The is the first installment of a new series from Pacific Standard called The American Man, written by Thomas Page McBee, author of the forthcoming title, Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man (City Lights/Sister Spit, September 9, 2014).

This article looks at tattooing as a male bonding ritual. His perspective in these articles (and likely his book as well) is sure to be more interesting than some other male writers on gender - McBee is a transman, and therefore has had to manufacture a sense of masculinity in ways many cis-males have never even considered.

The American Man: A Late Night at Magic Cobra Tattoo

By Thomas Page McBee • June 19, 2014


(Photo: Susan Law Caiz/Shutterstock)

Our constant exploration for a sense of belonging is just about the only thing that could bring Brooklyn hipsters, queers, and a Christian couple from California all together for tattoos in the middle of a full-moon night. That and the $13 price tag.

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The plan was for the scruffy lot of us to line up at midnight on the 12th outside Magic Cobra Tattoo in Brooklyn to get Friday the 13th tattoos—an underground tradition in shops across the country where $13, tenacity, and whiskey (recommended, not required) gets you a date with a piece of flash chosen last-minute off the shop’s board: a skull with “13” for eyes, a dagger, a toilet on fire.

My two buddies and I have dozens of tattoos between us, and there was talk of all three of us getting the same one. A crown, I figured, though I’d go for the owl or a dagger maybe, too. I love my friends, I love reclaiming masculine ritual, and I love tattoos.

What could go wrong?

Male bonding traditions are strikingly consistent and problematic in many cultures: often simultaneously homophobic and homosexual, pervasive, historic, and even animal—from skin cutting in Papua New Guinea to foreskin suturing by the Romans to bullet ant-sting initiation in Brazil—they’re also stunning in their commitment to pain and power as a way to mark a masculine coming-of-age.

One dark, modern side of such rituals is hazing—of particular concern in the military and college fraternities. The Army, which defines hazing as “an activity typically steeped in tradition, bound by silence, and ritualistic in nature” that “is thought to mark a transition, celebrate an achievement, or bring someone into a social or professional circle” has a zero tolerance policy for such activities, and the “deadliest fraternity” has eliminated pledging altogether.

I think that’s wise, and the fact is, ever since I began injecting testosterone three years ago, I’ve been drawn to ritual. I didn’t have a boyhood, never stayed up all night at summer camp engaging in harmless pranks like writing “butts” on some poor sap’s forehead, and—like a lot of modern men—I walk a knife’s edge between nostalgia for a true straight razor shave and a gratitude that I can be my tight-jean, literary self without much worry. I’m turned off by the endemic sexism, violence, and homophobia peppering locker room and barbershop talk, and—since I never felt an affiliation with my birth gender—I’m 33 and, for the first time in my life, I experience gender affinity with every toll booth ticket taker who calls me “brother” or “boss.”

Men are taught that power is the key to relationships, which is where a lot of troubling behavior starts. But an instinct to ritualize bonding may come from a need for healthy belonging. Contrary to popular belief, studies show that under stress that results in vulnerability groups of men (like women) demonstrate cooperative behavior that leads to less aggression and more trust and compassion. So Friday the 13th tattoos with my buddies felt more goodtime portside sailor than, you know, frat nightmare kidnapping and death. That was the idea, anyway.

It was only right that the night started off with my good buddy’s first trip to Shake Shack. We ate burgers and talked about this horrible dude we both want to punch in the face and the women we love, tenderness and red meat and elaborate fantasies regarding this guy getting his comeuppance. Then he bailed on the idea of tattoos so he could get up early enough to meet his fiancée in Philly (“I get it,” I said, because I did), and I took the G to hold a spot in line for my other friend.

The parlor line was a culture all its own. Hardcore old tattoo dudes; Brooklyn hipsters; and a mishmash of twentysomething hip-hop heads, and wide-eyed first-timers drank beer out of coffee cups and smoked joint after joint. A kid I knew from queer dance parties showed up, read my astrological chart, and hit on the straight girl in front of us who planned to get a UFO inked on her neck. She was with two doofuses, one of whom announced that he was “just here to meet bitches,” which drew a look from pretty much everyone around him. “Sorry,” he said, but he wasn’t. Later, I felt a twinge of victory when the straight girl ordered him to buy her cigarettes and he was gone, hitting three stores and returning to her with his hands outstretched, like an offering.

My friend showed up late and got in line with someone else, leaving me with no plan and a ragtag group—the straight Queens guys up-talking peyote with blustery bravado while holding an umbrella over my head, the queer kid smoking endless kush out of a vaporizer, and the Christian California couple behind me who went and bought me beer and snacks at 3 a.m. but stared at me, wide-eyed, when the queer kid announced that we were “all gay”—which wasn’t really true, I sleep with women, but whatever, close enough.

“You people might not like this,” the Queens guy just here to hit it with the ladies mumbled to us drunkenly around 4, “but there’s this reggae dance night in the Rockaways you should check out.” Kush Queer smiled politely, while I tried to understand whose people he thought I was exactly—gay ones, I guessed. It occurred to me that, as usual, I straddled the world in which I passed and the one in which I didn’t.

I can always bond, but never commit, to one way of being a man: I belong everywhere and nowhere at once.

Maybe that’s the reality of a lot of my brethren. Younger men aren’t as hampered by social constructions of masculinity, and though we may hunger to reclaim some aspects of it with our boxing clubs and barber shops, we have less of a need to codify what being a man means in primal, no-pain-no-gain terms. Generation Y men do more housework and are more engaged fathers than any generation before. Despite the need to be better feminists, many of us—contrary to what Pharrell thinks—use the term to define ourselves.

I caught sight of my friend after he got a knot tattoo on his arm, and we hugged and then he took off. I’d decided to go my own way with the log cabin, but by 4 I’d lost steam. It had been five hours, someone said the tattooists were drunk, and I felt a little hungover. When the rain kicked up, I told my new friends I was out, collected pounds from all of them, and hopped in a trolling cab.

