Cracks

The Discovery Channel has a series, Last One Standing, where a group of Western athletes participate in the fights and ordeals of various tribal cultures.

Today, as part of an Andean Indian event where they have to race up a mountain and carry down chunks of ice, each participant must get ass-whipped three times as an offering to the mountain god before heading up there. Most of the guys went thru it. Two refused.

One of them is an American black guy who could not get over the associations with slavery. I'm not in his skin, but it seems to me that the very fact that he was an unquestioned and valued part of this project and that everyone undergoes it as a religious rite makes it very different, indeed, the opposite of subjugation. One of the other white guys, who'd already been whipped, even offered to engage in a (second) mutual whipping with him, both of them standing up, just so he could remain part of the group. But he couldn't get past it.

And the Indian shaman or coach or whatever, in a stunning display of ethnic arrogance and total lack of respect for or sympathy with other peoples' cultural meanings, simply said, No whipping, no participation, no exceptions. You're out.

The other is a white guy who is a vegan...and who refused to participate because, get this, he refused to participate in "violence". This whole series is a celebration of tribal forms of institutionalized male violence!

Both these guys will get a kind of a pass. The black guy for sure. And the vegan, well, people told him that he had to stick with his convictions, no matter what.

I just wonder what would have been the response if one of the Western athletes were a Jew or a Christian who took seriously their religions' proscription against worshipping false gods and refused the whipping because it was an offering to an idol. I bet that they would be criticized for their lack of multicultural respect.

And no one dared to critique the ethnocentric and fundamentalist Indian official who excluded the two Westerners.

All this in the midst of a project which appears to be an unabashed celebration of testosterone.

Cracks.

PS. I note, too, that the title of this all-male show is not "Last Man Standing", but "Last One Standing."