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?
–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:
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.
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?”
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?”
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