It was the ride home that, surprisingly, offered me the fraternity I’d spent all night seeking. The driver, a Nigerian man with bad hearing and alarmingly erratic steering, couldn’t find the bridge to get me back to Manhattan. After a few minutes circling the same three blocks, I asked if we were lost. “Yes,” he said, pulling over, actually holding his head in his hands. It was 5 in the morning on a Friday, the salmon sunrise making everything a little sparkly. “I’m so ashamed,” he said.

“It’s all right,” I told him, because it was. He’d turned off the meter, I had nowhere to be, and the rain made the light look magic.

After getting back on the road and asking another cabbie for directions, my man turned around and faced me. “Have you ever been lost?” he asked, his eyes pleading, and I knew that what I wanted was this: a kindness to sand the edge off days filled with tiresome bravado, electric moments of near-violence, shit talk and flexing and avoiding a mysterious fight on Canal with a guy who accused me (wrongly) of “taking pictures of his car.” This moment wasn’t a ritual or a test, but when I answered the cabbie, I felt fraternal.

“I’m always lost,” I said, and we both laughed, two strangers in fragile bodies, connected in our liminal crossing of the bridge, under the sun that just kept on rising over our journey home.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The American Man is a new semi-regular series from Thomas Page McBee that features gonzo reporting from barbers shops, boxing gyms, frat houses, and other bastions of masculinity in an effort to define what makes a modern man.


Thomas Page McBee is the author of the forthcoming book Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man. He has written about gender for the New York Times, the Atlantic, Vice, Salon, and the Rumpus, where he pens the column “Self-Made Man.” Follow him on Twitter @thomapagemcbee.

Jed Diamond - Mentored Boys or Monster Boys

From The Good Men Project, this article by Jed Diamond looks at the importance of mentoring for boys and young men - and more than that, he looks at the importance of rites of passage.

Mentored Boys or Monster Boys

MAY 5, 2013 BY JED DIAMOND PH.D

“In the absence of elders, the impetuosity of youth becomes the slow death of the community.” Jed Diamond takes his grandson on a rite of passage. 

I wrote recently about my preparations to take my 15 year-old grandson, Deon, for a four day, young men’s rites of passage, retreat. It was truly an adventure of a life-time for both of us and want to share a bit about the experience with you.

I’ve long believed that mentoring is critical to the well-being of our children and grandchildren, particularly the young men. It’s also critical to the well-being of our communities. Many years ago I attended a mentoring workshop with ritual elder, Malidoma Somé. He said, “Elders and mentors have an irreplaceable function in the life of any community. Without them, the young are lost—their overflowing energies wasted in useless pursuits.”

He went on to remind us that “old must live in the young like a grounding force that tames the tendency towards bold but senseless actions and shows them the path of wisdom. In the absence of elders, the impetuosity of youth becomes the slow death of the community.” Psychologist Robert Moore offers a chilling recognition of what happens when young men are not mentored or given initiations into manhood. He says we move from healthy masculinity to monster-boy masculinity.

Comedian Elayne Boosler offers a humorous, yet insightful assessment about the different ways males and females deal with the stresses of life. “When women are depressed they either eat or go shopping. Men invade another country.” If we’re going to heal males and save humanity, there’s nothing more important than mentoring our young men.

My grandson, Deon, was dealing with a lot of stress, had few mentors in his life, and his anger was causing problems at home and at school. He had gotten in trouble with some other kids and came to the attention of the local police. His father and mother (my daughter) were divorced and his father didn’t spend a lot of time with him. I was hoping that attending the 4 day “Call to Adventure Rites of Passage Retreat,” sponsored by the Los Angeles Men’s Center, would help him at this important transition time in his life. I chose the Men’s Center Call to Adventure (CTA) because I knew it was high quality and also because they reached out to inner city Black kids between the ages 12 and 20. My first wife and I adopted Angela when she was 3 ½ months old. She’s Black and has four kids. Deon is the oldest boy.

I drove down from my home in Willits, picked Deon up at his home in Bakersfield, and headed for Los Angeles. Deon didn’t say much driving down. He’s a quiet kid. But he told me he wanted to do the retreat.

We needed a rest stop so I pulled off the freeway in Encino and stopped at a small park. I had remembered it from my childhood. It was a place my father had taken me numerous times before I was five years old. I thought we might get inspiration from being there, but was not prepared for what my grandson had to say as we sat in the grass. “You said you were interested in some kind of rite of passage from boyhood to manhood. What is it you’re wanting to get from the experience?” I wanted to know.

I expected his usual shake of the head or an “I don’t know.” But what he said was amazingly clear and concise. “I want three things,” he told me. “I need guidance. I also want more confidence. And I want respect.” I told him I thought with that kind of clarity and desire he would get what he wanted.

I also asked him what he thought the qualities of a good man were for him. Again, I was surprised by his insights and vision. He gave me seven things he associated with being a good man.

1. A good man takes care of himself and his family.
2. A good man is a working man and has a job.
3. A good man knows what’s right and what is wrong.
4. If he’s right a good man stands up for himself, but doesn’t make the other person wrong.
5. A good man apologizes when he’s wrong.
6. A good man helps people when they need help.
7. A good man always has a back-up plan.

I’ve learned from many years of experience that no matter how clear our vision of what we want in life we’re not likely to be successful achieving it without a connection with mentors and a healing community. I had chosen this rite of passage experience because of the connection I’ve had with the founder of the Los Angeles Men’s Center, Dr. Stephen Johnson. I’ve known Stephen for more than 25 years and have found him to be one of the most grounded and compassionate men I know. He’s written a wonderful book, The Sacred Path: The Way of the Spiritual Warrior, that gathers his experiences working with men and providing Rites of Passage for both young males and adult men over the last 35 years.

