A handful of decades ago a Masai youth was expected to single-handedly kill a lion, using just his shield and spear, to become a warrior. But these days, with a general shortage of lions roaming the thornbush waiting to be speared by testosterone-fired adolescents, a more simple rite of passage was found.
Sound easy enough, so far as rites of passage are concerned? No sir: the tsetse fly in the cirumcision ointment is that if a boy cries out or makes any other sound during the procedure, he fails to move past boyhood.
Which, among other social ostracisms, means he can never marry or ever become a leader ... and thus forever forfeits his right to be called A Man. It's kind of a big deal in a boy's life, literally a life-changing event ... as you might already have guessed.
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No such a thing as a ritual rite of passage exists for boys and adolescents here in the US, and I doubt we could even approximate (or agree upon) an appropriate age for boys to be called and treated as "Men."
Nor could we possibily agree about how a boy should be tested to prove himself ... because any kind of adversity might wound his fragile psyche.
Even trying to verbalize What Is A Man? or describe Why We Need Men can cause migraines, severe emotional duress and outright indignation for those who immediately associate super-machismo, chauvinism, arrogance and insensitive stubborness with the word Man.
Men and their traditional roles, our gender-neutral culture teaches, have become superfluous, redundant and gelastic: what our culture prefers is a well-coiffed jellyfish with gadgets dangling from his belt, chargecards filling his pockets and condoms bulging from his wallet.
The consequence of which, as we see 11- and 12-year old boys modeling themselves after gangstas and mimicking the lifestyles of sports anti-heroes, defying authority and order, selling and using drugs, dismissing education because it's either "too hard" or "irrelevant," having casual sex and using violence to acquire material trophies (like automobiles, designer tennis shoes and iPods) they couldn't legitimately afford, is a generation of males who're likely to reach middle age with their "boyishness" intact and their adolescent neruoses unchecked.
With absolutely no idea how to act, behave and treat others like A Man.
Put simply, without role models and a recognized rite of passage to test and prove themselves worthy, boys in our society have no means of (or even interest in) escaping boyhood ... and leaving behind all its puerility and feckless behaviors.
And it's gonna take more than a prescription, a TV psychologist or a shelf of self-help books to regain what's been lost.
