Maori Haka

Male Teenagers, Young Adults, & Protracted Teenagers Engage In Overt Sexual Displays In Order To Compensate... For Not Knowing, Especially Sexually

Sara Robinson addresses this in her article The Real Deal versus PoserWorld.

LowerManhattanite hits at it in Do NOT Mess With An Original Gangsta.

Hubris Sonic makes the point clear and all you need do is look at the pictures in Blackwaters' Mercenary Navy?. He spells it out explicitly in Putin tells Cheney to go fuck himself, so if you didn't get the point already or if the Red Sox pitching Curt Shilling in Game Six has you drinking heavily, there's still hope.

Because here it is yet again. (The full article is an absolute must read.)

Orcinus (Sara Robinson)

Which brings me around to my point, which is that the over-the-top behavior around masculine gender roles Digby and Dave are noticing is pretty classic early primary behavior, too. The games boys play at this age often involve extreme masculine archetypes -- cowboys, cops, soldiers, sports heroes, spacemen, and so on. (It's interesting that Little Boots has, at one time or another, tried to cast himself in all of these roles -- and that the male Kewl Kids just swooned over it, every time. Remember the fuss over Jet Pilot Action Figure Bush's "package"? Damn fool didn't loosen his straps before getting out of the jet. Nobody else on the deck had his crotch trussed up like a Christmas goose; and to them, he looked like a rookie idiot. But Chris Matthews practically had an orgasm on-air while watching him prance and strut.) The fact that so many mainstream and conservative media guys are suckered by this posturing shows that they don't really have a clue about what a Real Man looks like -- though, somewhere deep down inside, they're pretty sure they don't qualify. That's why they're so easily wowed by men who can put on the costume and make it look good.

But they're even more easily cowed by men who can actually fill the boots. John Kerry. John McCain. Colin Powell. Bill Clinton. (You don't have to agree with their politics; but nobody can say these men haven't comfortably worn the full measure of male power and responsibility for some critical stretch of their lives.) Like little boys, the media guys are so awed by the outward forms of masculinity that they eagerly make a fetish out of them; but they also actively fear and resent men who display the authentic internal goods that make an honest-to-God man. These guys' very presence incites such a strong sense of personal inadequacy that the Boys On The Bus can only resort to attacking them in ways that are openly calculated to feminize them -- that is, to bring them down to their own level. He look French. He's whipped by his powerful wife. He's preoccupied with his hair. Translation: This guy has more balls and more maturity than we do -- and we need to take him down before everybody figures out how inadequate that makes us feel.

Whatever the "real" content of manhood is (that's a whole separate discussion), sexual agency and virility lie somewhere near the core of it. It takes a sexually mature and capable man to find and woo a partner, father children, sustain the relationships that make a home, and take his place among the valuable men of the community. When you're a kid, Dad's sexual competence is the very heart of what makes him the alpha male in your family pack. At five or six, the physical attributes that make him a man are magical stuff -- and not only do you not have those attributes, your childish sense of time is such that it's easy to fear that you never will. The whole issue, as Freud knew, is fraught and uncomfortable. The only way little boys can deal with this deep and mysterious discomfort is to make giggly jokes about it. It's either that, or stand in dumbstruck awe about the power that your young life utterly depends on, yet you simply cannot comprehend -- and that's not an option on prime time TV.

The howling conservative and MSM men we're seeing on the air these seem to be stuck in some early sexual stage -- a stage where manliness and sexuality are scary adult mysteries, the obsessive stuff of wild curiosity, rampant misunderstandings, crude jokes, dress-up play-acting, and bizarre fetishes. For all their media power, these guys have sexually scarcely moved beyond playing doctor-- and, at this late stage, probably never will. Scratch any leering old man, and you'll expose a scared kid who, fifty years on, still hasn't come to terms with his own uncontrollable wet dreams, let alone the challenge of engaging productively with his own adult sexuality and that of the real-life adult women he shares the world with.

