Ah, autumn days. That time of year defined by jewelled grass, silky chestnut shells, and men across the nation eyeing their top lips like adolescents in a month-long event of back-slapping, high-fiving and Instagram-liking. We are now in the thick of Movember season. The last few weeks have seen our Facebook newsfeeds littered with selfies, as the otherwise banal and natural (yet for the female amongst us: totally unacceptable) process of hair growth is eagerly tracked with tongue-in-cheek insults pertaining to the thinness, style or “gingerness” of the emerging whiskers. Precious few of the posts, or the resulting comments, focus on men’s health issues, and virtually none recognise the pernicious gendered and racial connotations carried by the practice.
For the most part, sponsored activities (day-long silences, sponge-throwing, public waxing) depend on the extreme, the outrageous, the ridiculous. Friends and family are, apparently, only willing to part with money to witness something odd, humorous or downright unpleasant. So what message does Movember convey to those whose moustaches are more-or-less permanent features? With large numbers of minority-ethnic men—for instance Kurds, Indians, Mexicans—sporting moustaches as a cultural or religious signifier, Movember reinforces the “othering” of “foreigners” by the generally clean-shaven, white majority. Imagine a charity event that required its participants to wear dreadlocks or a sari for one month to raise funds—it would rightly be seen as unforgivably racist. What is the difference here? We are not simply considering an arbitrary configuration of facial hair, but one that had particular, imperial connotation to British men of our grandfathers’ generation and currently has a separate cultural valence for men from certain ethnic groups. Moustaches, whether or not “mo-bros” mean theirs to be, are loaded with symbolism. We often wonder how our fathers (both life-long moustached men) must feel each November, when their colleagues’ faces temporarily resemble theirs, and are summarily met with giggles and sponsor-money. No doubt they draw the obvious conclusion, that dovetails with many other experiences of life as an immigrant: there are different rules for white faces.
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