stoweboyd:

Sean Trainor | Losing Control

Viewed from a distance of more than a century, the nineteenth-century beard fashion looks like a basic historical fact. For many observers, the succession of bearded and otherwise unremarkable U.S. presidents during the decades preceding 1900 is no more surprising than the fact that there are mountains in Switzerland. And yet the arrival of this fashion came as a great shock for those who lived through it. Sweeping much of Europe, North America, and Latin America after roughly two centuries of clean-shavenness, the beard movement was almost certainly the most dramatic development in nineteenth-century men’s fashion – every bit as shocking as if knee breeches and ruffled shirts were to once more become the dominant mode of men’s dress throughout the so-called ‘Western’ world.

Fascinating analysis, but my biggest takeaway is the succinct definition of modern american masculinity as being “about mastery and control: control over one’s destiny and that of ‘lesser’ men and women. ”

This makes me wonder how much of my subconscious rejection of this approach has to do with a principled position, and how much simply came from growing up outside of American culture that made it so utterly foreign.