Interesting! Practically an artofmanliness.com in German? I didn't know this exists. I actually like it - I thought our European culture is too "civilized" for this. Also useful as language practice for me - I am a textbook "kitchen speaker", perfectly fluent but crappy grammar. Thanks a lot of this idea. I was asking around on Reddit about interesting German language blogs years ago, and generally I got boring recommendations, so if you have another a few, please shoot. I think the German language blogosphere and journalism suffers from a generic boredom problem esp. in Austria, I have no idea who reads diepresse.com or derstandard.at without falling asleep. I think the English-language journosphere is better at presenting similar topics in more engaging ways e.g. The Atlantic.

Various initiation rituals of fraternities use that mechanism.

There is a time and place for those, such as universities, either the American "Greek letter culture" or the old German "putting scars on each others faces with foils" kind. I don't think similar organizations compatible with family fathers approaching 40 exist. However, I hope once I get good enough at boxing to be allowed to spar full force, I will make some marvelous friendships through giving each other bruises, same logic as the face-scar fencing stuff.