Opinion by Jerreck McWilliams
Staff writer
“Rugged. Self-assured. Adult. These are the words that describe the man who wears a moustache,” according to the hit ’90s superhero show “The Tick.”
Add-in the word “robust,” and it describes the man who complements his mustache with the full suite of facial hair known as “the beard.”
Mock facial hair all you want, but many of us he-men treat this as serious business. So serious in fact, that we have devoted an entire month to the un-tampered cultivating of our beard faces.
What, daresay, would a month overflowing with such masculine magnitude be called? Why, none other than No-Shave November.
That is how we know it in this part of the world, at least. Daring adventurers from across the globe have reported that this very same holiday is celebrated in other places like Ireland, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Spain, the United Kingdom, Israel, South Africa and Taiwan.
Their holidays are slightly different from the Americanized one, however. They refer to it as “Movember,” a portmanteau of the slang word for moustache, “mo,” and the month of November.
Unlike our version of the month, participants, nay champions, of Movember grow only their mustache for the entire month of November, shaving every other facial plane, and their rules are very strict.
The rules of conduct currently on the Movember site (movember.com) are:
1. “Once registered at movember.com each mo bro must begin the 1st of Movember with a clean shaven face.
2. For the entire month of Movember each mo bro must grow and groom a moustache.
3. There is to be no joining of the mo to your side burns. (That’s considered a beard.)
4. There is to be no joining of the handlebars to your chin. (That’s considered a goatee.)
5. Each mo bro must conduct himself like a true country gentleman.”
The goal of Movember, is to raise awareness during November for prostate cancer and other cancers that affect men. They do a bit of fundraising as well, having reported on their website, movember.com, an accrued $176 million since 2004.
No-Shave November does their share of fundraising as well, for similar motivations. According to noshember.com, all donations collected for No-Shave November are sent to Families of the Wounded, a charity for the families of wounded soldiers.
No figure was given for their collected donations, presumably because it is so big the internet could not display it.
The rules for No-Shave November are also much more lax than Movembers. There are two:
1. “No shaving during the month of November, and
2. NO SHAVING DURING THE MONTH OF NOVEMBER.”
Participants can be found even here at our own Southeastern, you can often spot them wandering to and from classes like camps of lumberjacks, proudly displaying their testosterone-fueled achievements.
Among them, freshman Zach Crisp, who reports “My neck-beard is righteous.”
It should also be noted that women are as entitled as men to participate in No-Shave November, during which they are encouraged to forgo the shaving of their legs and armpits. These all natural females are referred to as “bro-sistas” by the Movember worldwide organization.
There you have it, “No-Shave November,” “Movember,” “Noshember,” or as the mountain men used to call it, “life.”
A truly masculine holiday worthy of being forever recorded as a legendary achievement in the annals of human history, for, as it was written: “Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard” (Leviticus 19:27).