One very hard-to-die tradition is that of male circumcision. Tuli, it is called in the Philippines. Boys are circumcised at an early age, rarely as infants but when the young lads are about ten years of age. It is, traditionally, done without anesthesia to numb the pain. The very act of being “cut” is seen as a rite of passage into manhood — you have to handle the pain manfully, therefore proving you’re “a real man”…
Filipino men who aren’t cut often get ridiculed, at times rather brutally. Because they’re “less than a man” because of it. I remember my former father-in-law constantly making jokes about men who aren’t circumcised — it was the funniest thing in the world to him. The overall tendency seemed to be that no man who was scared to get his foreskin cut off was truly a man. Worst of all, a lot of boys got cut outside of clinics, in rural communities in particular. Some old man with a machete would make the cut, with all your little friends looking on for signs of weakness. Some fainted. One local boy ran out after the first cut, jumping in the river with much of his foreskin still attached…
It was pretty wild to me, as a European man, to see this type of cultural practice. Where I’m from, unless your Jewish or a Muslim or have some sort of medical deformity, the default state of men is to remain “intact”. To have a bodypart with thousands of nerve endings not only removed surgically, but removed surgically in front of all your friends? Heinous.
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