Beards Banned at Work: What's So Threatening About Men's Facial Hair?
Grooming issues took center stage in Major League Baseball news earlier this week, as new Miami Marlins manager Don Mattingly reinstated the team’s old no-facial-hair policy. “You can fight it or you don’t,” reliever Mike Dunn (top center) said after shaving.
“Guys will whine. Some guys like it, some guys won’t. As long as we’re consistent, I think it’s not that big of a deal,” said Mattingly (top left), a former Yankee who was known, ironically, for sporting his own bold mustache (top right) on the field — and once even benched for refusing to trim it.
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So what’s he up to, anyway?
“It’s a symbol of control,” Allan Peterkin, a University of Toronto psychiatrist and lecturer and author of One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair, tells Yahoo Beauty. “Historically, we used to take our facial-hair cues from authority figures… until it was pop-culture figures. So this just may be him saying, ‘You guys are going to obey me.’”
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Also, Peterkin supposes, it could symbolize that the new boss is “whipping you into shape, into an old-style, all-American player, and that this is serious business,” and saying, basically, “Don’t get into all this vain, individual-style stuff. We are a team.”
Rules about being clean-shaven are pretty much antiquated in MLB, though the Yankees ban beards and only allow well-groomed mustaches (reportedly causing a bearded Brian Wilson to say he wouldn’t consider playing for the team in 2014), and the Cincinnati Reds, which stopped banning all facial hair in 1999, now only allows players to have “tame” beards and ’staches.
Outside of professional sports, private employers have a legal right to set their own dress and grooming codes; workers who want to keep their facial hair can generally fight and win exceptions to bans (safety issues, such as with firefighters, notwithstanding) if they can show religious or medical reasons for it. But Disney, for example, has only allowed its theme-park workers to grow beards and goatees as of a 2012 policy change.
Among pro athletes, though, a crazy range of facial hair has now become the norm, whether you play baseball or are in the NBA, NFL, or NHL.
“Baseball was the holdout,” Peterkin says, “as the look was always clean-cut, youthful, and all-American.”
Historically, for some people, facial hair was though of as being “unwholesome,” he explains. After both world wars, when well-shaven men returned from military service, they aimed to be clean-cut and professional. “So facial hair,” Peterkin says, “came to mean that maybe you were unemployed, or a bum, then later a Socialist or Communist or terrorist. For some it had diabolical associations. In the ’60s and ’70s it meant you were a beatnik or hippie. So usually it was something fringey.”
That notion took a major turn in the 1990s, though, when grunge took over, along with the goatee. “It swept America and unleashed a whole wave of facial hair,” Peterkin says. “And now it’s allowable, and a stylistic norm — except in banking and politics. But generally, it flip-flops back and forth.
Kind of like Mattingly’s own ideas of facial hair — which, given his personal mustache history, Peterkin notes, makes it “even more paradoxical that he’d do this to the team.”
The American Mustache Institute, a largely tongue-in-cheek think tank, wholeheartedly agrees, and slammed the manager for being “a hypocritical shame to his mustached American heritage,” in a blog post this week. “The entire episode marks yet another dark chapter in the way the Mustached American community can often be treated,” Adam Paul Causgrove, CEO of the Institute, noted in the piece. “But we will continue to fight for those who have no representation and firmly push our agenda, making the case of the power of facial hair and all that it brings to all walks of life.”
(Top photos: Getty Images)
