Pain, Fear, and Circumcision in Boys’ Adolescent Initiation Ceremonies

Abstract

Rituals that induce pain or instill fear occur in the majority of boys' adolescent initiation ceremonies. They have been accounted for in several ways: as resolving a psychological conflict, as expressing dominance over juniors, as promoting male bonding, and as preparation for participation in war. This cross-cultural study examines these harsh rituals and concludes that they are a form of adult male control over adolescent boys and unmarried (subadult) youths. They occur in societies in which control over young males is an important social issue and other means of control are lacking. We also examine a subset of harsh rituals, those that include circumcision and other genital operations, and discuss the cultural features, particularly marriage practices, that are significantly associated with these operations.

Harming in Order to Help: An Empirical Characterization of Prosocial Aggression

“…Athletic coaches, seeking to improve the performance of their athletes, assign them excessively grueling and painful workouts (Hollander & Meyers, 1995). Across many cultures, elders inflict physicallypainful ceremonies upon young initiates, which are often motivated by a grander desire to help them enter adult society (Schlegel & Barry III, 2017). People will also lie to and deceive others they feel compassionate towards, with the ultimate goal of saving them from emotional harm (Lupoli et al, 2017).…”

Genital Cutting as Gender Oppression: Time to Revisit the WHO Paradigm

“…In such "MGC-only" cultures, moreover, while boys may be advantaged along some dimensions, they are specifically disadvantaged by genital cutting, specifically because they are boys. In other words, because they were designated male at birth and raised as boys, rather than as female and raised as girls, they (and only they) must submit to a physically risky and often intentionally painful intervention into their sexual anatomy, or else face potentially severe social sanction (Schlegel and Barry, 2017).…”

“…Not all of the social meanings and functions of FGC are straightforwardly bad for women and girls-at least not under the arguably non-ideal conditions in which boys are also cut-and nor do they necessarily reflect a subordinated status. Instead, where deliberately harsh MGC rites enable men to form politically powerful bonds amongst themselves, created in part through their shared experience of genital cutting 20 (Schlegel and Barry, 2017), FGC appears to have arisen in some cultures as a parallel rite that is then invariably led by women. And like its male counterpart, the female rite serves to promote within-sex bonding, communal network-building, and power consolidation, thereby weakening other-sex domination in various spheres (Grande, 2009;Ahmadu, 2010Ahmadu, , 2016aPrazak, 2017).…”

“…In these rituals, young boys are typically separated from their mothers and sisters, isolated from female friends and playmates, and socialized-often by means of an explicitly gendered trial of violence-to become "real men" (see Dembroff, 2022), where this is characteristically defined in terms of patriarchal norms of masculinity that promote the subordination of women and girls (Leonard, 2000a;Silverman, 2004;Schlegel and Barry, 2017;Mashabane and Henderson, 2020). Therefore, opposition to these male initiations and other MGC rites may be crucial for disrupting gendered socialization processes by which patriarchal hierarchies are reproduced (Kimmel, 2001;Prazak, 2017;Steinfeld and Earp, 2017;Meoded Danon, 2021).…”

“…For such patriarchal systems to persist, the role of MGC in normalizing such top-down violence-that is, painful genital cutting inflicted on the most valuable members of society when they are simultaneously at their most vulnerable-must not be questioned. It is, according to one theory of the socio-functional origins of the practice, a dangerous and costly signaling device that proves one's willingness to submit to the norms (and rankings or authority structure) of the wider community, which would have been necessary for group survival under certain challenging conditions (Schlegel and Barry, 2017). FGC also serves this purpose, but to a lesser extent: "getting people to tolerate mutilation of their sons' bodies as a price for conditioned social acceptance is a stronger tool to ensure their submission to authorities than getting them to tolerate [FGC]" (Abd el Salam, 1999).…”