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.

Manspreading

As a psychology undergrad I was sent out to record the sitting postures of men and women.  The theory, generally supported by this new data, is that men are more likely to sit with their legs spread apart, and women with them together or with legs crossed. These days spread apart legs can cause issues in places like a train where it leads to guys taking up more than their fair share of he seating (a.k.a. manspreading)

Then, as now, I think it is incorrect to treat seating posture as purely a matter of gender-conditioning.  Dudes do have some stuff that can more easily get squished in a closed or cross position, especially in tight trousers.  While women are more likely to be wearing shirts and need to avoid giving the person sitting opposite a show. These things are gender-related but in a physically tangible, way not a purely psychological one.

That said, dudes who think sitting cross-legged is unacceptably ladylike need to take a lesson from he bad-ass Victorian naval officers shown below.  Totally rocking the cross-legged look and also somes beards modern hipsters only aspire to in their wildest dreams.