You may be wondering what stubble’s got to do with it…. I had been wondering why so many men in current advertising, including the man deemed the “Sexiest Man Alive” by a popular magazine, are often photographed and filmed with three to five days of stubble. My curiosity got the better of me when I read an interview with a female actor who had just completed a movie about a same-sex relationship. When asked what she liked best about kissing another woman, she replied, “No stubble.”
It turns out that stubble is women’s Number-One complaint about kissing men. It outranks bad breath and sloppy kissing. Of all the possible offensive things you can think of, stubble garners the most complaints. What I don’t understand is, if stubble is so bad, how did it get to be so popular? Is it one of those things that looks good in spite of being uncomfortable for the kissee? It does, perhaps, add to the “bad boy” image and may (in the U.S., at least) evoke cultural memories of the Wild West when bathing and shaving were done once a month or so. In the States, the “outlaw mystic” has a great deal of cultural appeal. Back in the days of the Miami Sound Machine, Gloria Estefan sang about what seems an enduring truth: “Bad, bad boys make me feel so good…”
A number of studies have shown that women prefer “bad boys” when they are ovulating, while they prefer cleaner-cut, “nice guys” the rest of the month. Women, it seems, want to reproduce with bad boys and live with nice guys. See “Men With Macho Faces Attractive to Fertile Women, Researchers Find” in Science News for a comprehensive summary of the research. In a related finding, the article states that women evidently don’t find intelligence especially attractive when they are looking for partners with whom to mate. Intelligence may not be so readily observed as a strong chin covered by stubble. A strong chin and heavy brow are indicators of physical power. As Henry Kissinger said, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” and the appearance of physical power is a sexual magnet. Other kinds of power may not be immediately visible, but women tend to respond once they recognize it. You can probably think of more than one male politician who has been able to “get the girls” for reasons other than his rugged, masculine good looks.
Other Odds and Ends
Have you noticed the ways the English language has been changing over time? In an old Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, Calvin tells Hobbs that he likes “verbing nouns.” You may have heard someone ask, “How will that impact us?” In the old days, it would have been “influence” or “affect.” The noun, “impact,” has become the verb, “impact.” It can also happen the other way around. Verbs can be nouned. Have you noticed, for example, that we no longer send and receive invitations. We send and receive invites. It now sounds perfectly normal to say, “Text me,” or “She was texting just before the collision….”
We are also losing the distinction between lectern, a desk for holding materials for reading to a group, and podium, something to stand on while giving a speech (such as a soap box). Language does, of course, change over time. Read a play by Shakespeare, for example. See if you know what to do with a “bare bodkin.” Hint: Hamlet did not find one hiding behind the arras, nor was Polonius showing his bare arras. “Bodkin” is an old word for “dagger,” which is becoming an old word for “knife.” “Arras” is an old word for “curtain,” and Polonius was hiding behind it when Hamlet stabbed him. If you’re interested in more change, try reading Chaucer in the original, or for even more challenge, take a look at “Beowulf.” I would be surprised if you recognize the language of “Beowulf” as English. There’s no doubt that language changes over time.
Be that as it may, the elimination of “lectern” in favor of “podium” is one change I don’t fully understand. Both words have Latin and Old Greek origins, so it isn’t that we are dumping a word from “dead” languages in favor of the modern English equivalent. Perhaps it is more a matter of shedding an extra word—why have two words when one will do? Those of you brought up in the days when we had a firm distinction between “lectern” and “podium” may, however, make entirely different images in your internal representation of the activity being described. People can, for example, stand on a podium, but standing on a lectern would be awkward at best. What imagery do you make when you are told that a speaker “gets behind the podium”? I suspect that the mental image you make depends entirely on your age. We may have to start asking, “What kind of podium, exactly?”
Those of you who have been paying attention to cultural change, may have to ask, “What kind of stubble exactly?” It seems to me that the loss of distinctions language is capable of conveying leads to a reduction in what’s usually called the transfer of meaning from one person to another during the process of communication. What kind of communication exactly? Would that be verbal (oral, written, electronic) or nonverbal (gestures, images)? It is hard to say (at least for me) how important such losses might be. As the hypnotherapist Milton Erickson discovered, readers and listeners will automatically fill in deletions and create internal representations based on their own distortions and generalizations, and that isn’t going to change whether you’re behind an arras or a lectern or showing your bare bodkin while standing on a podium.
And when you think of someone standing on a podium showing a bare bodkin, what mental image did you make? Did it include stubble?
