Sex

To Beard or Not to Beard. This isn’t a Question.


Beatrice – Lord, I could not endure a husband with a
beard on his face: I had rather lie in the woollen.


Leonato – You may light on a husband that hath no beard.


Beatrice – What should I do with him? dress him in my apparel
and make him my waiting-gentlewoman? He that hath a
beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no
beard is less than a man: and he that is more than
a youth is not for me, and he that is less than a
man, I am not for him

My favorite Shakespearean exchange. Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing is explaining her singular state, which in reality has less to do with hair than her being still rather hung up on Benedick, the plays “hero” and is all woolen.

I have been partial to men with facial hair ever since I outgrew Tiger Beat magazine. I went from Shaun Cassidy to Barry Gibb faster than I could get from zero to sixty in my Dad’s 1972 Dodge Dart – and I was no slouch on the accelerator. Ask anyone who ever bummed a ride off me.

Or maybe don’t.

My late husband grew a thick wooly cover every fall and shaved it down to a goatee just before Valentine’s Day every year. His goat was thick and long enough that I could twirl the ends around my fingers.

His mother hated it and he took no end in delight about the fact that he could use me as his excuse for ignoring her incessant nagging to shave it off.

“Can’t shave, Ma,” he would tell her. “The wife loves it.”

The truth was more complicated. He had a round baby face and the whiskers made him look older. I imagine he would have kept it until it turned grey at least with or without my encouragement.

My husband Rob has lived the gamut of facial hair. Bare-faced through mustaches of varying thickness and length to goatees to full beards.

Working in a chemical plant means that at various times he was hair-lip only due to safety regulations, but when we met, he was back to a very close cropped beard. Quite the sexy, exotic Canadian.

This last week, however, he learned that the drilling rig he is overseeing has a strict “no beard” policy.

“I have bad news,” he told me over the phone and I braced myself for a transfer to Texas*, “I have to shave.”

“Oh,” I was relieved. Hair grows back but Texas could leave marks.

“It’s just until the well is dug,” he assured me.

Although there is a mound of photographic evidence attesting to the fact that Rob is handsome regardless, seeing him without a beard in the flesh for the first time was like coming home to find your furniture just slightly askew in every room. It’s right yet not at all the same.

Fortunately the whole Samson effect is just biblical mythology because Rob’s sex appeal didn’t disappear down the bathroom drain with his face fur, and though he does look younger and it’s slightly erotic to snuggle up to a man who is your husband but looks like someone you don’t quite know, I will be glad to run my fingers over his grizzle again.

Devin and Glenn: Marriage Sucks


… so why not let Gays get hitched too?

I found this Hollywood politico cute shoot on The Daily Dish. It tries to take aim at the ignorant masses in California who oppose gay marriage, but it winds up making marriage look like an institution tailored specifically with the punishment of homosexuals in mind.

Marriage. That passionless bastion of crass in-laws and fat, inconsiderate spouses. The horror.

And I didn’t miss the supposed point. I just think the point was stupid and way off mark.

I think the creators missed the point. People, most of them anyway, who opposed Prop 8 are average folk who probably don’t know that they know gay people even. Their discomfort was manufactured in churches and via fear-mongering television ads. Denigrating the state of matrimony is not going to win them over although the hip left-wingers will enjoy quite the smug chuckle at the expense of soccer moms and their families.

The point shouldn’t be to make a joke of one side or the other but to introduce people to the reality of what is likely going on all around them. Couples of the same-sex, living, loving and starting families like couples do.

The vast majority of them not bad Hollywood clichés.

Devin and Glenn are bad Judd Apatow-ish fail.

“Single Ladies” Are Not Seven Year Old Girls


My objections to the only slightly less morally questionable than pageants world of dance festivals has been clearly illustrated by the following video of a seven-year old group of hip hop dancers in a recent competition:

The company YAK that distributed the video has forced YouTube to remove the video but you can view some of it on the GMA link below.

Not a single group of girls at my daughter’s dance school is even a tenth that talented and I am including the older teenagers. It’s part genetic gifting on behalf of the universe and part internal combustion propelling one to work it, but … where the hell were their parents when those costumes were handed out?

And seriously, seven-year olds shaking it like their dinner was at stake?

You can argue the skill it no doubt takes to perform the dance, but it will in no way detract from the fact that whoever let those little girls dress like hookers and get up on that stage to grind out what adults would be willing to admit was the softer side of soft porn if the dancers were grown women has no internal compass where right and wrong is concerned.

Sorry.

Normally the scantily clad ends when their tummies lose the round baby fat look and starts up again at late pre-teen. I haven’t personally witnessed girls in the 6 to 10 range so tarted up, but I am not surprised either. Just feeling vindicated that my spidey sense about the whole “dance” culture is accurate and glad that my seven-year-old is losing interest in favor of soccer and yoga.

I was relieved to read that web reaction was generally uneasy to appalled.

But who are their parents? Surely at least one of them thought this was really wrong? Even if they didn’t speak up too loudly? Of course, the dance mom culture being what it is – sheep-like and creepily willing to go along with ideas and demands that I am pretty sure non-dance parents would roll their eyes at and refuse to do – I am not too surprised.

We are a sick, sad culture. Hypocrites who moan about go-go dancing tots while feeding our children’s dreams of dancing near naked on stage with our own addiction to Dancing with the Stars*.

Age appropriateness.  When did that become passe?

Update: My friend Alicia wrote an excellent bit of commentary on this at her blog. She brings up the valid point of parental responsibility in teaching our children how/when to say “no”. She also points out something that hadn’t occurred to me. Music is internalized. We become the music – taking on its intention – when we sing and dance. Think about that minute.

Additional Update: Two of the parents of the girls – who are eight and nine year olds and not seven – appeared on GMA to defend themselves. They talk about context and that the performance wasn’t meant to be seen by anyone outside family and friends and other competitors. They also fell back on the tired excuse of “but it’s pop culture and everyone else is doing it”. Naive, blinkered, and typical of the kinds of parents I ran across all the time when I was teaching  in public school. They never question or consider the long term consequences.

*Not my addiction, mind you, I watched it with my mom, BIL and sister, DNOS, over Spring Break and was puzzled, and weirded out by the way flat screens make everyone look puffy in a partied too much on the weekend kind of way.