“Our young males are yearning for a sense of belonging,” says Johnson. “Inner city youth, succumbing to the dramatic absence of fathering and mentoring, turn to urban gangs for a sense of belonging. Males from privileged and underprivileged backgrounds often perceive acquisitions as the measure of manhood.” Johnson started offering the Call to Adventure retreats 14 years ago to make a difference in the lives of young men and older mentors.

When we arrived at the site for the retreat, I was knocked out by the peace, serenity, and beauty of the place. It’s located on a bluff 800 feet above Camp Hess Kramer and the Pacific coast and boasts spectacular views of the ocean, Channel Islands and surrounding Santa Monica Mountains. It triggered memories from when I attended U.C. Santa Barbara and was embarking on my own journey to manhood.

A good setting can go a long way towards a good experience and I was looking forward to seeing how the place would interact with the people and the program. We had arrived early and a staff member welcomed us and invited us to help build the sweat lodge which would be part of the ceremonial experience we would take part in later.

I was tired from the drive, but Deon volunteered right away and went off with the guys to help. It turned out that the sweat lodge became one of the cornerstone experiences for Deon in the weekend. Our group participated the next day. We listened to Inipi Sweat Lodge Ceremony leader Thomas Alvarez describe the way in which the sweat lodge was used by native peoples throughout the world to cleanse, pray, and ask for guidance.

One of the young men who had participated in a number of previous CTA retreats encouraged our group of adults and young men prior to going into the lodge. “This may be a new experience for many of you and it’s not the kind of thing most of us have done where we come from,” he told us. “But it can be a very powerful way of asking for guidance and getting support. It will be hot and dark and your natural tendency may be to get away as fast as you can, but hang in there if you can and you’ll get something important.”

He also told us that sometimes we sweat for others who are carrying a lot pain and difficulty in their lives but can’t be there. He said he was doing this for himself and also for his twin brother who was in prison. I thought of my daughter Angela and her family and wanted to help carry some of the burden of the pain she lived with every day as she dealt with the stresses of her family life.

There were “four rounds” to the experience and Thomas guided our prayers and sang to the spirits. It got very, very hot, but Deon and most of the others hung in there. By the end we all felt cleansed, had been forced to deal with our fears, and felt stronger for having gone through the experience together. After dinner that evening we met in small “tribal” groups with 10-15 adult mentors and kids.

We went around the circle and talked a bit about why we were here. Deon opened up immediately and told the group, “I’m lost in my life and I need guidance.” Young and old knew what he meant and many opened up to their own feelings of being lost. For the first time I had a deep experience of the violence that so many of these kids live with every day. One boy talked about killings he had seen in his neighborhood and Deon also talked about people he knew who had been killed. Another young boy said that didn’t want a lot in life, just to know that he would survive another day.

Steve Branker, one of the Men’s Center organizers said, “The pressures that these young men face in everyday life are astounding. Instead of primarily dealing with such things as schoolwork and girlfriends, they are dealing with whether or not they will come back alive after they walk out of their homes each day.”

I thought to myself, “God, they’re so small and what they are dealing with is so big.” I felt the terrible loss and pain that so many experience, but also the courage they had to break free of the life of violence and to reach for something better. I felt deeply blessed to be able to share this experience with my grandson and the other mentors who were committed to helping these kids survive their childhood and grow into adults who had something they could look forward to in life.

The next day we had the opportunity to confront the Ropes Course where leaders from Fulcrum, Inc. engaged us in taking risks to stretch ourselves and to celebrate their motto of Do, Risk, Grow and cultivate the potential greatness of each individual and the group as a whole. It was inspiring to see kids and adults reaching past their fear to test themselves and their limits.

As we gathered for our final goodbyes Stephen reminded us about why we were here and what we still had to accomplish. “Our boys, young men, and our mature men are calling on us to explore with clarity what the role of fathers, grandfathers, and mentors should be. If we do not provide a sacred role for our boys as they grow, they are more likely to join a gang, abuse their lovers, abandon their wives and children, subsist in emotional isolation, and become addicted, hyper-materialistic, lonely, and unhappy.”

“A boy needs a structure and discipline in which to learn who he is. He needs to live a journey that has clear responsibilities and goals. He needs a role in life. Without these, without the role training that accompanies these, he does not know his sacred and important objectives in life.” Deon leaned over and whispered to me, “Can I come back next year?”

“If you want to come back, we’ll make it happen,” I told him. “And maybe we’ll get your dad and younger brother to come as well. What do you think?” He just smiled and nodded his head.


~ If you’d like to learn more about these important programs for mentoring young men, visit the Men’s Center website.
~ Read more on Mentoring & Volunteering.
~ Images courtesy of the author

A warrior code gone wrong - Hazing is not initiation

This article from the Times Live (South Africa) does a good job of distinguishing between hazing and meaningful initiation.

Hazing is mean-spirited, cruel, and serves no purpose other than humiliation. Often, it is little more than ritualized abuse. Initiation, however, is not mean-spirited or focused on humiliation - it seeks to test the initiate to prove his merit. Initiation is a "rite of passage."

Initiation has essentially disappeared in any meaningful sense. (The Mankind Project has their own version, but many men have found it humiliating and degrading.) In the absence of any real structure, hazing has become widely practiced and accepted, especially in sports teams and fraternities.

A warrior code gone wrong


Judith Ancer | 28 August, 2011

Initiation practices are all too often brutal, bizarre and wholly irrelevant.

The 13-year-old boy was home for a holiday, having just finished his first term at a prestigious boys' boarding school. His parents had brought him to therapy because he was "just not himself" - he was withdrawn, moody and had lost weight. While the boy at first insisted everything was okay, it soon emerged that senior boys had made him crawl naked over concrete, had rubbed Deep Heat over his genitals and forced him to drink what he thought was urine.


The boy had been "initiated", playing his small part in an often agonising ritualised drama that has been going on for centuries.