There's more...

Hmmmm.

Just a few sentences of that again please, and let's tighten. Lots.

(While the sentences, well, the words anyway, remain sequential, I'm tightening up bunches, playing fast and loose with Sara's words as I delete stuff to make my meaning, throwing in extra periods, commas, and such, changing a bit of the grammar [in brackets] to pull four long paras down to three damn short ones.

I believe the heart of what I'm saying out of Sara's words is consistent with her post, but what is below is absolutely no longer what she said. It's me, using her words massively edited, to make my point. I take full responsibility for what is being said.

Why didn't I just make my own damn point then? I did. Just needed her words to do it. Sara's original piece was so good she clearly owned the space. Said differently, I couldn't get her magnificent turn of words and sequence (which is often much more important than the words) out of my head fast enough for anything else to show up before deadline. So I borrowed it (with attribution), edited it, and played word-collage without taking a single word out of sequence or adding any words except clarifying grammar. Go me! The result is... Well, judge for yourself...)

The games boys play at this age often involve extreme masculine archetypes. The fact so many guys are suckered by this shows they don't really have a clue what a Real Man looks like -- though, somewhere deep down inside, they're pretty sure they don't qualify. They're easily cowed by men who actually fill the boots comfortably, [have] worn the full measure of male power and responsibility for some critical stretch of their lives.

Virility and Dad's sexual competence is the very heart of what makes him the alpha male. The physical attributes that make him a man are magical stuff -- and not only do [they] not have those attributes, [their] sense of time is such it's easy to fear [they] never will. The issue is uncomfortable deep mysterious power [their] life utterly depends on, yet simply cannot comprehend.

The howling men seem stuck in some early sexual stage -- a stage where manliness and sexuality are scary adult mysteries, the obsessive stuff of wild curiosity, rampant misunderstandings, crude jokes, dress-up play-acting, and bizarre fetishes. These guys have sexually scarcely moved beyond playing doctor-- scared kid[s] who still [haven't] come to terms with [their] own uncontrollable wet dreams.

Maori Haka

Standing in the distinction of howling men (boys, teenagers, protracted teenagers, and young adults) imitating adult virility and competence, most often not by distinguishing the actual competence of being a grown adult competent at seduction and sexual behavior with another consenting grown adult -- which likely as not may have absolutely nothing to do with sexual archetypes, our children imitate that which can be imitated, and of course as children do, they take it to the extreme -- they imitate the outer archetypal displays, AND MISTAKE THE MAP FOR THE TERRITORY.

The children then proceed to defend this misidentified territory as if it were the Church of the Sacred Gato herself with libidinous worship services proceeding in full public view on the altar during Mass.

(Come early for best viewing of the sacrifice of the Sacred Virgin. (Virgins sacrificed at noon and 7 pm Mass; to apply to be a virgin submit an application to Sacrificial Mass Virgins or Altar Boys in Kilts. Please include experience & photo.)

Once you realize these children in youngster's bodies, brimming with hormones, are simply imitating their misunderstanding of what they believe is the magic power their father has -- why their Dad has always been so scary, so smart, so big, so tough, so able to TAKE Mother and make her cry, laugh, and make that strange face no one else can, and those funny noises Mommy makes which these boy-child-men only think about in the remote recesses of their thoughts and hands, jacking off hard in their bedroom at night, feeling dirty for imaging their best friend's mother that way (and with rare exceptions, not tracking the source of it back to their own mom.) These kids need somehow to become their Dads.

"Who do you want to be when you grow up, little man?" The only true answers are, "My Daddy" or "My mommy". Or in this multi-generational distributed world, an authentically appropriate replacement; accept NO substitutes.

Until we have fulfilled our destiny as boys and become our fathers, we are not grown men. We are incomplete. A similar dynamic takes place between daughters and mothers, although theirs is not as driven by an incomplete understanding of sexuality, and a need to prove oneself in the same way the male dynamic is. The biological and historical triggers are radically different, thus the mother-child relationship is different.

