Should men shave their facial hair? This apparently trivial inquiry leads us to profound wisdom about sexes and their roles.

Hair in men, animals and plants serve a very important function of temperature management. Human facial hair appears with puberty when brain begins to fire on all cylinders. But it does not happen in pubescent girls skeptics may object. They forget a simple fact that male brain is larger and heavier than a female brain. Hence nature has evolved extra foliage for it.

There was a historical time when a female face could launch a thousand ships. Then Alexander the great had a brain wave that a flowing beard was a handicap in hand-to-hand combat. His army men began to shave. This clean-shaven, handsome, smart and victorious army slowly and steadily swept the beards away, initiating erosion in the equilibrium between the sexes. With face as symbol of womanhood gone, women began to take care of their breasts. Its symbolism as object of attraction for men blinded us to its real function – breast-feeding of infants.

Alexander could not conquer the world but his idea of shaving conquered the civilized males all over the world. In the animal world, male and female compliment each other as equal but non-identical partners. Homo sapiens, the wise animals, or we are the exception. Here male and female are competing partners, equal and identical in thinking and behavior. The human sexes desperately striving to imitate each other are breaking homes – the building blocks of society.

Science in the twentieth century discovered that not breast feeding leads to breast cancer and that breast-feeding are ideal for infant and mother for emotional reasons too. The risk factor of shaving every day is waiting to be discovered soon. Not only our physiology but our psychology too suffers from these unnatural indulgences.

Men’s testicles are another example of a human organ and its extreme sensitivity to temperature. It hangs outside the body and maintains its temperature by adjusting its distance from the body. Using a tight undergarment in a tropical country like India has resulted in drastic reduction in sperm count.

The conclusion is very obvious. We go against nature at our own peril. A bottle-feeding mother deprives an infant of the purest food and emotional bonding and strengthened immune system and puts the mother at risk of breast cancer. Likewise, shaving of facial hair by men is also interference in nature. The consequences cannot be good.

Since men pride themselves on their superior brain they should take the initiative to correct this irrational aberration in our behavior. It is urgently required for the well being of our infants, men, women and human society.