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Move Over, Movember, You’re Standing on My Mustache

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Ideas
Brian Moylan is a writer and pop culture junkie who lives in New York. His work has appeared in Gawker, VICE, New York magazine, and a few other safe-for-work publications.

Correction appended November 5, 2014

The days immediately following Halloween should be wonderful. With the costumes packed up, the leaves littering the ground, and the chill growing, November features the slow days of the fall that roll into the mad dash of the holiday season. There are pumpkin spice lattes, cashmere throws and, if you’re lucky, a fire in the fireplace to make you nice and cozy. November is a dream – unless you have a mustache.

Movember is a charitable event where men grow mustaches for the month of November to raise awareness and hopefully money for male cancers (like prostate cancer). It is like the Ice Bucket Challenge for the face, except not nearly as many celebrities do it (and certainly not Anna Wintour). Movember is also a scourge—well, at least for those of us who are proud Mustached Americans the whole year round.

The 17 Most Influential Mustaches of All Time

Tom Selleck
When a baby-faced Justin Timberlake declared he was bringing sexy back, people in the know worldwide scoffed in unison, secure in the knowledge that sexy never left. It was there the whole time quietly residing in Tom Selleck’s mustache. Kypros/Getty Images
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt's mustache added manly gravitas the man needed as he started the National Parks Service and jumpstarted the modern conservation movement. Could a mustache have a greater legacy?Culture Club/Getty Images
Professional Wrestler
Hulk Hogan's blond horseshoe: striking fear for decades into the hearts of enemy wrestlers and the spouses of men with blond beards. Russell Turiak—Getty Images
Art, Personalities, pic: circa 1930's, Frida Kahlo, Mexican born artist/painter (c1907-1954)
Holding it down for mustached women everywhere, Mexican painter Frida Kahlo’s mustache was so bold as to make an appearance on many of Kahlo’s own self portraits.Frida Kahlo
The actor Boris Karloff as Dr. Fu Manchu in a scene of the film The Mask of Fu Manchu. Photograph. 1932. (Photo by Imagno/Getty Images) Der Schauspieler Boris Karloff als Dr. Fu Manchu in einer Szene für den Film The Mask of Fu Manchu. Photographie. 1932
Dr. Fu Manchu. The super villain so defined this mustache style it was named for him. Doesn’t get much more influential than that. Imagno/Getty Images
Adolf Hitler, Charlie Chaplin
Funnyman Charlie Chaplin (right) made the toothbrush mustache famous. It took the man whose name would become shorthand for pure evil, Adolf Hitler (left), to make it infamous. Getty Images (2)
Joseph Stali, Goucho
Another one of history’s boogeymen, Joseph Stalin (left), shared a mustache style with a contemporary comedy great, Groucho Marx (right)—even if Groucho’s was technically fake. Getty Images (2)
Michael Phelps Drinks on a Milk Mustache
Milk. Among the most easily recognizable marketing campaigns ever, Got Milk? retired in 2014 after two solid decades of faithful service dressing celebrities in milk mustaches, such as Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps. Business Wire/Getty Images
Lanny McDonald Portrait
Lanny McDonald’s red mustache is one of the greatest hockey players of all time. The extraordinary facial adornment body checked and high-scored itself and its owner all the way into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1992. Bruce Bennett—Getty Images
Proctor & Gamble Sells Pringles Brand To Diamond Foods For $1.5 Billion
One of the most iconic mustaches in all the world is literally an icon: the guy from Pringles chip cans.Justin Sullivan—Getty Images
Salvador Dali
This is how you know someone is crazy: they say things like “Salvador Dalí is NOT crazy!” Which Salvador Dalí once did. Because he is crazy. Just look at that 'stache. Jack Mitchell—Getty Images
JOSHUA CHAMBERLAIN
Staunch abolitionist Joshua Chamberlain’s mustache held the line for the Union in the Battle of Gettysburg, a key moment in the Civil War leading to the defeat of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery in the United States. AP
Hasbro Posts 62% Profit Rise In Third Quarter
Rich Uncle Pennybags. Also known as Mr. Monopoly, the Parker Brothers game mascot was based on the real-life monopolist and financier James Pierpont Morgan, according to Philip E. Orbanes, author of the book Monopoly: The World’s Most Famous Game—and How It Got That Way. Scott Olson—Getty Images
Robert Goulet gestures as he arrives to be honoured at Canada's Walk of Fame in Toronto
Talk about influence. This crooner's ‘stache wields so much that the American Mustache Institute named it’s annual mustache prize after it: The Robert Goulet Mustached American of the Year Award. Mark Blinch—Reuters
USA - Hollywood Foreign Press Association's Installation Luncheon in Beverly Hills
Is that some kinda Eastern thing? Far from it, Dude. That is actor Sam Elliot’s extremely chill mustache, which has dropped Western wisdom pearls over the years through the voices of many different characters, from Virgil Earp to the Dude's cowboy sage in The Big Lebowski.Fred Prouser—Reuters/Corbis
Pazyrik Horseman
Mustache Zero. Likely the earliest mustache depiction ever dates from 300 B.C.E. and features a Scythian man on horseback with some kind of mohawk, proving once and for all the mustache’s timeless countercultural bona fides. Wikimedia Commons
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche. The mustache that declared God is dead. Pretty bold. Print Collector/Getty Images

