Living with and Loving Lies

Here is what I am supposed to be learning: when people reject me, that doesn’t make me an unworthy, pathetic loser.

So I write a novel, and not one person in my family reads it. I give siblings paintings, and they re-gift them. A group with which I was deeply involved, a group in which I thought I was loved, suddenly rejects me and asks me to leave. Someone who loves me, like a lover, actually loves me like a favorite cousin. These disappointments tend to precede my deep feelings of worthlessness. I feel like a loser, unlovable, unlikeable, stupid, worthless, naïve, but I’m supposed to be learning that when I get rejected it is not evidence that I am a worthless being. In the past I jumped to the conclusion that when I am not cared about, it means I am not worth caring about, that God is wasting air on me.

I am willing to accept the hypothesis that just because someone doesn’t value me, does not mean I am valueless.

What I can’t seem to accept is that while rejection does not automatically equal worthlessness, I still believe that rejection CAN be evidence that I’m not cared about because there is nothing about me worth caring about.

Somewhere in my mind comes this idea that there is really very little advantage to me thinking I’m a loser worth a little less than a bucket of spit. I would do better if I had a positive attitude.

Here is a question: Is it OK, or smart to believe that I should have a positive attitude, I should look on the bright side, should I believe in my worthiness even if it’s not true? I mean, can I lie to myself, and end up liking myself?

A shrink might say, “It’s not a lie. You are worthy. When you were born no one stamped your forehead with indelible ink forming the single word, UNWORTHY! Every child is born with priceless value, and it doesn’t go away once you get pull-ups.”

It is a little like a little girl crying because she thinks she looks ugly with braces and black framed glasses, and her mother side beside her on the bed and says, “No, no, honey. You’re beautiful. If that boy doesn’t know it, well, it’s his loss.”

It just seems to me like if you have value, you would be valued. Your drawings would go up on the refrigerator. Your family would come to the awards ceremony and be thrilled with your honorable mention. They would miss me if I were gone. Someone would want you the way you want to be wanted. Sometimes you want to be loved as a lover and not as a really close friend. Sometimes you want your family to value what you create.

Back to my question: What if I am the ugly, dumb, untalented person that I feel I am? Might my survival be more likely if I lied to myself? If I believe in me even without the evidence wouldn’t I be happier, and more hopeful?

Set your minds on things above. . .
Colossians 3:2

I work with people who often live in poverty, have little education, and often they are mentally slow. I have had people in their thirties, people living in a camper trailer, people who read on a third grade level tell me that they are going to get their GED, go to the community college and eventually they are going to be a lawyer.

I know that human potential cannot be assessed with any degree of certainty, and people with disadvantages have sometimes achieved great success, but you don’t place your bet on a learning disabled person raised in poverty. While success is possible, it isn’t likely. In my view their success is unlikely. These people just don’t see how huge the obstacles are to achieve their goals. These people do not realize how much they don’t know, or how difficult it is going to be to develop the skills they need to achieve success.

Then I wonder, “Maybe I am just as clueless and they are.”

Would these people be happier knowing that there hopes and dreams are so out of reach that only one in ten million will succeed?

Many in this world live with illusions. They think someone all-powerful is going to manipulate events to give you what you ask for if you ask right, if you have faith, or if you believe totally and with no hint of doubt. Some believe there is power in positive thinking. Some people think they can be better if they lie to themselves.

A shrink might tell me that what I believe about myself is not the truth.

To tell you the truth, I have no clue how to assess myself. I don’t know if I would recognize the truth if I were hit in the face with it. I feel worthless, but maybe I am worthless and worthy. I feel like a loser, but maybe I am a loser and a winner. I feel like a low functioning rube who has no grasp on what life is really like, but maybe I’m smart and perceptive. I feel like positive thinking is just me telling lies to me, but a feeling is not a fact. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe being ignored by some, rejected by others is their problem and not mine.

I must live with being ignored, and rejected. I might have to live with disappointment. I must exist with frustrations. At times I must live with people hating me, aggressively seeking my failure, but maybe this dolor environment is just how it is, and if the whole world could care less about me, maybe I still have a right to good things.

Now, my next thought: Let’s say I have a right to good things, that joy belongs to me, that I am valuable, but the care I want, the esteem I long for, the love I yearn for is just not going to come to me. How do I live with self-worth in the midst of disregard, and rejection?

Things Might Have Been Worse

A hymn I was overexposed to as a child was Count Your Blessings.

