Doesn't everyone do this? Oh, maybe not. But we are technologically advanced. We have porn to show us what to do.
It's better if you include the next line. Like me and my dad. But we were in a Chevy. And not masturbating. Looking for parking spaces.
Uh huh.
Somebody (the Modern Love writer? The New Guinea tribesmen?) seems to be making a faulty assumption that adolescent males need to learn masturbation by example.
Mothers, don't let your sons grow up to be wankers. That's Dad's job.
Does it say whether the New Guinea ritual also involves crying?
To an adult, it seems impossible that anyone would need to be told about or shown this, given how much it's referred to in the culture at large. But as cerebrocrat suggests, it can be an unsuggested discovery, that takes the discoverer quite by surprise, as it was for me. Before too long I realized it was a common, in fact nearly universal practice, and what it was called, etc., but it was secret knowledge and power for a while there. The degree to which many kids do not register, or put two and two together about this before puberty can be hard to remember, I think.
As someone who grew up Lutheran in the Midwest, I'm always nonplussed by stories about people teaching other people how to masturbate. It's so far from the norm of not talking about it. I learned to masturbate by rubbing on the bed without anybody telling me about it, but I never figured out the idea of pulling on my penis until I read a fundamentalist study that said homosexuality was caused by people who began masturbating at an early age while looking at their genitals. So in that way I had to learn how to masturbate from reading about it.
Actually, there is a tribe called the Sambia in the New Guinea highlands who have an even more interesting puberty ritual:
"What makes the Sambia special, even unique, is their phase of ritual homosexuality in which youngsters are forced to perform fellatio on grown men, not for pleasure, but in order to ingest their semen. This then supposedly provides them with the substance or `seed' of a growing masculinity"
Puberty rites also involve extensive beatings and other tortures, all to prove your manhood, etc.
They have college fraternities in New Guinea?