By Giuseppe DiMartino
Special to YNOT
LANGLEY, Va. – According to the Washington Times, Judicial Watch, an organization presumably dedicated to spying on judges, is suing the Central Intelligence Agency under the Freedom of Information Act. At issue: Osama bin Laden’s alleged “porn ’stache.”
As a mustache-growing champion, I must say I’ve always found the term “porn ’stache” to be an offensive pejorative, a means of diminishing and denigrating the facial hair accomplishments of men like Tom Selleck, or more recently, Denzel Washington.
While I’ve finally (and grudgingly) accepted the general public’s tendency to abbreviate mustache to ’stache, it’s difficult for me to let go of proper nomenclature with respect to facial hair. So, while it might be trendy or hip to refer to bin Laden’s soup-strainer as a “porn” mustache, I feel compelled to point out that in my world it would be categorized simply as a “natural” mustache.
Now, things get a bit more complicated if we also consider bin Laden’s beard, but no matter how one slices it, no amount of gunfire from Navy Seal Team 6 could have rendered bin Laden’s beard and mustache pairing into, say, a Musketeer or Fu Manchu.
Not to speak ill of the dead, but from the perspective of a competitive mustache grower, there was simply nothing award-worthy, or even particularly notable, about bin Laden’s facial hair, whatever we choose to call it. As a matter of fact, I am unaware of any facial hair competitions, sanctioned or otherwise, in which bin Laden ever competed.
As such, you could argue it doesn’t really matter what we call bin Laden’s mustache style. There’s principle involved here, though — principle rooted in a long and glorious history of facial hair excellence.
Honestly, if anyone should be suing the CIA over its description of bin Laden’s mustache, the suit should be a class action affair filed by me and my peers from the World Beard and Moustache Championships (WBMC). With a little creativity, I think we could argue the CIA’s description is defamatory, generally, towards all men with facial hair, especially those who grow such competitively or wear it in furtherance of enhancing the sexual appeal of the characters they play in erotic films.
Plus, if you do your research and comb through the long history of porn — which, trust me, I’ve done plenty — you’ll discover mustaches like bin Laden’s aren’t particularly well represented in pornography to start with.
Sure, you’ll find the occasional snapshot of Harry Reems or John Holmes with a mustache that appears to fit the bill, but in more modern works, mustaches of any kind are rare. Perhaps that sad state of affairs is an accommodation or mirroring, if you will, of the lack of pubic hair on modern female porn performers.
If chaffing concerns are driving this dearth of mustaches in porn, please allow me to disabuse you of the myth mustaches chafe crotch skin. In fact, long mustache hair provides a quite pleasant tickle, something akin to being lightly touched with a soft-bristle brush. The real culprit with respect to crotch-chaffing, of course, is beard and mustache stubble, not the sort of well-curated works of true mustache maestros like those of us who populate the WBMC.
So, while I generally support Judicial Voyeur’s effort to get as much information about bin Laden’s mustache as may responsibly be made available to the public, I’m hereby calling on the international media to stop referring to it as a “porn ’stache.”
Referring to the deceased terrorist leader’s mustache in such a fashion not only obscures the plainly visible truth about bin Laden’s facial hair, but it also undermines the seriousness of Judicial Snoop’s legal efforts and trivializes the sacrifices of extreme facial hair athletes like myself.
So please, all you folks in the media: Do the right thing and rewrite all these bin Laden/porn stash headlines to more accurately and fairly reflect the truth, not just about bin Laden’s mustache, but about beard and mustache styles in general.
If you fail to do so, an entire generation could find itself irreparably misinformed as to the reality of pornographic mustache styles — not to mention greatly disadvantaged when it comes to attempting to intelligently discuss globally famous facial hair with their more worldly elders.
Giuseppe DiMartino is a three-time world champion mustache grower in the Imperial mustache category, and author of the book “Facial Hair and Exceptionalism: The Rise and Fall of the Bearded American President”
