Yesterday I passed a barbershop and saw ads on their wall outside of men with beards and short hair. It is a revival or saving electricity ?
this post was submitted on 03 May 2024
154 points (82.9% liked)
Asklemmy
43148 readers
1621 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Long story short: WW2
The military required men to be clean shaven, which was partly tactical (proper gas mask seals), partly to whitewash the service (e.g., black men can have severe skin reactions to shaving every day), and had other benefits to unit cohesion and general order (routine personal fitness and hygiene).
Well, that stuck, and an entire (massive) generation of men and their male children were taught that to be good they simply had to be clean shaven. Those two generations make up the vast majority of business and political power in the US, so the idea of “success” and “power” was idolized by a clean shaven male. This was further accentuated by the counter culture reaction of this cohort’s kids in the 60s and 70s, where longer and unkempt “bad” hair was cast against this “good” clean shaven look.
Fast forward to today, those traditions and appearances have been baked into most of modern life. As the boomer population starts to fade away, so will the tyranny of the razor.
The boomers ARE the unshaven hippies tho. People born in the 40s and entering public life in the 60s-70s