Word: manhoods
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Nigerians were warned. It only takes a touch, and you've lost them: your wallet from the back of your trousers or your manhood from the front. The rumor about vanishing male genitalia started sweeping Lagos two weeks ago, and by last week the capital was in a panic. Frightened mobs lynched or beat to death at least a dozen suspected organ robbers in crowded markets and bus stations, where being jostled by strangers is a fact of life. Nigerians were convinced that magicians could remove the male jewels at a touch, making them reappear in Lagos' witchcraft markets...
...many quarters there is anger. "The American man wants his manhood back. Period," snaps John Wheeler, a Washington environmentalist and former chairman of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. "New York feminists ((a generic term in his lexicon)) have been busy castrating American males. They poured this country's testosterone out the window in the 1960s. The men in this country have lost their boldness. To raise your voice these days is a worse offense than urinating in the subway...
...close, almost symbiotic relationship between Wynton and Branford marked their childhood and continued into their young manhood. Wynton, extraordinarily disciplined and driven by an insatiable desire to excel, was a straight-A student who starred in Little League baseball, practiced his trumpet three hours a day and won every music competition he ever entered. Branford, older by 13 months, was an average student, a self-described "spaz" in sports and a naturally talented musician who hated to practice. Yet both brothers deny that there was any rivalry between them. "Our personalities were formed to each other," says Wynton...
...what we like to think of as "primitive" warrior cultures, the passage to manhood requires the blooding of a spear, the taking of a scalp or head. Among the Masai of eastern Africa, the North American Plains Indians and dozens of other pretechnological peoples, a man could not marry until he had demonstrated his capacity to kill in battle. Leadership too in a warrior culture is typically contingent on military prowess and wrapped in the mystique of death. In the Solomon Islands a chief's importance could be reckoned by the number of skulls posted around his door...
Kyaw Lin, 11, is so tiny that the barrel of his M-16 rifle is sawed in half so he can carry it. It is still almost as long as he is. He has a florid tattoo on his right arm -- a premature badge of manhood that also serves as an animist charm to ward off evil. Sometimes Kyaw Lin is shaky and feverish because, like most of his comrades, he suffers from bouts of malaria. Nobody is there to wipe his brow or take his temperature; he just lies in his bunker until the fever subsides...