"No-Shave November"--in which men raise money to battle such threats to men's health as prostate cancer by growing their beards and donating the money they saved on shaving gear to cancer research–has come and gone.
While I'm all for battling prostate cancer–which claimed the life of my own father–I've never been keen on the male end product after 30 days of "Movember." Young guys with beards can look cool, but after age 40 men who don't shave tend to resemble Dumbledore.
But I don't have to worry. The social-justice-warrior community has decided that No-Shave November is double bad: On the one hand, it promotes "toxic masculinity" because as we all know, abundant facial hair is a leading male secondary-sex characteristic. And on the other hand, No-Shave November excludes women because they can't grow that necessary abundant facial hair. Now, why any self-respecting feminist would want to grow a toxic masculinity-promoting beard is beyond me, but you can't expect logic in social-justice war.
At any rate, Heat Street witer Gillian Kay Melchior (an IWF fellow!) reports on the toxic-masculinity aspect:
In a nearly unintelligible sentence published by Sydney’s Daily Telegraph this month, one critic wrote: “It’s disappointing that what could’ve served as a much-needed dialogue about the many ways in which men, trans men included, can express their masculinity without resorting to chauvinist caricatures is in danger of devolving into at best a pissing contest between bros about who can grow the most facial hair to prove their manliness and at worst an implicit endorsement of 1950s-style gender norms, complete with transphobia.”
Oh–transphobia. I forgot about that one.
But even without the chauvinist caricatures, we still have this:
“Movember irritates me because it’s not so much about cancer awareness as masculinity awareness. … Movember says that we protect men by celebrating masculinity. And that’s ridiculous,” wrote Jacob Brogan in Slate last November.
Masculinity is so ridiculous! So now enter the feminists:
“Society views male body hair as natural—but the same cannot be said of women,” complains Jessica Bansbach in a SUNY student newspaper. “When women join No-Shave, they are often met with disgust from the people in their lives, males and females alike.”
So we get academic "research" like this:
Take this satire-proof academic paper, entitled “Mo Bros: Masculinity, Irony and the Rise of Movember,” which centers around two ideas: “brand(ed) activism and ironic masculinity—to conceptualize how Movember enables problematic understandings of gender and philanthropy while constraining the space for politicized discussions about health and masculinity.”
(The dissertation also “explore[s] the relationship of Movember to the broader cultural trends including shaving and grooming rituals, hipster culture, kitsch and retro commodities, the politics of selfies, and hockey’s playoff beard.”)
Maybe men ought to figure out a different way to combat men's diseases than Movember. How about shaving as usual but donating the monetized value of flipping the middle finger to the social justice warriors to research on men's health threats?