Welcome to Mo-vember

Is it November already? (Yes, it is!) Well, according to some drunk guy and what he was shouting outside of a pub last night, that means it’s actually “Movember”, an international excuse for men to grow moustaches for 30 days, and somehow leverage that to raise money for prostate cancer awareness. It’s appropriate, because November 19 is International Men’s Day, according to the United Nations. (Bet you didn’t know that!)

Movember.com is a slick, corporate-style site that lets you sign up your friends in their social networking “Mo Space” as well as coordinate campaigns to promote prostate and testicular cancer.

But Movember.org claims to be the original home of Movember. And it’s a low-rent, amateur website that reads a little bit more like it was the creation of some drunk friends in a bar in Australia.

Which, according to Wikipedia, is exactly how Movember got started. Originally, actually, the Movember Foundation encouraged all participants (girls are welcome, though I’m not sure how) to simply donate any proceeds to the worthy charity of their choice. In fact, they’ve even started a Facebook group that explicitly states, “Movember was never about prostate cancer! Movember is a celebration of what it means to be human, and how that sometimes means doing stupid things for NO GOOD REASON, because it’s fun. By all means, promote the cause of prostate cancer, but let us have our Movember, and all that it doesn’t stand for.”

I sympathize with that sentiment. It rubs me completely the wrong way when gender stereotypes are used to promote women’s this or men’s that. Frankly, I’m a little sick of the way that breast cancer “owns” the colour pink. (Though, if you must, Prostate Cancer Canada’s “blue tie ribbon” is a clever execution of the theme.)

So, if you want an excuse to grow a moustache, and not have to tell people that you’re just experimenting with a different look, you can fall bakc on the prostate cancer thing. But why bother?

If you want to grow a moustache, there already were plenty of excuses. Try Cinco de Moustache, on the Saturday closest to May 5. Or, the Norwegian tradition of the Christmas Moustache.

Or, just create your own cause. Apparently it’s not hard. You can even get written up in the LA Times.