by the other half as just that. Boys, waxing romantic about the authority of their glorious hair. Odd that.
I’m glad to see that some of you other dudes are getting into the full beard and moustache thing.
Chris: Best piece I’ve read on the ‘stache–even after the recent Movember media deluge. Not to dis Movember–it might just be the best idea out of Australia since killing Cane Toads for sport (which, unfortunately, can only be practiced in Australia).
Seriously, I decided to participate in Movember ‘011, using the “event” as cover to experiment with what I had long held could be nothing but an ironic statement on any guy Gen X or later. I myself had been in an unsatisfying, years-long non-regime of shaving just once every 10 days to 2 weeks, letting a lame-o non-beard evolve from stubble to something just plain ugly. Also, I had convinced myself, over the decades, that it simply wasn’t possible for me to grow a full beard: there just didn’t seem to be enough follicles!
About halfway through the month, I knew that I was going to keep the ‘stache, because I really did think it looked good, and it looked even better as it filled in. It was a joy to shave more often in order to clearly distinguish the ‘stache from the non-‘stache areas, and to shape it into some kind of unknown ideal. I also looked more like my father, who wore a moustache for the later half of his life (died of prostate cancer at 59–true story). And the kicker was that I realized that I really could grow a beard, ’cause the ‘stache ended up thick and wide enough. OMG–I had become a man 🙂
So yeah, ‘eff the sad-sack indie-rock beard! What you’re saying with that is, “I wanna stay a sad-sack adolescent and call my band The Ponies.”