Sambia people in New Guinea did it by thrusting wooden sticks up the nostrils of five-year-old boys. In prisons, some gang initiates still do it by stabbing prison warder s. In the Russian army, some non-commissioned officers do it by branding recruits. At universities, undergraduates occasionally die while doing it. Some school sports teams do it by stripping, shaving and beating each other.


The question is, why?


Why do these kinds of practices survive in the 21st century? When we test someone's right to join our fraternity by cursing, assaulting or humiliating them, we are doing it to the previous version of ourselves. We were once that high school kid, that freshman. Yet we stand in line to pass it on to the next generation.


Communities have always conducted rites of passage both religious, such as bar mitzvahs, circumcisions and christenings, and secular, like 21st birthday parties and matric dances, which take young people through a journey from childhood to adulthood. Today these acts of initiation range from character-building and profound, through the playful or silly, to the abusive and frankly illegal.


The original purpose of initiation often gets lost. The word "initiation" derives from Latin for "entrance" or "beginning", literally "a going in". Historically, these rituals helped prepare individuals psychologically, physically and symbolically for the world they had to live in. But out of context, and taken too far, they constitute ritualised group abuse and institutionalised bullying.


Once they take hold in a group, harsh initiation practices become part of that culture and can be difficult to uproot. More than one school head has discovered that their attempt to moderate initiation practices is actively resisted by pupils, who wish to pass on the same trial by fire they underwent.


Often initiations are defended as arduous tests of strength and character, teaching humility and toughening up or weeding out the weak, the argument goes. However, most of us school our children to prepare them for the 21st century workplace, not for the rigours of the battlefield or a survivalist lifestyle.


Even in the military, brutal initiations are controversial. Sean Renaud, a New Zealand academic who researched the Chechen wars, comments on the impact of initiation practices on the Russian army when they fought in Chechnya. Those units that had the harshest versions of initiation were the first to fall apart under enemy fire and desert. And how well did our Kamp Staaldraad warriors do in the 2003 Rugby World Cup?


As parents, we might feel anxious about our children's initiations. There are a couple of questions you might want to ask:

• Is your child being initiated or hazed? Initiation is intended to be a meaningful, controlled and ritualised ceremony. Hazing is just abusing and humiliating someone who is new;
• What is the purpose of the initiation? How will running through a line of stick-wielding verbal abusers prepare your child for a future job as a doctor, IT specialist or plumber?;
• For boys, is initiation merely a way of forcing them into a stereotypical mould of masculinity? Being tough and controlling one's emotions is just one version of masculinity. A 21st century man has just as great a need to solve problems and contribute to nation building; and
• Do we tolerate the practice because we believe in it, or are we denying the pain, vulnerability and humiliation of our own initiation experiences?

Parents must make up their own minds about initiations, but should do so from a position of knowledge. Your child is ultimately your responsibility, so insist that a school is transparent about initiation practices and that you will not tolerate mindless hazing.


Lastly, speak out about the need for initiation practices to move with the times. Isn't it time initiations focused more on collaboration and community building through problem solving, creativity and strategic thinking?


Ancer is a Johannesburg-based psychologist

Saying Thank You and Goodbye in Dance

Found this at Robert Krulwich's NPR blog - very moving. These kids use dance as both celebration and mourning - a ritual of loss in the East Oakland rain. Krulwich calls it "a celebration so fierce and so tender that it took my breath away" and I agree.

Thanks

November 25, 2010

by Robert Krulwich

This is the day we give thanks. That is why I want to share this video.

Four friends are gathered on a street corner in East Oakland, California, at the very spot where the half brother of one of them was killed a few days before. It's raining. They are there to remember their friend. They do this, dancing. That is their way, I guess, of saying 'thank you' to the one who is no longer there. At the end of the dance, they say thank you to each other. To them, I say thank you for a celebration so fierce and so tender that it took my breath away.

Yak Films
Source: YouTube

These dancers call themselves Turf Feinz.

They are:

• No Noize in the red jacket.

• BJ is wearing the striped shirt.

• Man has on the black jacket.

• Dreal, in the white shirt, is the half brother of Rich D, the young man who was killed.

The video was produced by YAK Films. Their website has more.

Tags: thanks, death, dance, rituals, NPR, Robert Krulwich, Thanks, East Oakland, celebration, mourning, Yak Films, Turf Feinz

Coming of Age: The Importance of Male Rites of Passage

Another cool post from The Art of Manliness, this time on rites of passage.

Coming of Age: The Importance of Male Rites of Passage

November 9, 2008

The elders of the tribe stood in front of the hut and beckoned for the young man to come out and begin the festivities of the special day. The young man had barely slept the night before, anxiously anticipating the tests he would soon be called to endure. As he rose to meet the elder, he was aware of a great gnawing in his stomach; he had had nothing to eat for the last three days as he purged his body of impurities.

The ceremony soon began. The elders of tribe pierced his chest, shoulder, and back muscles with large wooden splints. Ropes, which extended from the roof of the hut, were then attached to the splints, and the young man was winched up into the air, his whole body weight suspended from the ropes. Agonizing pain coursed through the young man’s body, but he gritted his teeth and tried not to cry out. While hanging in the air, more splints were hammered through his arms and legs. Skulls of his dead grandfather and other ancestors were placed on the ends of the splints. All the while, the young man cried aloud to the Great Spirit for courage to endure. Eventually, the young man fainted from the loss of blood and the sheer pain of the torture. When the elders were sure he was unconscious, he was lowered down and the ropes were removed. Yet the splints were left in place. When the young man recovered consciousness, he offered his left pinky to the tribal elders to be sacrificed. He placed his finger on a block and had it swiftly chopped off. This was a gift to the gods and would enable the young man to become a powerful hunter. Finally, the young man ran inside a ring where his fellow villagers had gathered. As he ran, the villagers reached out and grabbed the still embedded splints, ripping them free. The splints weren’t allowed to be pulled out way they had been hammered in, but had to be torn out in the opposite direction, causing the young man even greater pain and worse wounds. This concluded the day’s ceremony.

