The Mustache as Metaphor, Masculinity, and the Mark of Transgression

“ From the earliest ages the moustache has been worn,—even the Arabs, who shave the head, leave untouched the upper lip. What would the pictures of some of the great masters be without it? Didn’t the Roman youths dedicate the first few downy hairs of the coming moustache to the gods? Does not the moustache give a manly appearance to the smallest and most effeminate? Does it not even beget a certain amount of respect for the wearer? What sort of guys would the razor make of Count Bismark, Dickens, the Sultan of Turkey, or Anthony Trollope? ”

“ The Roman Catholic clergy of Dalmatia, secular and regular, are allowed to wear the moustache without beard or whiskers, as a concession to national prejudices.
Amongst English people, always ready to be swayed by fashion, the hair of the face has been, age by age, cherished or shaved away, curled or clipped into a hundred devices. Before the immigration from Sleswick the Briton knew the use of the razor, sometimes shaving his chin, but leaving the moustaches long. ”

“ From a very different point of view the mustache is essential. It gives character to the face. It makes a man look gentle, tender, violent, a monster, a rake, enterprising! The hairy man, who does not shave off his whiskers, never has a refined look, for his features are concealed; and the shape of the jaw and the chin betrays a great deal to those who understand.
The man with a mustache retains his own peculiar expression and his refinement at the same time. ”

“ Modern usage applies this word to the hair grown upon a man’s chin and cheek. When the chin is shaven, what remains upon the cheeks is called whiskers. “Moustache” or “moustaches” describes the hair upon the upper lip. But the words have in the past had less exact meaning. Beard has stood alone for all these things, and whisker has in its time signified what we now call moustache, as in the case of Robinson Crusoe’s great pair of “Turkish whiskers.”
The bearded races of mankind have ever held the beard in high honour. It is the sign of full manhood ”

“ Just beyond the good "sister" stood a young man, poring over a piece of paper, which had the appearance of a medical prescription: a spirited-looking youth, whose harmonious and intellectual cast of features was heightened to rare beauty by richly mellow coloring, and the silken curves of a beard and moustache unprofaned by a razor,—curves softly traced above the fresh, rubious lips, and gracefully deepening about the cheeks and chin,—curves that disappear forever when the civilized barbarism of shaving has been accepted. ”

“ Fine eyes of deep, rich blue, fine teeth often exposed in compelling smiles, a resolute mouth and a firm, deeply cleft chin he had; and all these attractions were set off by his precise dress—gloves, bell-tailed overcoat, sharply creased trousers, varnished boots and silk hat. A short mustache, curling upward slightly at the ends, and a small, triangular tuft of hair on his lower lip gave him a somewhat foreign aspect. He had an air, a manner, that kept up the illusion. Men would perhaps have distrusted him as too obviously handsome; women would talk about him as soon as he had left the room. ”

“ He was a young man, who if he possessed no other qualities, had been remarkably favored by the gods in one particular; he was perhaps as singularly handsome a specimen of the human race as it is possible to conceive. So finely cut and delicately molded was his face that it would have been considered effeminate but for the mustache which, like his hair and eyebrows, and the long lashes that swept the clear olive cheek, was a silky, lustrous black. ”

“ In the ophthalmic hospitals of Chinese cities European physicians have found this practice a fruitful cause of many diseases of the eyes, but no remonstrances can induce the people and their barbers to give it up.
The mustache, as well as the pigtail of immoderate length, is a badge of a certain dignity, for no man is allowed to cultivate it until he reaches a certain [Pg 641] age, and it is an error to suppose that Asiatics are totally devoid of beard, for the old fellows among them sport grisly beards and mustaches of respectable length, and altogether have quite a venerable look. ”

“ Matthew Pole." She would have no idea he was Aston Rowant. If she happened to be young, beautiful, in all ways satisfactory, he would announce himself. How astonished, how delighted she would be.
But if not! If she were elderly, plain? The wisest, wittiest of women have been known to have an incipient moustache. A beautiful spirit can, and sometimes does, look out of goggle eyes. Suppose she suffered from indigestion and had a shiny nose! Would her letters ever again have the same charm for him? Absurd that they should not. ”

