Let's now consider the Mehinaku, an indigenous community located in a remote part of central Brazil.I'm going to dwell on this society at some length, because they are explicitly and self-consciously a nonviolent society. The Mehinaku go out of their way to maintain peace with neighboring communities that are more aggressive and confrontational.
Yet even this community exhibits familiar patterns regarding cultural conceptions of masculinity and manhood.
The Mehinaku reside among impassable streams and waterfalls, making their territory inaccessible to all but the most determined outsiders. They depend on river and lake fish for protein, and the men are expected to go on long fishing expeditions to distant waters, over rough and hazardous terrain, sometimes for days or weeks.
The Mehinaku men are very concerned about their manhood. For them, manliness is a status equivalent to the highest social virtue. A man's prestige comes not necessarily from being a good man in some abstract moral sense, but from being good at being a man. This entails living up to the 3 rules I mentioned before regarding provisioning, protection, and mastery documented by Martin Seager.
The Mehinaku men earn their laurels by trying to outperform the others in fishing prowess and in accumulating property such as cowtools and other goods. The community judges a man's industriousness, his willingness to go on long and arduous fishing trips to distant lakes and streams, often over treacherous terrain where rival coalitions might ambush and attack them.
A fear of economic inadequacy haunts these men. They experience intense anxiety about appearing slothful or lethargic. When a man returns from a dangerous fishing expedition, he is expected to appear immediately in the village plaza, where people gather expectantly. He then ostentatiously displays his catch before distributing it unsparingly. The anthropologist David Gilmore, describing the norms within this community, notes that, “The hallmark of a real man is that he is selfless…he always shares his food.” In contrast, men who are stingy are seen as “parasitic” and “despised as freeloaders.”
The Mehinaku instill a sense of hard work, civic duty, and the conventional understanding of manliness into little boys. For example, if a boy sleeps in late, or lounges about, or refuses to accompany his father on his fishing expeditions, he is mocked and called a “little girl.”
Moreover, a boy is often warned that if he is lazy, then when he grows up he will be undesirable to women. Thus, this community has managed to ignite the cauldron of young male energy and channel it away from warfare with neighboring communities and toward economic productivity, industriousness, and generosity, with a coinciding increase in desirability to potential romantic partners.
As I mentioned, the Mehinaku fight no wars and are regarded as a non-violent society.
https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/understanding-the-young-male-syndrome
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"Being called a little girl" is less of a threat to a redditor tbh.
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