How did I become a man?
Oh, Man: Excerpts (Part 3)
About four years ago I started writing what I thought would be my second book, a memoir on masculinity called Oh, Man. After a slew of rejections, I decided to start sharing some of the manuscript here with my paying subscribers (audio for this one is below the paywall). These stories may or may not become a book someday. For now, it feels good to be making a home for them here in the Courtyard with you.
Here’s an intro to the series.
Part 3 here shouldn’t be as triggering as Part 2 might be for some readers, but it does contain graphic medical content which can be intense. It’s also quite vulnerable for me to share, so, please proceed with caution and care for both you and me. Thanks.
I don’t know what a man is, exactly. I just know that I am one. I’m not sure when it happened, for me, but at some point it did, I’m sure of it: I became a man. I’m 35 years old, so it’s been, what, 15 years of manhood? 20? Five? When was it? When did I become a man?
And how, how did it happen?
How does it happen? How does a boy become a man?
Depends on the culture, I suppose. In my culture, it’s going out with your uncles to the bar when you turn 21 and getting drunk for the first time, legally. It’s getting hazed by your all-male a cappella group. It’s your college commencement. It’s, what, your first car, your first job. It’s losing your virginity. It was, and it wasn’t, all of these things for me.
In some cultures, Indigenous cultures, adolescent males are taken through a series of ritual initiations to become men. They dive headfirst from a high tower of sticks with nothing but a vine tied around their ankle. They wear gloves made of grass woven with angry bullet ants, stingers pointing inward. Their foreskins are cut off. Their pectoral muscles are skewered. Their backs, artfully scarified. Pain seems to be a common theme across some traditions.
There was no ritual for me, certainly not one that included the supervised, sacralized application of pain. But life took care to initiate me anyway, right around the time I would’ve had to jump off the high tower of sticks, or wear the bullet ant gloves, or submit to the knife. And although there was no ritual, there was pain.