“ The tendency of evolution, as we have seen, has been to make the sexes more and more different in appearance; and as man chooses his mate chiefly on æsthetic grounds, he habitually gave the preference to smooth-faced women, whereas woman’s choice, being largely based on dynamic grounds, fell on the bearded and moustached men, since a luxurious growth of hair is commonly a sign of physical vigour. Hence the humiliation of the young man who cannot raise a moustache, and the reciprocal horror of the young lady who finds the germs of one on her lip. ”

“ Can the reader conjure up any worse fate for a girl than to be doomed to pass through life incarnated in a male body? How grief -provoking for a mademoiselle to be cursed with a slight growth of hair on lip or cheeks! Only a trifling male stigma! How much more heart-rending for a mademoiselle to possess the male physique to such an extent that even all physicians (except a handful of sexologists) with their present lack of knowledge—or rather their closing their eyes to all evidence—would declare her a male, and prescribe that she should in life fill the latter role. ”

“ As the query left his lips he became petrified with astonishment at the mysterious and cruel change that had assailed the much-heralded society bud over night. Her sweetly smiling lips were now decorated with a huge, bright-blue, upcurving mustache for which a certain gentleman of royalty might well have yearned. ”

“ If he notices hair on a woman’s body, for instance, at once she loses all attractiveness in his eyes. Such a woman he finds as disgusting as a woman with a mustache. Equally disgusting to him are all women with sharp figures and no breasts such as remind one of a man. “A woman should be a woman,” is his favorite remark. He despises all “blue stockings” and emancipated women and has requested his wife to drop the acquaintanceship of a friend of hers who had taken an interest in various women’s movements.
In the course of the analysis he refers continually first of all to his wife. ”

“ Female society gives men a taste for cleanliness and elegance of person. Our ancestors, [p88] who kept but little company with their women, were not only slovenly in their dress, but had their countenances disfigured with long beards. By female influence, however, beards were, in process of time, mutilated down to mustaches. As the gentlemen found that the ladies had no great relish for mustaches, which were the relics of a beard, they cut and curled them into various fashions, to render them more agreeable. ”

“ She only wishes to dye thine eyebrows and pluck out thy moustaches." Quoth he, "As for the dyeing of my eyebrows, that will come off with washing, but the plucking out of my moustaches will be irksome." "Beware of crossing her," said the old woman; "for her heart is set on thee." So my brother suffered them to dye his eyebrows and pluck out his moustaches, after which the damsel returned to her mistress and told her. Quoth she, "There is one thing more to be done; thou must shave his chin, that he may be beardless." ”

“ There is no reason whatever, in a civilized condition, why the male and female should differ markedly in size, and the difference is disappearing as above noted, as is also the extreme weakness so long held desirable in women.
But in the great majority of cases our women are still content to be what they consider beautiful as women, and never to consider human beauty at all.
The disproportionate part played by costume and decoration in the sex-governed activities of the dependent woman, has given a peculiar cant to her beauty-sense. ”

“ As part of our androcentric culture we may point to the peculiar reversal of sex characteristics which make the human female carry the burden of ornament. She alone, of all human creatures, has adopted the essentially masculine attribute of special sex-decoration; she does not fight for her mate as yet, but she blooms forth as the peacock and bird of paradise, in poignant reversal of nature's laws, even wearing masculine feathers to further her feminine ends.
Woman's natural work as a female is that of the mother; man's natural work as a male is that of the father ”

“ As a male he is appealed to by the ultra-feminine, and has given small thought to effects on the race. He was not designed to do the selecting. Under his fostering care we have bred a race of women who are physically weak enough to be handed about like invalids; or mentally weak enough to pretend they are—and to like it. We have made women who respond so perfectly to the force which made them, that they attach all their idea of beauty to those characteristics which attract men; sometimes humanly ugly without even knowing it. ”

