What Does A Goatee Say About You?

What Does A Goatee Say About You?
by Bryan Curtis
Nov. 19, 2009 The Daily Beast
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-11-12/what-does-a-goatee-say-about-you/?cid=hp:beastoriginalsR1



Breaking: Brad Pitt has a full-blown goatee. It’s long and gray and bushy, and when Pitt showed it off last week at a movie premiere, it was beaded in a style favored by the pirates of the Caribbean. If there were ever a time to reassess the state of facial hair, this would seem to be it. It used to be that growing a goatee was some kind of fashion statement. Now the goatee has become the Gap T-shirt of beards. The New New Goatee can be worn at home or at the office, by the hip and unhip alike, signifying, well, just about anything.

The New New Goatee is a beard for all seasons, as harmless as a tattoo. This becomes apparent by reviewing a list of Americans who have been sporting goatees lately: Kobe Bryant, Tim McGraw, Pastor Rick Warren, chef Rick Bayless, NBC’s Chuck Todd, Todd Palin, Larry the Cable Guy, even Mariah Carey in her latest music video. “There is no kinship at all,” Chuck Todd, who is a good sport for answering his phone, tells me. Larry the Cable Guy does not concur: “I think Brad Pitt might have the goatee just because I pulled it off so good,” he says.

What does a New New Goatee mean? First you have to understand that the goatee has always been hard to pin down. Shakespeare had one, as did the Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck, whom the Van Dyke was named after. (For simplicity’s sake, I have grouped the Van Dyke and the goatee together, even though the Van Dyke is the official name for the lip-chin combo.) “Imagery often shows Pan or the Devil with a goatee,” says Allan Peterkin, the author of One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair. In the 20th century, the goatee was alluring enough to attract Lenin and Buffalo Bill, Burl Ives and Dizzy Gillespie, Colonel Sanders and Malcolm X, Dobie Gillis’ Maynard G. Krebs and Spike Lee, Anthrax’s Scott Ian and Kurt Cobain. It was Cobain and his grunge mates who resurrected the goatee from its Beat obsolescence in the 1990s. Though the goatee retains little of their residue of cool—if you’re at the cutting edge of facial hair, you’re wearing a full Zach Galifianakis—it is oddly more prominent in mainstream American life than ever.

The New New Goatee sometimes symbolizes brainy gravitas. This is most notable in Chuck Todd, NBC’s chief White House correspondent. Todd’s ginger goatee, which he grew in the summer of 2002, is a bracing counterpoint to clean-shaven mugs like Brian Williams’. “It highlights that nobody on TV has facial hair,” Todd says. But those carefully trimmed whiskers are part of Todd’s magic. A veteran of the D.C. insider tip sheet The Hotline, Todd is NBC’s numbers guy, its Election Day stats guru. In the blowhard universe of TV news, Todd’s pronouncements seem to carry real weight—you actually believe he knows what he’s talking about. Todd’s goatee confers upon him the same kind of authority as a political-science professor’s goatee.

Last month, when Todd lost a public bet with ABC News correspondent Jake Tapper and appeared poised to shave off the goatee, blogger Dan Amira compared it to Samson’s locks. Todd made a $2,000 donation to charity and kept the goatee by a whisker.

An interesting read for sure. On the other hand the comments about the article are nasty to say the least.

What is it with women and facial hair? I recently read an article written by a female lawyer that equated the goatee with a certain female body part. After the read, I almost shave my face completely slick.

To the many goateed here, I hope you don't take offense to what I'm about to say. What Does A Goatee Say About You? You don't have guts to grow a real beard.

Celsius wrote:To the many goateed here, I hope you don't take offense to what I'm about to say. What Does A Goatee Say About You? You don't have guts to grow a real beard.

Offense taken? Not.

What does a goatee say about you????
>>>>>You're too chicken to grow a full beard.