"Hey Beardo, Vote Quimby!"
When looking at Facial Hair, one may see:
1) that men are power-hungry control freaks, and thus are given facial hair with which to play, to provide them with the illusion that they are more in control of their lives than they actually are.
2) that it is still a man’s society, where men are allowed to have facial hair and women are not.
3) that beards connote:
(a) sophistication i.e. a level of maturity i.e. that a male is old enough to have a full beard; and
(b) self-control, not in the sense of willpower but rather in the creation of a self-image and utter self-awareness. Full beards, well-trimmed, are the happy medium between clean-shavenness and scraggliness; this happy medium is subconsciously representative of a level-headedness, from someone symbolically and outwardly demonstrating his metaphorical walking of the middle-path (N.B. the abundance of Ph.D.’s with stated facial hair).
4) that sideburns are cool, because they represent a cooler time (the 50’s and 60’s; the 70’s sideburns, much like their contemporaries, were less “cool” and more wild and crazy); people who sport these consider themselves either above their time, or less negatively, that they themselves are timeless, classic beings whose coolness and self-esteem transcend time.
5) that those men with wild facial hair in crazy patterns are wild and crazy themselves.
6) that chin fuzz dictates immaturity, i.e. incompleteness; without the complementary mustache, chin fuzz evokes thoughts of the yin without the yang (the feminine without the masculine).
7) that full goatees (above and below mouth) indicate youthfulness, of age and/or spirit.
8) that in the long run, soul patches choose their wearers; and in the short run, assholes choose soul patches.
9) that five o’clock shadow is an indication of Nature overcoming Humanity: Man can clean himself up and pretend to be sophisticated for ten to twelve hours at a time; after that, his animal nature positively shines through and is in need of further suppression.
10) that those men who shave even when they don’t have to are dangerous and to be avoided at all costs, as friends or otherwise; these are the men who want to rule THE world (unlike other men, all of whom to some extent want to rule A world, even if it is only THEIR world).
11) that there comes a time when shaving and the idea of shaving is no longer exciting and fun but more just a huge pain in the ass; this realization commemorates the end of youth and the onset of the innocence-crushing force known as “Reality.”
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