With this background, now the displays of Republican and non-feminist men make sense.

About six hours ago I started to write this post. Frankly, it was because I needed to balance a silly something I knew almost immediately I wasn't going to post, the Japanese Girl Bikini Rodeo Fight. It was cute, but just too porny for GNB. Which if it has been 60 seconds, fine. But it runs for seven minutes. Seven minutes of these girls in bikinis bouncing on sex machines throwing whipped cream pies at each other.

No, it really didn't take a lot of restraint not to post it. But for a minute there before I figured out it was just porn with whipped cream in bikinis, I figured I'd need some men to balance it or I'd have our female contingent screaming for Man with Ham. Which we're never going to post, no actual Man with Ham, (the lame photoshopping alone fills me with dread). But I looooove putting up Intern George, men in kilts, and (oh yeah you betcha) starlets.

I went looking for some men in kilts on YouTube me to post up. And found the one below about Maroi Haka v. Kilts. Which led me into this whole quest to figure out what the hell Maroi Haka was. Which led me into SIX HOURS now, no, damn, it's been EIGHT hours I've been up all freaking night! Aaaaargh. Eight.Freaking.Hours, taking Sara's beautiful post apart -- first I had to find it -- piece by bit by piece, and then putting it back together just the way I wanted it. This is all your fault too. Or my fathers.

Anyway, what we have below is video of this really cool thing these guys do at Rugby games. They challenge the other team using a Maroi ritual dance, which gets their team and fans ALL riled up. It's pretty groovy. You've no doubt seen similar displays when American Football or soccer teams take the field. The ritual pounding of the chests as the teams come together, and so on.

After having read the above, and seeing it acted out below, you're never going to see what's going on the same way again. Or, I suspect, participate in one of these rituals with quite the same degree of blind enthusiasm. *smiles*

Some of these repeat, sort of, as I show different aspects of the ritual. Some is historical. And some is just fun. It continues to build. You won't want to miss the two last ones. *grins*

Enjoy.

Kamate avec les paroles


Haka


Behind The All Blacks Haka


Maori Haka Competition in New Zealand


Maori Haka v Kilts


Kamate kamate! (The Haka, Gingerbread Remix)

There's more...

Do NOT Mess With An Original Gangsta

слово!

(or “Word!” in English)

It was June of 2001—yes, there was a world—an America before September 11th of that year, and George Bush, whose shiftlessness, arrogance, and balls-to-the-wall stupidity we were just beginning to glean took his very first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was in Slovenia for a summit, and Bush at his faux-empathetic best saw fit to let the whole world know what he thought of his Russian counterpart. In a move that should have been a red flag for the crazy to come, Bush went to his “faith healer” schtick and gave us his “sense” of the man via little more than a handshake and a look:

“I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straight forward and trustworthy and we had a very good dialogue.”

“I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

That was six years ago. An eon in diplomatic time—and an ever-loving eternity when you factor in 9-11.

Which brings us to today, a post 9-11 world where the landscape is radically different from those “soul-gazing” days of '01. A landscape featuring a topography of mingled Asian sand and Caspian ice —via AP:

He (Putin) also suggested Moscow and Tehran should have a veto on Western plans for new pipelines to carry oil and natural gas from the Caspian Sea, using routes that would bypass Russian soil and break the Kremlin's monopoly on energy deliveries from the region.

Putin came to Tehran for a summit of the five nations bordering the Caspian, but his visit was aimed more at strengthening efforts to blunt U.S. economic and military ties in the area. Yet he also refused to set a date for completing Iran's first nuclear reactor, trying to avoid an outright show of support for Iran's defiance over its nuclear program.


