PortMANteau

It's Movember and this is the third year I am participating. Curiously though I never made it through even though I spent the better part of a year sporting a moustache at Honda (I think I wanted to emulate my father's office persona) and had a cavalier moustache in 2nd year uni.

I've also never done Movember for charity. I just think it's a good exercise to grow a moustache at least once a year and change up the appearance.

Subconsciously I must lay blame at the foot of Gillette advertising for the state of the world as I realise I've never ever had one of their razors. But basically their highly effective ads have always consisted of phase 1. guy shaves, phase 2. attractive woman cuddles up to him.

Whilst I can say playing the law of averages shaving and getting a girl follow a if A then B type logic. But it seems to have reduced the common accepted attitude to be "guys you should shave if you want women" which evolved in the worst cases into "as a woman I have the right to demand you shave"

Perhaps the most profound and impressive thing Bryce has ever said was in the following exchange in Year 11/Year 12 I don't remember I bet he does though.

Person: Doesn't your girlfriend hate your goatee?

Bryce: I don't give a shit if she hates it.

It could perhaps be retconned into a stronger exchange. But this in Balifornian sexual politics was unheard of, the suggestion that a person's body image was not to be dedicated to the sole pursuit of attracting the opposite sex.

My own attachment to old shabby clothes was sexual suicide sure, but that was just my naive disinterested stupidity. Bryce was getting laid and controlling his own image.

That's mantastic.

And I think if Movember were to stand for anything, it should stand for this. Being a man isn't just the devotion of ones efforts to attracting a mate.

Being a man is self referential. Grow a mustache for yourself. Sure there's got to be other ways to be a man, and for many men a Mustache is undesirable in a wholesomely self referential way.

And this isn't just about the emasculation of men in times of plenty, it also applies to the idealogical victory of marketing over cool!

Advertising has us believe that cool is changing yourself so people like. Cool has never been such, cool is being liked for refusing to change yourself. It is hard won validation derived from self validation.

Hence I suspect movember has had something to do with Josh Brolin's mantastic mantasy rise to fame. He is a man's man in American Gangster and No Country for Old Men.

Surely Man is entering a new era:
Man up Denzal!