It started already. Today an acquaintance I see regularly said to me, “Oh, look at your mustache for Movember.” While I appreciate people thinking that I’m altruistic enough to raise money for cancer, that is not the case. I have worked long and hard to grow and maintain my furry friend and it certainly did not pop up over the last five days. That’s sort of like visiting a vineyard in Burgundy and saying, “Oh, it’s so cute of you to have planted these grapes last week!” or asking every woman wearing pink in October if it’s for Breast Cancer Awareness month. (Also, what does it say about my friend – or me – that he doesn’t notice one of the more prominent details of my face 11 months out of the year.)

Like I said, raising money for cancer is great, but there is something about Movember that just feeds into the worst aspects of how mustaches are regarded. These days, when you can buy pacifiers that make babies look like they’re sporting lip sweaters or just about everything from notepads to dish soap in the shape of an old-timey handlebar mustache, the facial hair choice for millions is relegated to a joke. The same is true of Movember. It’s a silly stunt to get attention. A beard wouldn’t suffice because they are now so mainstream and connected with virility as to prove indistinguishable, but mustaches, on the other hand, are a punch line. Movember says, “Look at me, I have a mustache. Aren’t I wacky!”

Those of us who wear mustaches hear those jokes too often. “I love your porn ‘stashe,” a randy chap on Grindr will quip to me. Thanks to Burt Reynolds and John Holmes, the mustache will always be equated with pornography and bear skin rugs. There are worse connotations, but this one seems to align itself with a nasty stereotype that mustaches belong to perverts and pedophiles.

I’m often catcalled on the street for sporting a hirsute upper lip. Some people just shout out, “Mustache!” and point. Others, usually of the drunker variety on weekend nights in the bar-invested blocks of Manhattan, say things like, “Nice Hitler mustache, man.” First of all, there have been countless world leaders from Teddy Roosevelt to Martin Luther King who have sported mustaches, but the one everyone goes back to is Adolph Hitler. And my mustache is what is known as a chevron, similar to Tom Selleck’s, not a narrow toothbrush mustache like Charlie Chaplin’s and, ugh, Hitler’s. All mustaches do not look alike.

But that’s what we equate mustaches with: guys who wear trench coats and expose themselves in public and those responsible for genocide. That doesn’t take into account the many great people who have sported them, including so many of your friends, neighbors, relatives and gym teachers (why were gym teachers always mustachioed?). Sure, John Wilkes Booth had a mustache, but so did Albert Einstein! Why don’t we get credit for him?

And in Movember, all of these issues come to the fore, where so many guys think they are cute and clever for 30 days while they get a little fuzziness around the philtrum. They just make everyone think that all mustaches are ironic, that we don’t wear them to look good or express ourselves, but to try to look cool by looking bad (and maybe to push more jars of our hipster artisanal aioli spread at the Brooklyn Flea).

A mustache is a viable option to wear everyday, like sturdy underwear or galoshes, but even handsomer. I don’t have a mustache because I want to be ironic. My mustache is very serious and should be taken at face (ha!) value. I don’t have a mustache because I secretly want a beard (though the rest of my beard is as sparse as a Christmas tree farm on New Year’s Day).

I have a mustache because it looks good on my face and I like having it. I don’t shout disparaging remarks about your eyeglasses or bangs, or fake having them for a month as some jest (as well-intentioned as it may be). Yes, for the Mustached American, Movember is the cruelest month. Maybe all you Johnny-come-latelies can just make a donation and leave your lips bare. Save yourselves and the rest of us the humiliation. Let’s leave the serious business of having a mustache to the professionals.

Correction: The original version of this post stated that Movember is also known as “No Shave November.” It has been corrected.

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