Putin strongly warned outside powers against use of force in the region, a clear reference to the United States, which many in Iran fear will attack over the West's suspicions that the Iranians are secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made similar comments.
"We are saying that no (Caspian) nations should offer their territory to outside powers for aggression or any military action against any of the Caspian states," Putin said.
The five national leaders at the summit later signed a declaration that included a similar statement — an apparent reflection of Iranian fears that the United States could use Azerbaijan's territory as a staging ground for military strikes in Iran.
Putin has warned against such attacks previously, but reiterating them in Tehran gave them greater resonance — particularly at a summit for a region where Moscow deeply resents U.S. and European attempts at greater influence.

-------------------------------------------

At the same time, Putin — on the first trip to Iran by a Kremlin leader since Josef Stalin visited in 1943 for talks with Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II — said Moscow wouldn't back down on its obligation to finish the plant.

"Russia has clearly stated that it's going to complete this work," Putin said. "We are not renouncing this obligation."

Cue the big brain on Driftglass:

Hmm. Where have I seen this before? Nuclear states with imperial ambitions?

Taking a rooting, tampering interest in countries with strategically valuable resources?

Countries which can trade geopolitical importance for power and prestige, and through which their dominant partner nations can carry out a cold, proxy war at a safe distance?

Oh yeah.

So meet the












New War...



...same as the












Cold War.

He hammers the nail through the wall, into the neighbors' apartment and through the back of mama's old breakfront. Bush (and his imperialist handlers) were so dead set on treating Iran like a wet food stamp that there was almost no way this Putin/Ahmadinejad love connection wasn't gonna go down—especially after the shitty treatment he got here in New York during his visit. Now, no one is saying that we should have extended to Ahmadinejad the tender courtesies that Mickey Kaus does to his goat friends, but one would have to be a fool to see that Putin's perfectly-timed, and historically-destined cuddle wouldn't be a result of the U.S.'s ham-fisted non-diplomacy. And while a cuddle it may be, the arms of said Caspian cuddle-er while capable of the gentle diplomatic caress we're seeing now, are just as capable of and ready to casually snap the neck of anybody who really pisses him off.

Which leads us to the crux of this situation...which Hubris lays out succinctly:

He wants to make it clear to Bughouse Dick that if he moves against Iran there will be consequences. We have seen this whacky topic of invading Iran ebb and flow based on the level of Dick's meds recently. Hopefully this message from Pooty Poot will quiet down the trained monkeys about invading Iran.

Russia is the only country that is helping Iran to realize its nuclear program in a peaceful way, he said.

If you want to keep it that way Richard, keep your trap shut...

As a public service to the President and Vice-President, I'm gonna lay this out for you real simple-like.

DO. NOT. FUCK. AROUND. WITH. VLADIMIR. PUTIN.

Okay?

Now, I know you want to fuck with him, but let's be clear—he ain't like you. Meaning, that for all the tough talk you guys have spit out over the years with the aid of handlers and broadcast transmitters hidden in your suit jackets, this son-of-a-bitch—Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin walked the walk—and probably shot the bullets, and car-batteried the gonads of people who got in his way.

Actually did it, okay?

To you, Mr. President, Putin was in the KGB when it was your daddy's job to see to it that as many members of that organization ended up face-down in Gorky Park with poisoned shivs in their backs. And it was Putin's job to make sure he piano-wired the carotid arteries of anyone trying to poison-shiv his KGB buddies. You ducked conflict. This guy dipped it in his borscht and ate it, happily.

And to you, Mr. Cheney, for all your diabolical thinking, your hand-rubbing and mordant chuckles over evil plans set in motion via dark-roomed, “cigarette-smoking man” calls from you, understand that Putin worked as the kind of low-level spook who handled the dirtiest of the dirty work. Tail a guy, brace him, beat the living shit out of him, dope him up, torch his place, torch his nads. He's everything you are—minus the innate cowardice to actually do the evil with his bare hands. Say what you will, but that does something to a man. It's what separates a button pusher, from a trigger man. And that trigger-man runs the only place that has near as many nukes as we do.