When upon life’s billows you are tempest tossed,
When you are discouraged, thinking all is lost,
Count your many blessings, name them one by one,
And it will surprise you what the Lord hath done.

This count your many blessings phrase is trite, it is a cliché that aims to turn the mind of a gloomy Gus towards the ignored positives in one’s life, but just because it is folksy advice doesn’t mean it is sans merit. Worn out phrases of advice are worn out because the advice often achieves the results being sought.

I am particularly sad right now and so I have paused to consider my blessings. I have two.

Age 5

I remember my mother taking me to a public pool. I might have been 4, or I might have just turned 5 when this happened. Regardless of age, I clearly remember much of what I am sharing here. I’m not sure why but somehow my mother was not watching for some short period of time.

I remember watching someone climbing out of the pool by this chrome-shinny ladder. I thought that looked neat. I walked to the ladder, held both sides with my hands, and started down the ladder. I had not realized that it was attached to the side of the pool and that it did not have rungs all the way to the bottom. I stepped down one rung, then a second, but when I tried for the third rung there was nothing there and I went into the pool and sank to the bottom. I can remember trying to get back up the ladder. I could touch the very bottom of that chrome ladder, but I couldn’t pull myself up. I remember looking around and seeing legs above me kicking. I remember the infamous light.

I don’t remember what happened after that.

My mother said she started screaming for help and a 14 year old boy found me at the bottom of the pool and pulled me up. I don’t know what treatment I got at the scene. I don’t recall seeing any doctors. My mother tells me that for several days when I talked she could hear a gurgle because there was water in my lungs.

I remember clearly trying to get up that ladder. I remember looking up, not afraid, but thinking it was odd to see so many legs hanging down from above and all of them kicking back and forth.

If I had died then, I would have died unafraid. I have no memory of being afraid. I thought all this was very odd, but I just didn’t have enough experience to know I should have been afraid.

Age 15

I was really weary the summer I turned 15. My mother had just had twins and as the oldest I had additional chores because of the new babies. I was sort of my mother’s child care assistant. I also did some extra housekeeping stuff because my mother was just worn out by the babies. A person can rock two babies at once, and both my mother and I had our experience rocking two babies at once, but I was really getting tired of being a premature adult. There were not many opportunities for me to get some time off just having fun.

One hot summer day my mother must have known how burned out I was feeling and suggested that I go to the public pool and swim. Looking back now, it was sort of pitiful. I walked to the pool carrying a towel, but I was alone. I had no friends to go to the pool with, it was me, myself, and I. I got to the pool, and it was hot. I was eager to cool off. I tossed my towel to the ground and dove in head first. I hadn’t looked to see where I was. I dove in head first to the shallow end. I went in to about 2 feet of water and hit the bottom of the pool with the crown of my head.

I remember coming up out of the water, strangling. I’d draw water into my nose and throat. I had the pain at the top of my head, but I wasn’t immediately aware of the pain in my neck. I tried to have fun, but I was hurting, and it wasn’t fun being there alone and in pain. I went home. I don’t think I told my mother what had happened. The next morning my neck was swollen badly.

The compression of the vertebra can still be seen in x-rays 45 years later.

I was not aware of just how lucky I was that day. I did absolutely everything right to be paralyzed for life. Had my neck broken and the spinal cord severed I would have had a very different life.

I’ve been a sad person most of my life. This weekend I was packing books and came across old year books I reread some of the notes written in my year book by my peers. I saw words like “brooding” and “sad” being used to describe me. I’ve not been focusing on my blessings. I’ve not been grateful that my life, I’ve not properly appreciated a life that could so easily have gone far, far worse.

Ysex?

My therapist gave me a copy of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and in the very first level, right next to air, and water was sex. It was an update of Maslow’s list of needs, but I was a little shocked to see it in the first group of basic human needs.

I remember the parental “tongue lashing” I got as a child. “You’re mixing up your wants with your needs. You don’t need that, you just want it, and we have no money to buy you everything you want, so just shut your pie hole.”

We can survive without our basic human needs, but the length of survival time we can survive may be dramatic. It is said, on average, a human being can survive 3 minutes without air, 3 days without water, 3 weeks without food. How long can you survive without sex? Some might claim forever, that it is possible to survive a life time without sex. Of course this is true if your definition of sex is sexual intercourse. There are huge numbers of people who live substantial lives and then die never having had sexual intercourse. But if your definition of SEX includes sexual thoughts, wet dreams, or masturbation and you will have a far more difficult time measuring how long a human survives without sex.