The young man was exhausted and bloodied, but euphoric. He had been beyond glad to participate in the ritual. This was the greatest day of his life; today he was a man.

While the coming of age ceremony of the Mandan tribe is a particularly gruesome example, peoples and cultures from prehistoric times onward created rites of passage to initiate boys into manhood. Today, such rites of passage are almost extinct. Boys lack clear markers on their journey to becoming a man. If you ask them when the transition occurs, you will get a variety of answers: “”When you get a car,” “When you graduate from college,” “When you get a real job,” “When you lose your virginity,” “When you get married, “When you have a kid,” and so on. The problem with many of these traditional rites of passage is that they have been put off further and further in a young man’s life. 50 years ago the average age an American man started a family was 22. Today, men (for ill or good) are getting married and having kids later in life. With these traditional rites of passage increasingly being delayed, many men are left feeling stuck between boyhood and manhood. College? Fewer men are graduating. And many that do “boomerang” back home again, spending another few years figuring out what the next step in their life should be. As traditional rites of passage have become fuzzier, young men are plagued with a sense of being adrift.

Of course the process of becoming a man, ceremony or not, does not happen in a single moment. But rites of passage are important in delineating when a boy should start thinking of himself as a man, when he should start carrying himself as a man, when the community should start respecting him as a man, and when he should start shouldering the responsibilities of a man. Lacking these important markers, many young men today belabor their childhood, never sure of when they’ve really “manned up.”

What Is a Rite of Passage

Sociologists have identified three phases that constitute a proper rite of passage: separation, transition, and re-incorporation.

Separation: During this phase an initiate is separated in some way from his former life. In the case of the Mandan tribe, the young man was isolated from the village in a hut for three days. In other tribes, boys’ heads were shaved and they were ritually bathed and/or tattooed. In a more modern example, when a man has just enlisted in the military, he is sent away to boot camp. His former possessions are put aside, his head is shaved, and he is given a uniform to wear. During the separation phase, part of the old self is extinguished as the initiate prepares to create a new identity.

Transition: During this phase, the initiate is between worlds-no longer part of his old life but not yet fully inducted into his new one. He is taught the knowledge needed to become a full-fledged member of that group. And he is called upon to pass tests that show he is ready for the leap. In tribal societies, the elders would impart to the initiate what it meant to be a man and how the boy was to conduct himself once he had become one. The initiate would then participate in ritual ceremonies which often involved pain and endurance. In the case of the new soldier, he is yelled at, prodded, exercised, and disciplined to prepare him to receive a rank and title.

Re-incorporation. In this phase, the initiate, having passed the tests necessary and proving himself worthy, is re-introduced into his community, which recognizes and honors his new status within the group. For tribal societies, this meant a village-wide feast and celebration. The boy would now be recognized by all tribe members as a man and allowed to participate in the activities and responsibilities that status conferred. For the soldier, his boot camp experience would come to an end and both his superiors and his family would join in a ceremony to recognize his new status as a full-fledged member of the military.

During the all phases of the process, the men who have gone through the ritual themselves guide the young initiate on his journey. By controlling the rite of passage, the men decide when a boy becomes a man.

Go read the whole post to discover how to do your own rite of passage for a young person, for a family, or for yourself.

The three stages mentioned above are an abbreviated version of Joseph Campbell's monomyth and of the general initiation sequence first proposed by Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner: separation, initiation, and return.

Tags: Coming of Age, The Importance of Male Rites of Passage, masculinity, boys, rituals, initiation, Art of Manliness, Joseph Campbell, Victor Turner, Arnold Van Gennep, monomyth

Father’s Day 2008: Mowing the Meadow, Shaving The Chocolate

[Cross-posted at IOC.]

Via The Moderate Voice:

Father’s Day 2008: Mowing the Meadow, Shaving The Chocolate

June 13th, 2008 by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, TMV Columnist

(I’d prepared this article earlier to run during the day today, but in no way wanted to put a clang in the middle of the news and memoriums about the passing of Tim Russert. I hope it is alright to post it now overnight as the shocks of the day begin to recede a little. This piece was meant to commemorate bright moments that most often occur in the most mundane ways between fathers and sons.)

When I was a little girl, my dad used a rough brush and a heavy porcelain mug to lather up, and then a straight razor to shave. Don’t touch, don’t touch, he’d say when he laid the razor down on the little sink. In fascination I watched him shave. Just like I learned to cook from my mother, by watching…if I’d been a son, I’d have learned to shave just by watching my father; how to make the facial grimaces, how to tilt your head, how to sweep the razor up on this part, and across on that part.

Every night, every day, my dad’s face grew a beard, over and over. That was amazing to me. Something taken away, kept coming back. His strength. As a man. It isn’t too much to say.

Your dad too, no doubt, would he nick himself and just go on shaving while the blood ran down his throat? Wasn’t that amazing to you when you were little? And the tiny yelps when he put the styptic on? And the tiny bits of tp? And how cool and smooth his cheek was after, no more chinny-chin-chins until nighttime? Now just sweet smelling and tender cheeked. For a while. Off to work he would go. The scent of his shaving strangely holding ‘the father place’ in the house, his fragrances of soap and hot water and cologne lingering in the air long after he was gone.

And I wonder how other fathers taught their sons to shave… did the sons when they were little, like we did, even us little girls, quietly reach into the tiny medicine cabinet hanging over the sink, and sneak the blade and give it a few whishes on the strop behind the door, then soap our faces, and as carefully as we could, draw the darker roads through the white lather? Wasn’t there something so seeming magical about that? And some secret giddiness in having touched the tools of the king?

Or maybe, like in the picture, some father, uncle, friend, even mother, taught the boys to shave? It must have been a moment for a man; the first real shave; mustache, beard, clean shaven, half and half, learning that careful throat art nonetheless.

