Defending the Beard

A recent new story in New Zealand included the little morsel "KFC [only] allowed beards to be worn for legal, religious or medical reasons".  And this gave me a serious WTF moment. And I'm like, I am used to tattoos and braid and  bright hair colors being treated as somehow shocking. But beards? What kind of anti-hipster hellscape is this?

The situation with beards is unusual only in that the other normal grooming habits that are banned link to a specific moral panic.  Tattoos -- dangerous biker gangs hoodlums (clutches pearls).  Colored hair -- anti-social punk feminists (think of the children!).  Braids -- things black people do (I guess?).  But Beards?  Things every man does unless they actively choose not to at least once a day? What is the underlying panic? Does someone out there think beards shed like a cross between a stressed Persian and a porcupine, embedding themselves in every surface?

Free the Beard!

And not only because beards are sexy as smurf. But because this is the thing about service work. You can hand people a chicken sammich with a tattoo, with green hair, with braids, with a mustache, and with a beard (on a boaty, with a goatee etc).  Sure you may be required to wear one of those ludicrous beard snoods if you are involved in actually cooking or assembling the food--but big whoop.

When it comes to service work your employer is hiring your labor, not your body and any intrinsically attached parts thereof.  They don't own you. And if they think their customers can't deal with seeing perfectly normal forms of personal grooming--let alone forms that probably pre-date homo sapiens as a species like having a hairy chin--then the employers and/or customers need to grow the fuck up.