Posted by Dinah on March 27, 2004, at 9:26:52
In reply to Re:Re: Marinoff and 'philosophical counseling' » DaisyM, posted by 64Bowtie on March 26, 2004, at 1:55:09
> <<<Not poo-pooing what you are saying. However, for 6,000 years and 180 countries, (None the USA), adolescent males have been given a knife, a robe, and a sack of food, sent off into the forest and told to come back after 12 moons. If they make it back, they become a man in the tribe they used to be a boy in. If they don't make it, they become food for forest predators and scavengers.
>Are you saying this is a good thing? Not to be disrespectful to anyone's religious customs or anything. But one of my main goals in childrearing is too teach my son to have enough of a sense of who he is to resist feeling like he needs to do foolish and dangerous things that society tells him will prove he's a "man".
A man is someone with enough differentiation to say "I don't need to go out in the forest and risk becoming crow food to prove I'm a man. I can do it by living up to my responsibilities to society and to my family." I'm glad to say he's got a father who teaches that to him every day by example. So maybe when he goes to college and hears that he'll become a man by going through some fraternity drinking ritual, he'll be able to laugh. Or when he hears that a real man will have sex as often as possible, he'll say that a real man understands the obligations that are entailed in having a sexual relationship and risking pregnancy.
poster:Dinah
thread:326975
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20040327/msgs/329020.html