The urge to have sex is so powerful that it can drain psychic energy away from other necessary goals. Therefore, every culture has to invest great efforts in rechanneling and restraining it, and many complex social institutions exist only in order to regulate this urge. The saying that "love makes the world go round" is a polite reference to the fact that most of our deeds are impelled, either directly or indirectly, by sexual needs.
—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Until recently I hadn’t actually thought much about why a human being would want sex. I assumed the reasons were obvious.

Sex is emotion in motion.
Mae West

Humans are hardwired to have sex. Coitus is evolution’s way of ensuring the survival of our species. One of the ways to ensure that the species will have sex is to make it pleasurable. Having sex often ends with feelings of contentment and relaxation, feelings sometimes referred to as an “after-glow.” My barely thought through conclusion was that humans have sex to reproduce, to experience pleasure, and to relieve sexual tension.

I now believe that the urges for sex are far more complex.

Sex is hardly ever just about sex.
Shirley MacLaine

I am sure I have not exhausted the possibilities, but here is my list as of now:

1. sex is our means to reproduce
2. to experience pleasure
3. to enjoy emotional closeness
4. because a partner wants it (pity sex)
5. to please a partner (gift sex)
6. to make a conquest,
7. to relieve sexual tension
8. to feel valued by a partner,
9. to express value for (and to) a partner,
10. to nurturing one’s partner
11. to feel a sense of personal power
12. to sense and enjoy the power of your partner (think of Bill Clinton John Edwards, Tiger Woods, or rock band’s Groupies)
13. it can be a reward for partner (celebratory sex?)
14. sex can, of course, it can be used to punish or retaliation (as when someone has sex to “get even with” an unfaithful spouse)
15. sex can turn a casual relationship into an intensified relationships, or increase the level of commitment within the relationship
16. it can be used to turn a short-term relationship into a long-term relationship
17. sex can be used as a sort of ‘‘mate guarding’’ (this is my man, or my woman)
18. it can be used to deter a partner from straying
19. sex can be a commodity, exchanging sex for money as in “prostitution,” but this would also apply to things like the Hollywood’s infamous “casting couch,” or people use sex to gain a promotion, as with people who “sleep their way to the top”
20. what should have been first on the list, is that sex is a facet of love (remember the act of coitus is sometimes called “making love.”

I can’t accept that sexual intercourse is equal to our need for air, but there are psychological factors in play that make our need for sex an actual need and not merely a want.

I came across and interesting BBC report on a young man in the UK living with Muscular Dystrophy who decided to hire a prostitute in order to “lose his virginity.” Doctors believe that it is unlikely Nick Wallis, who is 22 years old, will live past his thirties. Once the public learned of this story, it became a catalyst for discussion, and, at times, heated debate. What is or is not acceptable for disabled human beings? If you happen to be disabled does that automatically mean you can never experience sexual intercourse?

Mr. Wallis was under the care of hospice. The hospice staff consulted with an attorney, clergy, and health care professionals to consider their patient’s intentions. A decision was to locate a sex worker and to facilitate a sexual encounter. While this decision was controversial, it does indicate that the professionals involved concluded that sexual intercourse is a legitimate human need.

Sex without love is a meaningless
experience, but as far as meaningless
experiences go

its pretty damn good.

Woody Allen

Obviously there are people so disabled that it is unlikely they are going to find a partner, be in love, and have a sexual relationship that grows naturally from that relationship. The decision to facilitate a sexual act between a disabled young man and a sex worker indicates that the act of having sex, even apart from a pair bonding relationship, is still a need that ought to be allowed, facilitated and perhaps even encouraged.

The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs a lot less.
Brendan Behan

In another BBC article, there was a story about an adult young man with Down ’s syndrome wanted to have sex and that young man’s mother was seeking some way to safely accommodate her son’s desire. The mother stated that that disabled people have a right to have the same human experiences that not-disabled humans routinely enjoy.

My conclusion is that sex is not like air, but it is not like a yearning for chocolate either. There are powerful and profound psychological factors driving our desire to have sex, to think about sex, to pleasure others, to pleasure ourselves.

Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.
Henry Ellis

Manhood Rites Part two

When you think about Manhood Rites or Rites of Passage you can’t help but ask, why? Why bother? What is the value of the manhood rite? There must have been some value or the practice would not have been adhered to for hundreds of years. When you analyze the various manhood rights you find that most have three phases.

