Lockdown Beards: The New Yorker reviews the Beard Liberation Front
The New Yorker has written on Lockdown beards, (23rd April 2020)
Their perspective (I think) is summarised in this line:
Rather than saying, ‘I have given up on the world,’ the achievement beard declares, ‘I am away, but not gone.’ ”
While I didn’t speak or correspond with the journalist who wrote the piece (although I would happily have done so) it also summarises what it takes to be the worldview of the Beard Liberation Front. Its rather like a decent Wiki entry. Its not inaccurate but neither does it really capture the perspectives of the BLF in the round.
Anyway a link to the full article is below. The New Yorker is paywalled but you should be able to read this for free
Feelings about facial hair are constantly shifting—for every Donald Glover or Dennis Hopper, there are associations with the alt-right, or reports that people find the bearded unsexy and untrustworthy. Keith Flett, the spokesperson of the Beard Liberation Front, calls the stereotypes and discrimination “beardism”—or outright pogonophobia. A “Marxist trade unionist & beard campaigner,” per his Twitter page, Flett views beardism in the workplace as a form of respectability politics, constraining the lives of “anyone who does not conform to the stereotype of a young, single white man in a suit.” American politicians, it is thought, suffer at the ballot box for their facial hair, while Sikhs and other religious minorities face violence for their visibility. Jeremy Corbyn, the eight-time winner of the U.K.’s Parliamentary Beard of the Year, is, to his critics, according to the BBC, “almost a caricature of the archetypal ‘bearded leftie.’ ” However, Flett, whose organization dispenses the annual honor, told the Independent, after Corbyn’s sixth win, that the award would have easily gone to the hereditary peer Lord Hylton, who wears a broad, corn-silky billy-goat scrim, if the octogenarian and his fellows in the House of Lords “knew anything about how to vote.” (Flett reports Russian interference in the 2018 contest.)
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/video-dept/the-rise-of-the-quarantine-beard
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