Ladies, rejoice! With the arrival of December 1st, across the country thousands of electric razors will awaken and buzz, returning your partners, brothers, and pals back into the clean-shaven men you know and love. Movember, the month-long marathon of moustaches to raise awareness and funds for prostate cancer among other diseases, will draw to a close. The movement, that began in Australia in 2004 and has since raised an estimated $174 million world wide, gets bigger every year. This year’s was harder to miss than a 1970’s handlebar.
Movember has succeeded because it turned something that is essentially a passive activity, growing a moustache (although many men put effort into trimming, waxing and shaving their beards) into a feat of endurance which deserves sponsorship, like running a marathon. The organizers were able to do this is because moustaches, once a common sight, had become relatively rare.
As Cam Hunter, rap vocalist for the band Down with Webster, says that moustaches have become a parody of themselves. “Someone could still grow a mullet but they’re now growing it as a joke. I think that moustaches have fallen into the mullet category of ‘It happened, it was funny’ and we look back and laugh at it.”
Movember has done a remarkable thing–hijacking hipster irony for a sincere cause.
I feel a bit guilty because not only have I never participated in Movember, but I was born with the incredibly, fast-growing facial hair that would make my moustache thick and luscious. (Well, I suppose I wasn’t born with it.) I’m nervous that people will barely conceal their disapproval and will say things like, “But you’re shaving it off at the end of the month, right?” To understand the Movember experience, I sought out three men who are braver than myself.
Why do it
For the first time, all the members of Down with Webster have participated in Movember.
“We’re a group of men, and men’s health is important to us, so it hits close to home,” Hunter explains.
“I care about men’s sexual, mental and emotional well-being,” says writer Shawn Syms. “And growing facial hair comes pretty easily for me. So it’s a lot easier to manifest support for a cause by doing something that just happens organically, rather than, say, climbing the CN Tower.”
More Hair, or Less?
For some participants, Movember requires patience as they wait out their awkward, ‘teenage with a fake ID’ peach fuzz. For hairier men, Movember is actually about scaling back.
“Year-round, I’ll let my facial hair grow from anywhere between a week and a month before shaving again,” says film editor Daniel Reis. “It depends on my mood, the weather, and if I’m going to be a lumberjack for Halloween. I don’t grow a moustache unless it’s for Movember.”
This is similar to Syms, who says, “I’ve had facial hair pretty consistently since I was about 20 – usually a beard and sometimes just a moustache. I’ve gone fully clean-shaven perhaps once or twice over the past two decades, for up to a year at a time. So for me from an appearance perspective, Movember is about having less facial hair than usual, rather than more.”
But for men like Hunter who are normally clean-shaven, committing to the moustache can be a trial. He claims, out of the whole band, he hates his the most.
“There’s times when I’ll cut my hair and I’ll look different, but I look in the mirror and I think, ‘No, it looks good. Different, but good.’ This is different but not good.”
The other men like how theirs look. Syms says his moustache reminds him of the working class men he grew up around, while Reis likes how his moustache makes him look older and “balances out my very thick eyebrows.”
Another good thing about Movember–discovering what men are vain about.
Okay, but how do others feel about it?
“Women I know tend to like me better without facial hair, and guys tend to like me better with it,” Syms says. “A lot of women I know are very uncomfortable with moustaches for some peculiar reason…That said, some of the women in my life are definitely beard fans.”
Reis reports a wide range of reactions. “Fist-bumps from strangers, comparisons to Freddie Mercury from co-workers, laughter and looks of disgust from friends and family.”
“Some people really like it,” Hunter says. “Some people really hate it. And they’re just like, ‘What is that? What are you thinking?’ I think the awareness of Movember is broad enough that most people get why I’m doing it, so it’s not like I have to be continually explaining myself. So most people are like, “Oh, Movember!” and I’m like, ‘Yep!’”
Moustaches are a subject that even strangers are comfortable asking about. As Hunter says, “Every single situation I find myself in, it gets brought up.”
The Moustache Revival
Committing to grow a moustache and keep it for a month made a lot more sense before moustaches came back in style.
“I think that you can link the disappearance and revival of facial hair to the popularity of male body hair in general,” Reis explains. “Magnum P.I. had chest hair just as lush as his moustache, but then male beauty ideals changed and chest waxing became popular…But now I think we’ve returned to older ideals of male beauty. Look at Jon Hamm, he’s a modern sex symbol and rocks full chest hair underneath those 1960s suits.”
Hunter points out that not all moustaches are in: “Those little kind of thin, pervey ones have come back in style. There’s not many full-bodied, Carl Winslow moustaches any more.” And as his experience attests, moustaches can still be plenty embarrassing. “I’ll go into meetings with people and they don’t take me seriously. It’s like I’m dressed up in a Halloween Costume.”
Real Men?
I ask Hunter about why moustaches continue to be such a powerful symbol of masculine virility.
“My guess is because most women can’t grow moustaches.”
There’s a lot of embarrassment surrounding prostate cancer and Movember has done a remarkable job in raising awareness of allowing discussion. The only worry I have is how it’s done this by embracing the outdated masculine ideal of the moustache. Although many people who do Movember treat the look as a big joke, there are other people who bemoan their lack of facial hair on facebook as though their genetics have let them down. I hope they’re speaking in jest, because we’ve come too far in evolving gender roles to have anyone seriously believe their lack of a hairy upper lip means they are “less of a man” (whatever the heck that means!).
But Hunter encourages even the smooth-faced among us to support the worthy cause.
“Spread awareness any way you can. I have a friend who has alopecia, and cannot grow eyebrows let alone a moustache, so he just uses his Twitter and his Facebook and does it that way. And there’s always funny stick-on moustaches. That’s always an option.”
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Max Mosher writes about style for Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @max_mosher_.
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