Maybe that moment of ‘first ritual shave’ is only half recorded in a grown man’s memory. But, maybe too, it’s still one of the bright pride lines of that time when the world cracked open for a young male… and suddenly out stepped a knowing but inexperienced man … who only moments before had been just a very, very experienced boy…

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CODA
‘Shaving the meadow,’ or ‘mowing the front forty (acres)’ or ‘raking the field,’ is how some men in the backwoods where I grew up spoke of the manly morning ritual. One of my black friends charmed me utterly by saying, ‘Ok, gots to go shave some chocolate now.’

Tags: Father’s Day 2008, Mowing the Meadow, Shaving The Chocolate, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, fathers, sons, rituals, initiation, The Moderate Voice

Male Initiation, Part Two - The 5 Most Terrifying Rites of Manhood from Around the World

OK, I was planning a more traditional introduction to the topic of rites of passage, but this post from Cracked has been making the rounds and I think it's pretty interesting, even though the author is fairly dismissive.

Here is a little background on rites of passage from Wikipedia:

A rite of passage is a ritual that marks a change in a person's social or sexual status. Rites of passage are often ceremonies surrounding events such as childbirth, menarche or other milestones within puberty, coming of age, marriage, weddings, and death. Initiation ceremonies such as baptism, confirmation and bar or bat mitzvahs are considered important rites of passages. In the last centuries Western society has seen a steady decline in the usage of and potential benefits rising from male rites of passage.
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According to Arnold Van Gennep, rites of passage have three phases: separation, liminality, and incorporation. In the first phase, people withdraw from the group and begin moving from one place or status to another. In the third phase, they reenter society, having completed the rite. The liminal phase is the period between states, during which people have left one place or state but haven't yet entered or joined the next.

I will blog more about this in the future, but that is the basic outline of the rite of passage -- the important thing to know is that these rites are undertaken in most cultures to move the child into adulthood, which can often mean a new name as well as new status in the group.

One of the defining characteristics of many rites of passage is that they are important in warrior and hunting cultures as a way of making boys less emotionally attached to their families and their own lives. On any given day, the young warrior might meet his end, so he needs to be able to face it with bravery and no fear.

The more militaristic the culture, often, the more extreme the rites of passage.

The 5 Most Terrifying Rites of Manhood from Around the World

By Alexandra Gedrose

So what did you do to earn your manhood? At the very worst, some of you had to read a prayer or two from a select holy book, maybe a distant uncle sent you a few bucks. Your parents start bugging you about getting a job and force you to move out by the time you're 20, or maybe 35.

But in some parts of the world, manhood is still something you earn.

#5. Vanuatu Land Diving

When you're a member of the South Pacific Vanuatu, by the time you get to be eight-years-old or so it's high time to prove your masculinity. And what better way to prove you're ready to take on the challenges and responsibilities of adult life than stripping naked and bungee diving off a rickety 100-foot-tall platform?

Oh, and instead of stretchy bungee cables, they use vines. Those things that have been known to drop grapes and tomatoes every once in a while. They will show absolutely no give when you run out of slack and you're still hurtling toward the earth at hundreds of miles per hour. That will show no remorse when you plummet to your death. Vines.

The ritual is intended to impress both the gods and the ladies. Maybe you're thinking, "Hey, tourists do that sort of thing all the time! That's not so terrifying!" The Vanuatu people also realized that and decided that the gods would only be impressed if the boy's head touched the ground.

Jump, plummet 100 feet, hit the ground, don't die. We're not sure why the Vanuatu need to appease gods, because if you can pull off that combo, you're damned immortal in our books.

#4. Australian Aborigines Take Circumcision to a Whole New Level

Waiting until you're a teenager to get circumcised should be terrifying enough, but a lot of indigenous tribes actually do that as a rite of passage. The Aborigines decided they had to find a way to multiply the terror that surrounds your typical teenage penis-cutting incident. Brace yourself:

The ceremony begins by taking a 15- to 16-year-old boy to a secluded place with a number of tribesman. Then begins a several-hour-long chant that's supposed to relax the boy, but we're assuming will do absolutely nothing if he knows what's coming.

Then, two men get on their hands and knees together, and the boy clambers on top of their backs. If ever in the future you find you're in need of a late-in-life circumcision, we challenge you to replace the operating table with two nearly-naked, chanting tribesman. While they do their cutting, the boy is expected to show no signs of pain. You know, because only children feel pain when their penises are cut.

Then, with that fresh in his mind, they make him wait about a week. That's when a second operation is performed. Jens Bjerre, one of the very few men to have witnessed this ceremony, documented it in his book, The Last Cannibals:

"A hole was pierced right through his sex organ near the root, and there was inserted into it, at either end, a splinter to keep the aperture from growing together again. The object was to ensure that henceforth the urine and the sperm would be ejected through this little hole high up on the sex organ, instead of by the normal channel."

Guess what they're all watching.

Just let that soak in for a minute.

The idea is these guys can now have sex without impregnating a woman unless they cover the newly made hole.

In case you've forgotten, or blocked it out, all of this is done with no anesthetic to ease the pain, other than a bunch of men repeating the same phrase over and over again.

#3. Hamar Cow Jumping

Around ages 12 through 15, when most boys are worried about being picked last for kickball, Ethiopian boys of the Hamar tribe are expected to make a leap of pure holy-mother-of-pearl faith over a row of cattle who serve a fate worse than those at a Burger King farm. When these cattle aren't being jumped, stepped, or fallen onto, they're probably more than happy to maul the poor sucker who trips and face-plants.

That guy made it look pretty easy, didn't he? For a real life equivalent, imagine trying to run and jump over your car four times. And that all your family and friends are gathered around to watch you. And the car is a living squirming thing. And that you have to jump over the squirming car about four consecutive times without falling. That you only get one shot. That if you fall, you can forget manhood, a potential wife, and respect from your relatives. That's right, in this reality there's actually a way for you to fail puberty. You couldn't even speak in class without your voice cracking under the pressure, and you think you're going to be running wind-sprints across a herd of cattle?