“ Doubtless—I wish to be quite just—there are many who look the better for such embellishment; but, at the hazard of being thought old-fashioned and prejudiced, I cannot speak of the custom with anything but strong disapproval. If men are to lie among the rouge-pots, inevitably it will tend to promote that amalgamation of the sexes which is one of the chief planks in the decadent platform and to obtund that piquant contrast between him and her, which [79] is one of the redeeming features of creation. Besides, really, men have not the excuse of facial monotony, that holds in the case of women. ”

“ Nothing indeed but the long effeminizing of our faces could have given rise to the present shaven ideal—to the forgetfulness of the true standard of masculine beauty of expression, which is naturally as antipodal as the magnetic north and south poles, to that of female loveliness, where delicacy of line, blushing changeable colour, and eyes that win by seeming not to wish it, are charms we all feel, and at the same time understand how inappropriate they are when applied to the opposite sex ”

“ Becoming suspicious, we continue our investigations, beginning to think that the world is here upside down. Here is a man who comes tripping along; but no, it cannot be a man, in spite of the small and carefully curled mustache. The dressing of the hair, the powder and paint on the face, the blackened eyebrows, the gold earrings, the bouquet of flowers on the breast and shoulder, the elegant black gown, the gold bracelets, the fan held in a white-gloved hand—none of these things suggest a man. And with what coquetry he fans himself ”

“ We imagine that a woman—any woman—just because she is a woman, has an artistic touch, an æsthetic sense, by means of which she can cure ugliness as kings were supposed to cure scrofula, by the laying on of hands. We find this feelingly alluded to in fiction where some lonely miner, coming to his uncared-for cabin, discovers a flower pot, a birdcage and a tidy, and delightedly proclaims—"A woman has been here." He thinks it is beautiful because it is feminine—a sexuo-æsthetic confusion common to all animals.
The beauty-sense, as appealed to by sex-distinctions, is a strange field of study. ”

“ A second glance, and—my word for it—you will modify your opinion. A third will do away with your indifference; a fourth change it to admiration!
Continue the scrutiny, and it will end in your becoming convinced: that a woman wearing a moustache—young, beautiful, and brunette—is one of the grandest sights which a beneficent Nature offers to the eye of man.
It is presented in the person of Isidora Covarubio de los Llanos. If there is anything unfeminine in her face, it is not this ”

“ And though it is very far from my purpose to wish to deny the fundamentally different nature of the masculine and feminine character, it is still true that a blank separation of human qualities into male qualities and female qualities is no longer possible. In no instance have the anatomists succeeded in determining with absolute distinction between the characters that belong separately to the sexes. Moreover, it has been shown that there is no such thing as a fixed woman character, but that women differ according to the circumstances under which they live, just as men differ. ”

“ The full development of those visible properties which are essential to the human organism is universally recognized as indispensable to perfect beauty,—natural deformity, the unsymmetrical shape of the body, apparent traces of disease, &c., being regarded by every race as unfavourable to personal appearance. We distinguish between masculine and feminine beauty, and, in spite of racial differences, the ideas of what constitute these forms of beauty are fundamentally the same throughout the world. To be really handsome a person must approach the ideal type of his or her sex. ”

“ If ugliness and unconventionality and eccentricity of face and deed do not hinder men from doing the world's work and reaping the world's reward, why should it hinder women?"
Other things being equal, all of us, black and white, would prefer to be beautiful in face and form and suitably clothed; but most of us are not so, and one of the mightiest revolts of the century is against the devilish decree that no woman is a woman who is not by present standards a beautiful woman. This decree the black women of America have in large measure escaped from the first. ”

“ The world still wants to ask that a woman primarily be pretty and if she is not, the mob pouts and asks querulously, "What else are women for?" Beauty "is its own excuse for being," but there are other excuses, as most men know, and when the white world objects to black women because it does not consider them beautiful, the black world of right asks two questions: "What is beauty?" ”