Separation

In the separation phase an individual must withdraw from their current status and prepare to move from one place or status to another. You can’t be somewhere else until you leave where you were. This concept is involved in the well worn phrase: cutting the apron strings. The idea is that a man child can’t begin to be a man so long as they are tied to mama.. In the beginning survival depended on that dependent relationship.. But how does one recognize that the apron strings have been cut without a string cutting ceremony?

For many males this breaking away from mother takes place between arguments, slammed doors and acts of defiance. The apron strings are not cut they snap. There are some symbolic acts that signal the boy is no longer a “mama’s boy,” One common symbolic act takes place when the boy shows up for boot-camp. This action is depicted often in movies: a recruit sits in a barber’s chair and with a few swift passes with an electric cutter, the hair drops away, like childhood. It is a particularly powerful act because after the military hair cut has been inflicted upon the boy, he no longer looks the way he looked before.

Transition

The transition phase is more than just the lull of time between who you were and who you will become. During the transition phase the time is for learning new skills, gaining inside, and getting use to the idea of being something you have never been before. Boot camp, college, pledging a fraternity or sorority all involve isolating you from the people and places that had defined you, and giving you tasks that teach you to see yourself differently, and to lean on peers and resources that have never known the former you, so you can dare to be different.

Re-incorporation

In more primitive cultures men have an essential role to play in the survival of the tribe. Hunters and warriors sustain the group, and ensure the survival of the group. In a tribal society, if the male children cut their ties to the past, but were never reincorporated back into the life of the tribe, in a very short period of time, there would be no tribe. If the village starves without a successful hunting party then reincorporation is a life and death matter. Our problem is that we live in cities, and have the option to move from one city to another. There is no core group that is totally dependent of you returning to fill an essential role in the survival of the tribe.

separate from their childhood, and/or their mothers, to have some experience in which they see themselves differently, and then they must return to the tribe, as a man. Because families, and groups can survive in most Occidental groups it is just not vital for the rite of passage to lead back home. We are a cut flower generation. We look OK but we have been severed from our roots. We can use our florist skills to create an environment to make us look OK longer, but we are disconnected from that which could’ve, and should’ve nourished and refreshed us.
In America reincorporation is not even see as possible. One of the great American Novels is entitled: YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN. The phrase is emphatic. It is not, WHEN YOU GO HOME AGAIN, THINGS WILL BE DIFFERENT. No, the Thomas Wolf title says it just CAN’T BE DONE.

Walk of Don’t Walk

When my son earned his Bachelor’s of Science he had a walk/don’t walk option. He could go through the ceremony and wear a Mortarboard (the infamous square hat), and have someone he maybe never met hand him his diploma, or, he could have them mail the diploma. Universities offer this option because they have no building large enough, nor do they have the parking spaces available to accommodate the families of each person graduating. But my son also opted out walking for his Master’s Degree. Is the walk across the stage essential to the degree? No. Of course the walk is not about legitimizing the degree; it is about going through some ritual that serves as psychological Marker. Weddings don’t make you more married than a civil ceremony in the court house. You’re just as dead with or without a funeral. But ceremonies matter. The power is not in the ceremony it is in the mind of those who go through the ceremony, or who witness it. Ceremonies don’t change facts, they change minds, and when you change a mind, you have profoundly changed the owner of that mind..

Our society pretends that we are each independent self-sustaining people that we don’t need to go through the ceremonies. I count myself among them. I don’t want to dress up, drive someplace with not enough parking, and give up hours of time that I could have spent painting or writing. My mind keeps asking, “Is it worth all that grief?”

I want to say no, but I am starting to understand that rites, rituals, and ceremonies matter because it is an outward and visible action that represents something emotional, mental, and, if you’re bent this way, spiritual.

I have regrets

I have regrets. When I look back on my life I see things that I would very much like to erase. Maybe it is stupid to dwell on past mistakes, and past premeditated bad actions, but I do that. Knowing it is wrong to dwell on my regrets is just one more thing I regret.

Most of the really big regrets have to do with my son, Ryan. He is 31 years old, now, never caused me any problems, everything he did impressed me, and he continues to be awesome. Perhaps it is because he was such a wonderful son that I feel extra special bad about stuff I did to him.

