As someone who prides himself on being an acute observer of the outside world, I have managed… As someone who prides himself on being an acute observer of the outside world, I have managed to notice that the Pittsburgh Steelers are playing in the Super Bowl this season. I mention this in case someone hasn’t noticed this occurrence on their own; that is, perhaps they’ve been kidnapped, blindfolded and hidden in a room without radio, television or computer. If this has happened to anyone, I want to be the first to tell you: The Steelers are going to Detroit. Oh, and congratulations on escaping from your kidnappers.

In watching this post-season run, I have also become totally fascinated with all the attention that has become focused on one particular aspect of the Pittsburgh Steelers: the beard of Ben Roethlisberger.

Admittedly, this is a bad beard, being sort of scraggly and shaved straight across on the jaw-line so that at certain angles it resembles more of a purely conceptual geometry concept – perhaps a rhombus? – than a beard, but everyone is acting as if his face possesses the worst facial hair ever invented. Which it totally isn’t, because I saw the worst facial hair ever in an ice skating rink in Wheaton, Md., in 1993. It was a tuft of hair on some guy’s otherwise clean-shaven cheek that was so long he was able to tie it into a ponytail. A ponytail on his face.

I still have nightmares about that thing, so in comparison, Roethlisberger’s beard is just fine, although people have not been acting as such. The ridiculous beard obsession reached its absolute nadir, or perhaps zenith, when the bearded Jake Plummer played the Steelers, which led to, of course, absurd “Battle of the Beards” comments from the various commentators who say various things before games with varying degrees of talent and originality.

Nobody likes beards, it seems. Plummer doesn’t have the best beard – he looks like a slightly more glam Unabomber – but, again, people hate it far more than they should.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently because in the past, when I’ve grown out a beard, people have absolutely despised it, and yet people used to have beards. And it was not just gold panners, or French-Canadian furriers stalking the upper half of our hemisphere for pelts in the 1880s. I’m talking about people as recently in the 1960s and 1970s, back in the days when pot was sold in “lids” and people knew what a “lid” meant. Those people had beards – big, weird, proud-to-be-an-American beards.

Now look around. Who has a beard? Yes, I know, Ben Roethlisberger. But who else? Fine, fine, Jake Plummer, but what about an example I haven’t given you? All right, yeah, maybe that dude who lives down the hall from you who has patched jeans and a turtle for a pet, but, honestly, beards are really dying out.

And why are beards dying out? I think it’s because what beards mean no longer resonates within the general culture the way it has in the past. The old idea of being a man was pretty simple: just be tall, good at sports and able to lift heavy objects. Being able to drink a lot was a total bonus. In this sort of environment, being bearded was all right. It was no problem. It would probably keep one warm working outside in the cold doing something intense, like trying to lift up a car.

This is no longer what we think of when we think of masculinity, which is, after all, not a quantitative fact but instead a subjective idea. Gender, as a biological fact, is something that can be proven, but masculinity or femininity is simply an idea that is created and defined by the culture in which one resides. Thus, being masculine in the ’60s meant something absolutely different than what being a man in the aughts means.

That’s why, if one were to observe the movie stars of today – which is always how we, as a collective culture, wind up defining things – one would see Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, both clean-shaven, boyish men, as opposed to hirsute former box-office draws like Burt Reynolds and Sean Connery. Men are no longer viewing themselves as hairy, bearded, distant individuals because the culture in which we reside no longer views this aspect of masculinity as viable.

So this explains the public shaming of Roethlisberger and his attempts at reclaiming a concept of masculinity that is no longer a viable cultural grooming practice. I am, however, at a total loss to explain his weird haircut.

Bearded or shaven, Kevin Sharp always makes the cut! E-mail him at [email protected].