You see, there are “Original Gangstas”, and there are “Posers”. Kind of like the whole Tupac Shakur and Suge Knight paradigm. “Pac”, as he was called, was in essence a master showman. A more than capable actor who could put across the image and superficial trappings of the toughest of the tough street hoods. He played this role on record, to the press, and very convincingly on film. If you didn't look at him too close, he could easily scan as the the living embodiment of the image he portrayed.

But an image is all it was. For all his bluster and “Thug Life” tats, and gangsta-talk, Pac, in spite of some troubled family surroundings wasn't a “thug” or a tough guy at all. He went to art school. He studied poetry, jazz, acting and ballet. Performed Shakespeare to boot. By the time he was twenty he'd read Salinger and Melville, and the feminist works of Alice Walker and Robin Morgan.

A “Thug”? Hardly.He got his big break dancing behind Humpty-Hump in Digital Undergorund—not from taking nine, or nine-hundred bullets “Fiddy-Cent— style. (he caught a couple of slugs and checked himself out of a hospital hours after a minor scuffle once) And once given light, he adopted the “Thug Life” mantra, lifestyle and requisite attitude as a performer's persona. A performer's persona.

Now, his “buddy” Marion “Suge” Knight is a different story altogether. The 300 lb. monster rolled with Compton's vicious Mob Piru Bloods gang as a teen. The “Bloods” of drive-by killing fame. Suge would use his hulking size eventually nab a football scholarship to UNLV, and from there to “bodyguard” jobs for stars which he'd eventually parlay into a career in “concert promotion”—that usually ended up with disagreeing parties being broken and bloodied in an alley somewhere off Crenshaw Avenue. And eventually, he wound up in trouble with the law over the relatively minor issues of grand theft auto, concealed weapons and attempted murder charges. Had a restraining order put on him for cutting off a girlfriend's ponytail in front of her home. Capped a dude twice with a hot .38. Broke another guy's jaw pistol-whippin' him.

Suge was NOT an actor. He was the real. The awful, ugly, deadly and down-and-dirty real.

And in this world, you have your wannabe gangstas...of the “Pac”—for all his “talent”—mold, and the Original Gangstas of the just-as-soon-as-shoot-you-as-hand-you-a-cigar Suge Knight mold.

Bush and Cheney fall into the “Pac” camp. They can talk a good game but have no real “record” to stand on. Putin is in the “Suge” school, with a trail of broken and non-breathing bodies behind him. Bush and Cheney rat-fuck. Putin, as we've seen in the case of Alexander Litvinenko will rat-poison a mother-fucker.

There's one hell of a difference between the two. And as we saw on that fateful night in that parking lot in Las Vegas, one dude walked away from the gunfire, and one wound up on a slab. Guess who did what.

You might—Mssrs. Bush and Cheney take a lesson from that. You've been verrry successful as posers for all your lives. You've parlayed it into great personal success. But you need to check your bullshit at the door when you're dealing with an “O.G” (Original Gangsta) like Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. You said you “looked into his eyes and saw his soul”. John McCain, for all his silliness noted the other day that when he looked into Putin's eyes, he saw three letters: “K.G.B.” It's a quip. A nifty sound-bite. But John McCain probably knows a shitload more about what it looks like staring into a hard, brutal man's eyes than Bush and Cheney ever will. Putin's got the icy look of a man who's seen life ebb out of more than a couple people, and more than a couple of times directly because of him.

One last thing. When I was a teenager, there was a little deli/grocery store in my neighborhood called “Slim's”. And as is often the case, a name like “Slim” is given to a fella who is not that. The proprietor—“Slim”—was a man-mountain. six-foot-five and about 270 lbs. None of it fat. Arms like picnic roasts. Hands like baseball mitts. Big, southern fella with a “Paw” from the “Hillbilly Bears” countenance. Wore overalls all the time, and had a huge burn welt on his right upper arm—just below a faded, crude green Marine Corps bulldog tattoo. Said he got the burn when a dude attacked him with an arc welder. He never said what happened to the dude...and he didn't have to.