One of my big regrets has to do with the day he was baptized. We had been going to this little Disciples of Christ Christian Church and the pastor there had a series of classes to prepare the children in that group to be baptized.

Ryan went to the classes. He didn’t complain. The time rolled around when the baptisms were to take place. We got up, he got some clothes to be baptized in, a t-shirt and some shorts to go under the baptismal gown, and then the service was about to begin.

We looked around and there was no Ryan. People were looking around, mouthing the words, WHERE IS RYAN?

I got up and went to look for Ryan and found him standing in a back hallway. I told him he needed to get in there.

“I don’t want to,” Ryan said. “I’m not ready.”

I sure wouldn’t have forced him to be baptized if he’d said something earlier. But Ryan had waited until just before the baptisms were to take place. His name was printed in the program. Other people would wonder what was going on. People would ask why did this had not happen. I was afraid I would be embarrassed if we didn’t complete this process. Backing out at the last minute caused me to be afraid I would look like a bad dad.

Ryan said again, “But I’m not ready.” I could hear in his voice that he was stressed and hurt that I was making him do something he was not ready to do.

So, in order to avoid being a bad dad, I became a very bad dad. I insisted that he go through it.
If you believe in adult baptism, and believe that this act should be a personal commitment to God, then what good would it do to force someone to be baptized? If the initiate is not ready to commit then going through the motions is performance, not commitment.
I wonder what Ryan thought and felt that day?

• “My daddy cares more about how things look than about how I feel.”
• “This is embarrassing and stupid.”
• “If he really loved me, why would he make me do this even after I told him I was NOT READY?”

Why didn’t I side with my son? Why did I let HOW I thought things might look govern what I did? Why couldn’t I have honored Ryan above peer pressure?

I wish I could say this was the ONLY time I’d been such a damn fool, but, unfortunately my bungled efforts to be a father are many.

Manhood Rites: Part One

Both the young and mid-life men either struggle or are unable to coherently define and explain what it personally means to be a man, an adult male.
–David Crawford Becoming a Man - The Views and Experiences of Some Second Generation Australian Males


In some primitive cultures there are very clear rituals that mark changes in the life of a human being. Children are not like adults, but every adult started out as a child. How do you get from point A (babyhood) to point B (Childhood) to point C pubescence to point D adulthood, to point E aged?

Without marker events along the way it is hard to know where you are on your journey of your life. Life has long been compared to a journey, so I’ll use a journey analogy. This has happened to me traveling rural roads in Oklahoma, late in the night. Sometimes they just don’t bother to put up road signs. Without the marker signs it is very hard to know when you have gone too far, or when you turned too soon. Without manhood rites a man may not know if he is done with one stage of his life or not. Some kids act and think like grown ups far too soon. If you grow up too fast you miss out on the benefits of being a child. There are some insights that come from experience and if you cut those experiences off too short, you enter your next stage without the preparation that comes from being what you were suppose to have been. .You can’t make an aged wine in a week. You can’t have a 30 year old single malt scotch in 6 months. You can’t have a giant red wood in 5 years. Some stuff takes as long as it takes and trying to rush it will means you end up not having what you intended to have.

I was a child of the 60s where we thumbed our noses at the traditions and rules of the 1950s The customs, mores, rites, and rituals that seemed to some to be immutable, were for us quite, restrictive, and stifling. We would rather have been naked than dressed in straight jackets. You can’t be finished with childhood until you have finished all that needs to be done in childhood.

For all the males, there has been no memorable moment or process in their lives, physically personal to them, marking their passage to male adulthood. All the males in this study have been left to become men by accident by themselves, however they can.
–David Crawford Becoming a Man - The Views and Experiences of Some Second Generation Australian Males

Have you ever heard the phrase, “He had to grow up fast”? It is used in two ways:

(1) Sometimes we admire children who “grew up fast” and filled the role that should have been filled by an adult who just wasn’t there. A dead mother, or an alcoholic father, or a great depression can force children to cut that stage of their life short, and they prove themselves to be able to meet and exceed expectations even without the preparations gained from a Normal Childhood.

(2) Other times we use the “grew up fast” phrase as an explanation of why a kid is so messed up as an adult. Michael Jackson was forced to grow up fast, working long hours that would have crushed many adults, living with enormous pressures, having hundreds of people economically dependent on him when his greatest pressure should have been the spelling test next Friday. Some explain away his amusement rides on the back lawn, his obsession with altering his appearance turning is normal, cute face into a pale disfiguring mask that could not be removed.
In the past most cultures marked the end of childhood by some test/quest.

