It is an initiation into manhood, it must involve a recognition of the masculine even more than of the feminine virtues.

This has been well understood by the finest primitive races.

They constantly give their boys and girls an initiation at puberty; it is an initiation that involves not merely education in the ordinary sense, but a stern discipline of the character, feats of endurance, the trial of character, the testing of the muscles of the soul as much as of the body.
Ceremonies of initiation into manhood at puberty--involving physical and mental discipline, as well as instruction, lasting for weeks or months, and never identical for both sexes--are common among savages in all parts of the world.

They nearly always involve the endurance of a certain amount of pain and hardship, a wise measure of training which the softness of civilization has too foolishly allowed to drop, for the ability to endure hardness is an essential condition of all real manhood.
It is as a corrective to this tendency to flabbiness in modern education that the teaching of Nietzsche is so invaluable.
The initiation of boys among the natives of Torres Straits has been elaborately described by A.C.Haddon (_Reports Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, vol.v, Chs.

VII and XII).