The evil that is the goatee Tom Smith

More goatee nonsense here.  Click through to the completely ridiculous article in The Beast.  Blech.  No, the goatee is not difficult to pin down.  Goatees became popular in their most recent eruption in prison.  It is a piece of fashion from the deep, deep underclass that has slowly gurgled its way upward until now it is worn by many, even, alas, law professors.  Some of them are my friends, and I forgive them, but only because their other contributions to civilization outweigh the harm they do by sporting goatees.  The goatee curse emerged I believe precisely because persons of con-hood and ex-conhood were looking for additional ways to look scary, in addition to prison tats.  Possibly the goatee-sporters I am more familiar with, to whom I will refer as scary, pickup truck driving rednecks from hell, borrowed the fashion from African Americans they met in prison and whose style sense they admired.  I am aware Malcolm X wore a goatee sometimes.  But I don't know.  It would not be the first time that white people tried to be stylish by pretending to be black, almost always a mistake, as it deceives no one.  The goatee also has ancestry in the Beat Generation, a group which had good taste in jazz, but whose depravity is underestimated.  Read any Nick Tosches lately?  What a complete freak.  And they did all this with only alcohol and marijuana.  And heroin.  OK.  I guess they had plenty of drugs.  And goatees.

I think I am with George Will on this one.  While he has not opined on goatees that I am aware, I feel sure he would oppose them if he gave it any thought.  Beards are fine.  Mustaches are fine.  Sideburns are tolerable for young people or Victorian gentlemen.  But the goatee is an abomination.  No number of scruffy Hollywood boymen can change that.  You don't have to wear a tie, but you may not wear a goatee.  I can only add that any woman who admires goatees is one I would think very carefully about.  I'm not saying she certainly lacks virtue, but I would be very careful.

Comments

[Larry]

I too despise goatees. I didn't realize that the fad for them began in prisons. I'm told that a lot of recent ridiculous fads began in prison: use of black prison slang, wearing baggy pants that ride low on the hips and drag the ground, shorts so absurdly long they resemble women's capri pants, etc.

No non-felon (except undercover cops) should mimic the felon look. I suspect one reason a lot of guys go this route is to attract girls, who are drawn to the bad boy look. Being next to a thugged out guy seems to give many girls a tingle in their nether regions.

[Tom Smith]

Yet more sociobiology in action.

[Lou Gots]

Why in the world should anyone wish to identify with the inmate criminal underclass? That is truly sick--death-oriented, dirt-affirming. It is saying "no" to virtue, truth and life, an act of culture-treason.

It makes me think of that fabulous couplet from Alexander Pope's Prologue to Addison's Cato. Ever the pedant's delight, Pope folded one subtle allusion inside of another to exzlt British drama over French in the aftermath of the War of Spanish Succession:

With honest scorn, the first famed Cato viewed,
Rome's learning arts from Greece, whom she sebdued.

To take one's culture from criminals, losers, failures--sick indeed.

[dearieme]

I was taught French at school by a chap who sported beard, 'tache and beret in the French style. He'd been on attachment (we all believed) with the Resistance during The War. He'd have been just the boy to garotte a few goatee-flaunters.

[yara]

though i did meet a guy once who had a natural goatee, that is, he didn't shave and there was a clear, hairless, separation between his sideburns and the rest of his facial hair.

[Tom Smith]

the natural goatee may be an exception. We have a well known legal scholar on our faculty, quite elderly now, who sports a French beret sometimes. He was in the OSS and had been behind enemy lines in France on various occasions, and so was entitled to do so I suppose. I asked him once how he found the Gestapo as an enemy. "Formidable," he said.

[William Sjostrom]

This is silly. Goatees have been around forever, and are perfectly respectable. My grandfather had one, and he died in the 1950s, and was a pillar of respectability, married to a high society woman. I have seen group pictures of him at academic conferences (he was not an academic, but he was a chemist who ran the research division at Corn Products), and a lot of the fellow dignataries had goatees.

[Tom Smith]

It is the new goatee that is the menace. The old goatee is something entirely different.

[John Bowman]

Just to be picky about language, you appear to have succumbed to a common misconception. The facial hair that wraps around the mouth from mustache to chin is properly known as a Van Dyke. A goatee is a small chin beard. This became amusingly known at the conservative corporation I work for when they finally, just a few years back, announced that beards would be allowed, but not extreme facial hair, such as a goatee. A young fellow soon showed up with the ring around the mouth that most do call a goatee. His supervisor showed him the stipulation in the regs and told him to change it. Instead he came back with a chart from a barber school, displaying the various types of facial hair. The supervisor backed down, and the powers that be, rather than admit their ignorance, just ignored the issue. But I know, language changes, it's a goatee. Sigh...

[Eddy]

Put two horns on anyone with a Gaotee/Van Dyke and they look like the devil. The modern intent is to look tough and be intimidating, it makes most men look ugly and evil, period, and is not flattering.

Many men have currently said they did it to be different, but since so many have done it recently, it makes you just one of the crowd. To be different is to not follow fads and trends, and be yourself. Just like Tatoos, it's like throwing mud on a painting and tasteless for most men.

Look at the Harley guys, they all have the Goatee/Van Dyke, to look mean and intimidating, bunch poser wannabes in my opinion, that need to get a life. They would be better off wearing a sign saying: "look at me, I'm insecure, so look at me" which is far closer to the real reason people get tatoos and sport intimidating beards.