Stop: Hamar Time.

Once the Hamar boy passes the cow-jumping test, he earns the respect given to a man and also becomes a eligible to participate in the Hamar women-beating ceremony, where the girls of Hamar happily volunteer to prove their devotion to their husbands by being ceremonially hit and whipped. If some woman should ever object, we're assuming a simple, "Hey, I jumped over those cows earlier," trumps any argument she can muster.

#2. The Algonquin Drug Trip

The idea of getting force-fed hallucinogens in order to become an adult will appeal to a lot of you. But this isn't that Grateful Dead concert you remember so well. Boys of the Algonquin Indian tribe of Quebec were brought to a secluded area, often caged, and then given an intoxicating medicine known as wysoccan.

This stuff contained the deadly datura, an extremely dangerous hallucinogen that is said to be 100 times more powerful than LSD. Yes, to the Algonquin people, manhood took the form of spending 20 days in a completely deranged state that included a racing heartbeat, amnesia and hypothermia. If the Beatles had been ballsy enough to graduate from LSD to datura, their musical influence probably would have been deterred due to all of their subsequent songs sounding roughly like a donkey giving birth to a tractor.

The whole idea of this drug-induced party was to force any memories of being a child out of the boy's mind. Unfortunately, memory loss tends to affect, well, everything, including memory of their family, how to speak, or even who the hell they were.

If boys showed recognition towards their childhood after returning to the village, they were taken back and given a second dose and the pleasure of having to cheat death again.

#1. Matis Hunting Trials

As screwed up as the Algonquin ritual is, the Matis, a small Brazilian tribe, top them pretty handily.

The ritual for recruiting boys into the ranks of their hunters begins with dumping a bitter poison directly into their eyes, allegedly in order to improve their vision and enhance the senses. We're sort of interested in how many different combinations of toxic liquids the Matis shamans shoved into their eyeballs before finding a winning formula that didn't dissolve them into a white, gooey mess.

The next series of trials includes beatings and whippings, but those look like Matis massages compared to the final trial. The concluding test revolves around an inoculation of Phyllomedusa bicolor, which is basically Latin for "local frogs that just happen to secrete nature's death juice."

Don't you dare fuck with me.

After burning an area of the skin, the frog goop is injected with the use of a wooden needle. The poison is said to increase strength and endurance. However, those enhancements must come after the unbearable lightheadedness, vehement vomiting and violent relieving of the bowels. After all, REAL men don't need innards.

Once the boys prove themselves able to withstand these trials, they are treated to performing them before every future hunt they partake in. Actually, thanks anyways but we think we'll keep playing with our Tonka trucks over here guys.

Tags: Male Initiation, Part Two, The 5 Most Terrifying Rites of Manhood from Around the World, ritual, initiation, masculinity, Cracked, rites of passage, Arnold van Gennep

Male Initiation, Part One

This is the first of several posts I want to put up on male initiation. I had intended to begin with a look at the anthropology of initiation rites, but then I found this post from TC at T-Nation that sort of does the same thing, but suggests introducing boys to the gym as a modern initiation.

One of the downsides of modernity is the loss of masculine initiation rites. When formalized rites are absent, boys express the unconscious need for initiation in a variety of ways, many of them unhealthy -- hazing, gang initiation, drinking or drugs, and so on.

Maybe joining a gym is a good alternative. Certainly gathering with other men to hear and discuss their experiences as men, and what it means to be a man, along with the gift idea, are also valuable options. [More comments below.]

ATOMIC DOG
In Love With Machismo
by TC

I spent part of the morning with a miniature Barbie doll stuck up my ass.

Let me explain. Let me explain quickly.

My shower isn't working so I had to take a bath, minus the Calgon, thank you. As I sat down, I felt a sharp pain in my keester, literally in my keester, if you catch my drift. I jumped up and looked at my reflection in the bathroom mirror and saw the problem: sticking out of my ass was a ball-gown bedecked Barbie.

That's when I remembered that I'd bought my daughter, Gucci, a set of 4 "Barbie Soaps." Each bar of soap is made of mulberry scented glycerin and comes with a tiny Barbie embedded within. The glycerin had worn largely away, but there was just enough slippery soap on her head to make her a viable substitution for Richard Gere's gerbil.

As I looked at my reflection in the mirror across from the tub, I thought, "That really doesn't look very manly. Come to think of it, that doesn't make me feel very manly."

These thoughts set off an internal dialog on the nature of manhood in America.

Is appearance related to masculinity?

What is the nature of manhood?

The answers don't come easily to me. Part of the reason is because things seem to have changed in the last few years. I once wrote that I didn't think that the events of 9-11 had changed squat in America, least of all the attitudes of Americans towards each other.

Boy was I wrong.

Americans, particularly young male Americans, are permanently pissed. Oh, they've always been pissed about one thing or another — which isn't necessarily bad — but 9-11 made them feel more than a little frustrated, at least subconsciously, because they don't have a way to channel their aggression.

They want to show that they're courageous, but courage has become confused with violence or the promise of violence; manliness has become confused with aggressive posturing. They've fallen in love with machismo.

You know one of the reasons why the majority of men voted for George Bush? I think it's because he swaggers when he walks and he told the terrorists to "bring it on."

I'm sorry, but tough talk does not necessarily a man make. Personally, I don't think a guy — any guy — who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth can truly be a tough guy. Nope, I think you need to have been born with an old, rough-edged steel spoon in your mouth; I think you need to have tasted a little rust and a little blood to be a tough guy.

And looking or acting tough? Got nothing to do with anything.

The three toughest people I know or knew don't fit any stereotypical image. The first is my wife, who once, with her appendix about to burst, dutifully prepared for work (lying down on the floor while blow drying her hair because she could barely stand up), drove to her job at the hospital and attended to her first patient. When the second shift tech showed up to replace her, my wife staggered into the E.R. and collapsed. They wheeled her in and did an emergency appendectomy.