Years before there was bungee jumping I saw a documentary on TV of these Vanuatu people who were doing something similar to bungee jumping, but which was far more dangerous. Vanuatu is a small island nation in the middle of the South Pacific. It was here, in this very isolated place where an odd, but traditional test/quest was developed. There seemed to be some connection between the time of harvest and a test of manhood they called Land Diving.

It was bungee jumping without a bungee cord. Around April or May these people would build a crude wooden toward reaching heights of 100 feet or more. Crawling to the top would be test quest all by itself, but was it enough for these folk? Hell no. The men accepting the test would climb to the top, tie a vine on to the platform and another to their ankle and then jump head first off the platform. People who have studied this ritual say that the land divers reach speeds of up to 45 miles per hour as the plummet to the ground. In spite of how it looks the goal is not to dislocate your hip, or break your neck. The goal is to fall in such a way that as the slack in the vine is used up, it doesn’t jerk the leg off, yet still getting the land jumper close enough to the ground that by tucking their head toward the chest their shoulders will brush the ground.

I’m told that these Vanuatus people have been land diving for 15 centuries. Why do they do it? One reason is they think their god get’s a kick out of watching people risking death in the hopes that a good show will cause their god to feel obligated to give them a bountiful yam crop..

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.
– King Lear by Shakespeare

Who’d’ve thought a bunch of yams would be worth the risk? The second purpose was to be a rite of passage ushering village boys into manhood. The one smart thing these Vanuatus folk did is they started out with peewee platforms. The first time you jump off with a vine tied to your foot it makes some sense to start off with short drops. Boys of the village, some as young as 5 years of age start out jumping from low ledges first, and gradually, as they get older the distance they fall increases. The further the fall, the greater the risk, and the greater the risk, the manlier the man will be in the eyes of his peers and neighbors.

As I read up on manhood rites I noticed two common themes associated with many manhood rites.

There are other sorts of manhood rites depicted in our movies. Fore example, In Rebel Without A Cause, in one of the major scenes of the movie, the hero, played by James Dean, is challenged to a game of chicken. Two young, untested males would drive like a bat out of hell towards a cliff. This was a sort of unrecognized test/quest. Whoever bailed out of the car first was chicken. Manhood was determined by the one willing to take the greatest risk.

In the movie, and novella, A River Runs Through It, the two brother’s (Norman and Paul) run river rapids in a small, stolen, wooden rowboat. They challenged their peers to participate, but the peers were less manly, and unwilling to take a risk.

In many of coming of age movies, like The Summer of Forty-two, the initiation was an initiation of sexual intercourse, where an older more experienced woman, Dorothy, at a moment when her judgment staggered by grief, takes a young teenage boy Hermie and turn him into a man. Of course the audience, and Hermie realize that Dorthy's loss of judgement is linked to her learning that her husband is a casualty of war. The act of turning Hermie into a man is not just the sex. Hermie also recognizes that Dorothy has suffered a severe loss, and that somehow, this act of sexual intercourse is not just teaching a young inexperienced boy and showing him how to please a woman, because this experience involves loss, grief, and sacrifice. There is a recognition that war is not heroes and winning. War always involves the senseless loss of life, and each life lost impacts every other life. War is often recognized as a powerful event for maturing and seasoning young men, suffering from testosterone poisoning.

The other common trait of manhood rites usually had something to do with the inflicting of pain, especially pain to a young man’s penis. For many men, the penis is the only part of their body that they allow to experience pleasure, and yet that is the very part targeted for punishment in many manhood rites. In some cases the pain and mutilation of the penis is unrestrained.

For example, the Australian Aborigines people had a manhood rite that perfectly describes such penis focused rite: The young men would lay next to the fire and a an elder leader of the tribe would take the child’s foreskin and stretch it and twist it. While this was going on another group of men would dance past the initiate and make little cuts to the foreskin until it was severed from the penis. Another group of men, a short distance away would weep and carry on in symbolic grief over the loss of their childhood. After the foreskin was removed the elder would tell the initiate to eat without chewing this piece of meat, which, as you can guess, turned out to be their own foreskin. The boys eat the flesh that represented their childhood, they are nourished by this magical morsel that causes the boy to grow into a man. Why is it so common for cultures all over the world to include some sort of genital pain to “make a man out of a boy?”