Face Scraping

Since beards are fashionable now (which means they will eventually cycle back into NOT being fashionable yet again) — THIS would be a good time to ask that we drop the expression “clean-shaven.”

Just like it finally dawned on us to stop thinking the only way a black person can be well-groomed is to straighten out their hair in order to look more like yeah “us” — assuming that removal of male facial hair is the norm by labeling it with the universally positive word “clean” is yet another ethnocentric White Western Christian form of othering.

Newsflash: Male facial hair is entirely “clean” in the Jewish community, in eastern Christian communities, in the continent of Africa, AND with 1.6 billion Muslims globally.

But even looking only at ourselves, our insistence to diss facial hair is hypocritical because we otherwise go way out of our way to identify what is organic or natural. Obviously male facial is natural so to grow it and take pride in grooming it is organically human.

What is very unnatural is our prideful insistence, our cultural obsession to conquer nature, to celebrate a daily battlefront ritual of scraping off natural facial hair with 4 overpriced micro-blades and all kinds of chemicals that really should not touch our skin in the first place.

Lucky for all of us, freedom of choice is STILL fashionable, so please feel free to keep on scraping your face every morning + at no extra charge, I hereby also declare that everyone is free to be attracted to scraped male faces — except now you know that face-scraping does NOT make your face clean but DOES make you unnatural. . . OMG, I hope my labeling you “unnatural” doesn’t hurt your feelings! 

Yikes, that wasn’t nice of me —I should go “clean” my mouth out!