Alright. This might end up being a bit of stretch, but don't hold it against me. Just a thought.
I was getting ready for work, brushing my teeth, splashing some water on my face to try and wake up as I am perpetually tired these days, and I dried my face and the few days of scraggly growth that has accumulated on my cheeks and jawline. (Side note: upon auditioning for a movie role, I was told I looked too young and should grow a beard. I told them, "Well, it's not going to be a real beard, but sure." So I haven't trimmed it.) This got me to thinking about the concept of facial hair as a whole. And I stumbled upon a question in my own head that I hadn't previously thought of:
Why do men have facial hair and women don't?
It's easy to say that these days it comes down to a matter of preference, and has probably affected sexual preference for as far back as we can remember. That plays a certain role in all of it, sure. (And I'm guessing a bunch of you out there might argue, "Dude, women DO." Anyway.) Maybe there was a flip of a coin back in the day and the first caveman decided he liked a woman who didn't have any hair on her face, so they started popping out babies and subsequently less and less women over time sported a regal chin carpet. But I kind of doubt that was the whole story from the get-go, and I'm thinking there was more of a biological basis to it.
Well, I spent some time looking around on the internet. Of course, a lot of the results I found jumped over the evolutionary basis, and went straight to the modern day biology. Male hormones tend to accelerate hair growth on the face and slow growth on the top of the head during puberty, when sexual hormones become more active. Female sexual hormones actually tend to accelerate hair growth on the top of the head, which I think should eventually be pushed out of the natural selection process, since men everywhere can agree that women who go to the salon twice a week and spend three hours a day shampooing and conditioning are clearly missing out on valuable procreation time. Regardless, just because that's what our hormones do these days doesn't mean that's the reason it all started. It's pretty much like saying the reason we get hungry is because our bodies release chemicals that tell us to eat. Well sure, that happens, but the reason they GET released in the first place is because our organs are concerned that they're lacking enough nutrients to continue working at full capacity. THAT is what I'm looking for here.
One possible solution I found was that in the early days, being a man and having a beard was useful for being recognized from a distance. Hey, that sounds good, except, why? "Oh look, someone is coming! Hey wait--it's a man!!" ?? I don't really know what purpose that serves? Certainly you can give credence to the theory that humans have hair to keep themselves warm. And that over time, as the body became less exposed to the elements, body hair started waning, but facial hair remained as strong as ever because the face was always exposed. (Thus, future descendants of ninjas will probably have smooth baby faces.) Still, that's a good explanation for why men have beards. But why DON'T women?
Well, the best answer I found in all of my exhaustive searching (11 minutes, 4 google queries) was, of course, related to mating. When humans were not human, and instead animals that walked around on all fours and often found themselves head-to-hind, males were able to distinguish the potential fertility in a mate by noticing a female's swollen ...ahem... goods. Then all the sudden we jumped up on two legs so we could swing from tree-to-tree on vines and participate in Edward 40-Hands. Now that we were forced to look women eye-to-eye, we had no way of knowing if her seeds were ripe. Ding ding ding! Biological significance. Apparently, women's faces get a nice red glow to them when they're feeling the heat, but if they were outfitted like ZZ Top, us men would never have any way of knowing (certainly we wouldn't ASK). So God reached down from the heavens with his Mach 4 and ripped that face felt right off.
I'm not sure if this is the 100% guaranteed fool proof reasoning behind beardless women, but I'm going to stick with it as my own theory for the next time I find myself in an awkward situation and need to play it cool with a fun fact of evolution. Of course, there's always the answer that Eve, the first woman, didn't have a beard because God didn't want her to, so, end (and beginning) of story. Either way, I for one am glad that things turned out like this. Especially because I myself can't really grow anything, so it's comforting that at least there aren't millions of women out there kicking my ass with their lady-scruff.
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