Why'd she do that? She didn't want to let the patients down, many of which had waited weeks for an appointment.

The second tough guy I knew was named Dr. Michael Dullnig. He was a gay psychiatrist with AIDS...before there were anti-virals and many of the other drugs that now make the disease somewhat manageable. While he had managed to fight off the wasting effects of the disease with anabolic steroids, he developed CMV retinitis, which would have ultimately led to blindness. Almost worse was the maddening, constant, insufferable itching caused by the cornucopia of drugs he was using.

So this brave man cheerfully decided he wanted to die.

He made the decision about as easily as you or I might decide to leave a party that had gotten a little boring, and he didn't make it because he was scared or depressed. He just wanted to go check out the next life, dimension, or whatever lies waiting for us beyond this plane of existence. He wanted to go to the next party and see if it was a little livelier. He was genuinely curious.

But before he checked out of this life, he threw his own little real-life party, a party with champagne, music and most of his friends in attendance. He danced, had some fun, posed for pictures, and then walked upstairs to his bedroom, stopping once on the staircase to smile broadly and raise a glass in a silent toast. He went to his bed, lied down, ate a yogurt laced with Nembutal, went to sleep, and never woke up.

No sadness, no tears, no regrets, no doubts. If that ain't tough, I don't know what is.

The third toughest person I knew was my father. He didn't do anything classically heroic, but he kept the same shit factory job for most of his life, working 6 or 7 days a week, 10 to 12 hours a day (for the overtime), and never called in sick no matter how rotten he felt. Did he hate it? Maybe, probably, most certainly, but that didn't matter. He had work to do and a family to support. He didn't agonize about what he coulda-shoulda done with his life.

I probably would have done things differently than all three of my examples, but having convictions and will is something I admire, pretty much regardless of the reasons or the consequences. Clearly, toughness — real toughness — can come in any guise, as can bravery.

But Americans, particularly young Americans, think toughness begins and ends with calling someone a shithead and threatening to "bust them up." They're little boys who never metaphorically graduated from wearing short pants. It's not all their fault, though. Unfortunately, unlike some cultures, we have no rites of passage into manhood. As such, young men blithely go on skirting responsibility, avoiding hard work and throwing frequent violent temper tantrums because they're still little boys.

Pundits and preachers and politicians claim that the solution to all this is a nation-wide return to "family values." I don't even know what the term means. When I think of family, I think of husbands and wives fighting, brats screaming and picking boogers out of their nose, grandma gumming her food, and tame Saturday night, roll-on roll-off sex followed by a nice nap in church the next morning. Since when did having a family place the mantle of virtue on some Neanderthal's sloping forehead?

I know, I know, they're talking about traditional family values, which means supporting a family and busting junior on the head when mom finds stroke mags underneath his mattress. Sorry. Family values are a little too estrogenic for me. Give me male values, traditional male values.

Walter R. Newell, in his book, "The Code of Man" advocates just such a return to traditional ideas of manhood. He writes that through the ages, courage and pride were about "the struggle to defend and extend justice and to overcome our baser instincts," but he laments the fact that somewhere along the way, traditional manhood gave way to false machismo and violent behavior.

How exactly do we reestablish these traditional male values? I'm not sure. It's a tall order. I know some cultures send their boys out into the jungle or the wild by themselves. When they come back — if they survive — they're pronounced men and treated as such. Americans? We send our young boys to Daytona Beach, or maybe the Bahamas! Or even — Junior will like this — snowboard camp! It's a reward for having the incredible tenacity and ability to make it through... high school, or even junior high school.

When they come back, they're not men; they're still arrogant, disrespectful punks, albeit with nice tans.

I'm not just being an old coot. I thought this way when I was 20 and I think this way now, but current times have strengthened my convictions on this topic.

I've got an idea. Do you have a son? Do him and yourself a favor. When he reaches 16, get some adult male friends — role models — together and throw the boy a ritual, a manhood ritual. Tell the women to stay home.

Then, have each friend stand up, tell him what it means to be a man, and give your son some small token of manhood or masculinity, whether it be a jackknife, a set of dog tags, or a special book. They'll serve as talismans to both remind him of his new station in life and to ward off weakness. Tell your son that he's a man now and expected to act like one from now on. And if he screws up? Well, he's now got a whole tribe to answer to, any of which forever have the right to smack him in the back of the head when childish behavior creeps back in.

Seal the deal by eating some bloody steaks.

As part of the ritual, I'd take him to the gym the next day and introduce him to weightlifting. Weightlifting is where he channels his aggression. Weight lifting is how he builds self-confidence and pride and prepares himself for the physical challenges to come. After all, defending and extending justice is hard work. It takes a strong back.

Beyond all that, America has to stop loving merely the facade of toughness or masculinity. The virtues we hold dear — the virtues that truly reflect masculinity, traditional masculinity — come in different, often unexpected guises.

That being said, the embedded Barbie doll still isn't a very manly look.

© 1998 — 2008 Testosterone, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

I'm seeing more fathers with their teenage sons in the gym, especially in the summer. It warms the heart. Boys can learn to be men in the gym -- learning about the rewards of hard work, the discipline to reach a goal, the value of being with other men who also are working hard to reach their goals. The courtesy of sharing equipment is also a big thing that many could learn -- that a little kindness goes a long way.

Not only that, but building the body also builds self-esteem and self-worth. Achieving goals helps build the strength to chase bigger goals. Learning to be embodied (the mind-muscle connection lifters talk about) gets us out of our heads, helps us learn to listen to what the body is telling us. The more embodied we become, the more access we have to our emotions.

I think that introducing boys to the gym (at between 13 and 16) is great form of initiation and father-son bonding. TC got this one right.

Tags: Male Initiation, Part One, masculinity, initiation, TC, T-Nation, gym, weight training, boys, men, fathers, sons, rituals