The Men From the Boys: Rites of Passage in Male America.

• Author: Naughton, Jim

The Men From the Boys: Rites of Passage in Male America. Ray Raphael. University, of Nebraska Press, $19.95. My family says a special prayer during Advent. If you repeat it 15 times each night, Jesus is supposed to grant you a special intention. When I was 11, I prayed that I would grow up to be the free safety for the Minnesota Vikings. I grew up instead with the body of Michael Dukakis.

Twenty years later I'm comfortable with the conclusion that Jesus did the right thing. But growing up with athletes as my role models, being too short and too slow to compete beyond Little League seemed like punishment for sins I didn't know I'd committed.

There was a certain cachet that accompanied playing Babe Ruth League baseball or playing high-school basketball, an acknowledgment of masculinity that was denied the president of the student council, the kid who just passed his driver's test, or the guy who helped support his family with a part-time job. The only feats that could win a guy similar prestige were having a great deal of sex (and talking about it) and drinking a great deal of beer.

Ours was an impoverished notion of what it meant to be a man, but in an economically depressed former mining town, it was all we were given to work with. One comfort of Raphael's insightful book is the discovery that we were not alone. None of the men he interviewed seemed to have a particularly welldeveloped idea of just what it is that separates the men from the boys.

We haven't killed our own food for centuries, so that can't be it. It takes fewer and fewer of us to defend hearth and home. And, of course, women now excel in fields once reserved for men alone. Progress, it seems, is the nemesis of masculinity. This may not be one of the major criticisms of progress, but it has left a generation of men struggling (too often in print) with their identity.

The identity problem, Raphael would have us believe, is most acute for the young man. A society that is unclear about its definition of masculinity is incapable of formulating rites through which a boy passes into manhood. Lacking such rituals, Raphael says, we grow up frightened of definition and duck commitments. The midlife crisis, Raphael says, is the working out, late in life, of problems once resolved by rituals of passage.

Devising and supervising these rituals was once a profoundly social affair. As Thomas A. Leemon observed in The Rites of Passage in a Student Culture, a 1972 book, such rituals placed "a...