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When do you know you have become a man? First fuck? First beer? First fight? Who knows. I Googled it, and an article about Charlton Heston from the Knights of Columbus kicked off the list.
The world’s largest Catholic fraternity agrees that “American culture lacks definitive rites of passage to bring teens into manhood.” Fair enough. Here in the land of free we leave it up to the individual man to decide, but some ancient traditions weren’t so open-minded.
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Death jump
The South Pacific Ni-Vanuatu have a tradition called “land diving”, and it’s only for the men of the tribe. This ritual has been in practice for 15 years, and has been documented by National Geographic.
Every spring, the men get together to build these 100-foot-high wooden structures from twigs and sticks. Once the rickety, homemade towers are constructed, the men will scale the structure in preparation for the dive. You see, the men have to measure exactly how much slack they need for their big jump. Once at the top, the men take turns jumping off the tower, head first, with only a vine tied around their leg for safety. The whole point of the ritual is to appease the Gods in hopes of a bountiful yam crop that harvest, and second, to impress the women of the tribe with the manly venture. Young boys are encouraged to participate in the jump to prove that they are ready to become men. Boys as young as five years old will join their elders at the top of the tower and fling themselves off. If you have the perfect amount of slack, your shoulders will touch and you will survive. I have no idea what the success rate is of this seemingly fatal ritual, but I’d bet that Vanuatu’s signature dish is “Boy Skull Soup.”
Rite of passage
The Mardudjara Aborigines of Northwest Australia are perhaps best known for a special kind of brutality saved exclusively for their penises. The story of Mardudjara circumcision is enough to make your dick throw up a little…and not in the good way.
At age 15, Mardudjara boys are taken by tribe elders to a holy spot to perform the lengthy ritual. A fire is lit and the boy is instructed to lie down while the elders sing and dance around him. Another group of men, appropriately named “mourners,” hover around the boy while a boomerang is placed between his teeth. The tribal elder mounts the boy like he’s about to ride cowgirl, pulls up the boy’s foreskin, and twists it like a wad of gum. When the mourners “wail and cry,” two elders take turns sawing back and forth until the boy’s skin is cut off. The boy is then forced to kneel on a “shield” that is put over the fire in some makeshift attempt to “purify his wound.” To add to the trauma, the boy must then swallow his foreskin whole; under no circumstances is he allowed to “chew” it. The Mardudjara believe that by literally ingesting your former boyhood, or foreskin, it will help you grow into a better man.
That’s not even the worst of it. Once the physical wounds heal, the newly appointed “man” must return to the holy spot so an elder can straddle him yet again. This time, it’s to insert a small, wooden rod into the boy’s urethra. Then, the elder splits the underside of the penis from the frenulum to the scrotum like an Israeli butterflying a hot dog to fit it into a pita. The ritual closes with the young man squatting and pissing in front of everyone like a female dog with his freshly altered worm.
Worst. Circumcision. Ever.
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