h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This coming from a female observing the male population... I usually like the way they look on a guy Heck, they even improve the appearence of some of the less appealing men (my last ex included...). I know some women totally trash facial hair, claiming it's like kissing sand paper... well, they're missing out... popular or not, I think the goatee rocks... and personally I don't care what's in style or not... I just like what looks good!

Have you still got all your Michael Jackson records?

Never even owned one... No tapes or anything else either... I do have one CD that has a Jackson 5 song on it, does that count?

I read somewhere the Jackson 5 are getting back together. I guess you will be going to one of the concerts

Only if you're comin' with me, and you've got a goatee

I'm afraid my sense of author's ethics made me shave it off.

This is how the unedited article concluded

Like, there's a difference. Clearly, it is time to stop acting the goat when everyone from alternative Christian rockers to your local mortgage manager or accountant (well, maybe not accountants) is busy trimming that facial folly. No longer is it a valid, low-maintenance form of self expression. Goatees must die. Now.

I don't want the goateee as a "valid, low-maintenance form of self expression" I want it because some guys look really really good in goatees, and I happen to like that look. The only thing that should die (well, actually be helped, and drastically changed) are all the people so lost and without a sence of who they are that they have to follow trends to think they're worth anything. The Trends are what must die, not the goatee, it is just a scape goat!

Nods sagely

A goatee isn't a fashion statement for me. I don't have any beard growing anywhere on me that is not a goatee. I wonder which part of my heinz 57 ancestry that it comes from! Anyways, because of this, I have been watching this trend for awhile.

The reason gay guys (besides me) started wearing them is that you could look butch but not straight by wearing one. You could also use a goatee to wear a beard without attracting 'bears' (very hirsute men) who would normally use a full beard as a signifier. Goatees also allow you to hide the fact that you haven't a chin; for some men, gay or straight, a goatee will always be the best, non-surgical choice.

Then straight guys and Seattle boys appropriated them. Earrings were going out of fashion, so for a brief while one could do both a goatee and an earring, or avoid flannel.

This wasn't helpful or appealing to us, so it looked like the goatee was going away, but the coffee-addicted gay crowd started cutting them in odd strips and/or dots. For about a year you could tell if a guy was in Recovery by looking at his chin to see how well and how oddly barbered it was.

Nowadays, the few gay ones remaining become decidedly more artsy, but for the most part they're gone, and we will have to start doing something else. I'd expect straight guys to be growing them for about four more years though.

Interesting....

Sea Change, do/did the points you highlight apply globally or are they unique to the United States?

Sea Change, do/did the points you highlight apply globally or are they unique to the United States?

My perspective is definitely Southern Californian. This is an important datum for cultural phenomena, and I am sorry I forgot to post it.

I have no perspective for the hitchhiker rest of the world, except when I was in Vancouver BC, Canada for the world's fair in 1986, they were still wearing early 1970's style feathered haircuts, and late 1970s clothing. My guesses on the rest of the US of A:

Northern California is of two minds: the hippie marijuana culture never really distinguished goatees from any other kind of self expression, and probably is too stoned to care if they are in or out of style, and the Silicon Valley nouveau riche, who are not really californians but opportunists from just about everywhere else, are much too uptight to actually be anything other than necktied and clean shaven.

The East Coast is already doing something different, simply because they like to think they are ahead of everything.

The Midwest is just considering wearing goatees.

I speculate wildly on the eastern South, never having lived there. Outside of Atlanta, probably still thinks that goatees are what Colonel Sanders, and quaint racists who pretend they are plantation owners wear. They'll start in a coupla years, and they will never really catch on with the s**t-kickin' Bubbas.

In the Southwest, and rural/desert areas of California, they are probably mark you strongly as a pocho, and so there would be a cultural and economic class divide thing going more stongly than anything gay.

Currently, young straight men in LA(from heliarche to 22 yo or so)are growing only-below-the-mandible patches. Don't know what or where this particular cultural phenomon is coming from-doesn't look Dragonball-Z-like, skateboardy or MTVs TRLish to me.