One wonders if a similar impulse may in part lie behind the universal brutality of boy’s initiation rites into manhood. Perhaps the male community’s tradition of “welcoming” a boy into its midst by hurting him is not just a test to prove the boy tough enough to be worthy of joining. Perhaps it is also a demonstration, a need to communicate the men’s own sense of woundedness, a ritual dramatization of how much pain they all carry inside.
