Beards are Beautiful

I was recently unlucky enough to meet a young woman who, without provocation or any real knowledge of who I am, deigned to call my beard 'ugly'. Without knowing me, without ever having experienced the bliss that IS beardhood herself, without any prior knowledge of the many situations my beard has saved me from, or the insults and slights it accepted in my name, she insulted my beard. She claimed it to be ugly. She claimed that the part of my face I consider most important to survive (far more so than my eyes, nose, throat, or anything else) was ugly, and she made the claim without understanding why it was so very wrong.

I FIND THIS UNACCEPTABLE

She called my beard ugly. I had no response, I couldn't imagine what one would say to someone so ignorant and hateful...how can you respond to someone who hates a beard?

You see, beards are more than just secondary sex characteristics.  They're more than decorative facial art to accentuate or draw attention from various features.  Beards are more than a sign of maturity, and more than a result of laziness...beards are a personal statement made to the entire world.

They say, "I'm going to be a man today, and every day I have this beard."  They say, "I don't care about razors right now, I have too many beard-related things to attend to."  They tell your peers and coworkers, "No, I don't want to come to the office viewing of "Bridget Jones' Diary", I want to go eat some unhealthy red meat while reminiscing about time spent in the woods."  They say more in their silence than this strange beard-hating woman could say with a lifetime of words.

So...why would anyone consider them ugly, and seek to insult them?

The lady in question didn't mean serious offense.  She simply commented that she didn't like beards, and that she thought mine wasn't good looking.  This seriously surprised me since I had just trimmed it down, in order to look less intimidating (Many unbeareded men find us beard-folk frightening, so like a bear cooing to its cubs, we must do all we can to avoid accidentally frightening them).  My beard was well groomed, and like a prize-winning bear (like a show-dog, but instead of a poodle, it's a giant bear) I had kept my beard in perfect condition.  The mustache barely graced my top lip line, the hint of deep red in the base of the beard was showing a bit, enough to draw you in but not so much to seem flashy...my beard was in perfect shape.
I had spent time to make it more than a chin-curtain, or a soup-catcher.  It no longer looked like it could be found on the face of a man who lives in a deep woods cabin and keeps pet raccoons as his only companions...it looked good.  And then, of all times, she called it ugly.

I really didn't understand, and still don't.  A beard is a great and wondrous thing.  One of my favorite sites, The Beardly, put it best in some of their posts.  They point out hat a man without a beard is just a boy, and a man without a beard never knows the true freedom that manhood can give. Perhaps their most poignant observation was that a man's very identity can be shaped by his beard.

TheBeardly.com is great, check them out!

So, to call my beard ugly was not just an insult to my face, it was an insult to my soul.  To call my beard ugly was to take away a piece of my manhood, it was an insult to my very core, and worst of all it was simply a lie.

At that time, I didn't stand up for myself.  I didn't stand up for my beard.  I didn't even know what I COULD say in the face of such ignorance.  But now, now that I've had time to heal from the ordeal, now that I've had a chance to think about myself, and who I am, and who my beard MAKES me, I've come up with my answer.

To her, and anyone, male or female, who besmirches beards, I have something very simple to say:
You will never know the beauty of a beard, and so you will never know how wrong you are to dislike them.  Until you have felt the gentle brush of your beard-hairs scraping your chest as you chuckle, or until you've cleaned the stray crumbs of food from your glorious bushy mustache, you cannot know what it is to be a beard-wearer.  You, who dislike beards, think they're something that a man grows when he grows tired of shaving, or because nature intends for it to be so...but you don't know.
A man doesn't grow a beard, a beard makes a man GROW.

To that woman, who believed my beard 'ugly', I hold no grudge.  Rather, I pity her.  For, if one does not know a beard, does not know and feel a beard, can one ever truly know oneself? 
And that's what I'll leave you to think about.  For now, I must go, my beard has decided that it's time to catch a moose with my bare hands, and tame it with my bare beard.
Have a good day, and stay beard-y.

This Beard Says, "Stay Classy," but it means Beard-y too.

If you your own beard-stories or satire, leave it in the comments below!  I respond to nearly every comment, so check back if you want a reply!  And if you enjoyed THIS installment of BeardsBearsandBrian, check out similar works, such as "Fat People Have Superpowers" or "How a Choir Boy Becomes a Mountain Man".

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