Latest Breaking News
In reply to the discussion: Dermatologists say Marines' tightened shaving waiver could hurt Black members' careers [View all]DFW
(58,137 posts)I suffer from it as well. I also suffered from my high schools (2 different in 11th, and 12th grades) pressuring me to shave, them being totally indifferent to the fact that if I shaved, my face would turn bright red like a boiled lobster. I bent in 11th grade, stopped bending in 12th grade. There were two guys in my graduating class with beards. One was a libertarian right wing type, so he was tolerated. I was not, and so the pressure, while not quite reaching the level of mobbing or harassment, was relentless. As a partial revenge, at graduation, when we were herded together for the class picture, my brother, one class below me, and at a rival school, who was next to me, tried to scramble over the arrogant jocks to be out of the way when the picture was taken. No one would let by, and I said, "look, the school doesn't care about us anyway, so stay put. I bet they'll never notice." Indeed, they never did. I let word filter up about six months later, but they were so indifferent, me being no Republican president's son, to this day, no one ever figured out who the ringer in the photo was.
My high school social life, never the subject of sitcoms to begin with, dropped to flatlining until I stopped shaving. Indeed, my last year of high school, the school paper ran an article about how the girls' school down the road considered us "Freaks, Jocks, and Zeroes," and then ran a photo of me under the headline (and they wonder why I never send them alumni contributions). It didn't take me long to not give a rat's ass if their alumni were put off about one of their students having a beard (this was 1970, after all) or not. That kind of emotional scar lasts a lifetime, and I never forgot it. I stood in unshaven solidarity with every beard-wearer I ever met since.
Edit history
Recommendations
4 members have recommended this reply (displayed in chronological order):