Anyways, one day I'm in his store, and there's a real jerk at the counter harassing one of Slim's daughters at the register. Lewd, chattering about everything, being a general nuisance. He hands her a five-dollar bill for his purchase amidst his distracting patter, and then upon receiving his change, went ballistic, claiming that he'd given her a twenty and that she was stiffing him. I know it was a fiver, as I was standing behind him for five minutes practically watching his every annoying move. She corrected him—“No, you gave me a five. I put it right here.” He countered with curses, threats, counter-pounding and demands that she give him change he wasn't entitled to. When I heard her call out to the back room “Daddy!”, I knew it was all over.

Slim lumbered from the back, ducking his head at the short doorway, and the clown at the counter, who evidently was pulling a scam and had never been in the store before—and didn't know who he was fucking with continued with his invective. “Oh, now you gonna call this mother-fucker out here? Who the fuck is you? Who the fuck is you?”, he railed.

“You need to calm down, kid. Watch your mouth in my store.”, Slim rumbled. “And don't be bothering my daughter.”

“Fuck your daughter!”, the idiot yelled as I took a step or two back. “She gypped me! I gave her a twenty, she's saying I gave her a five! I want my Goddamn change! All of it!”

“Baby, what did he give you?”

“A-a five”, she stammered.

“We don't be gypping people who come in here, mister. I been here twenty years and we don't do that. I think you made a mistake.”

“I made a mistake?”, the guy screamed. “No, this is a mistake!” And with that, he upset a jar of pickles that was on the counter, tipping it over and as it wasn't 100% sealed, spilling pickle brine all over the counter.

“Mister...I ain't no play-toy.” Slim intoned. And he threw a couple of paper towels at the guy. “You need to wipe that up, right now.”

“Yeah, well I want my fuckin' change right now! All of it! Right now!”

And with that, I heard—I didn't see because it was too damned fast—Slim whip one of those baseball-mitt hands out and grab this dude by the clavicle. The other hand hit the guy's hip, and with one quick motion, Slim yanked him into the air, and slammed him down hard onto the counter with a “BOOM!” that shook the gum rack and penny-candy boxes.

He had the guy pinned in an unnatural position that looked for certain to snap his neck if he kept him like that for long. The man's face was pressed hard against the brine-soaked countertop.

“I told YOU, I ain't no Goddamned play-toy! I gave you a chance to wipe that shit up—now you're gonna lick it up! NOW LICK IT UP!. Sure as shootin', homeboy started to loll his tongue out and lick at the liquid like some sort of spine-twisted cat at a bowl. “Annnh! Annnh! Annnnh!” he went, lapping up the spillled brine as Slim moved him about like a human dishrag.

“I told-you-what-to-do, but-you-didn't-wanna-listen, did-you? Now-look-at-cha! Told-you-I-wasn't-no-Goddamn-play-toy, right? Huh? I-didn't-hear-you? Am-I-a-Goddamned-play-toy?” “Annnh! Annnh! Annn-n-n-n-n-n-h!” was the throttled response again.

The correct answer of course, was “no”. Slim was absolutely not a “play-toy”. Certain people you'll come across in life are just not. And Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is one of those people. An “Original Gangsta”, if you will.

You don't just fuck around with folks like that. And the absolute worst thing you can do is “play” tough guy with them when you don't have the pedigree for it. Take heed the tales of “Pac”, and “Suge”, of “Slim” and “The Counter-Licker”, and if you have any sense at all, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, you'll go to the phones before you even think of going to the generals.

'Cause from what I remember seeing, being forced to lick up pickle brine ...is an absolute bitch.

There's more...