Only when I had put work in could I feel good that day otherwise I couldn't sleep. Gang Member, and he took it seriously, seeking to distinguish his passage with a particularly brutal brand of violence. 'This was my 'rite of passage' to manhood,' he would write in the best-selling Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Putting in work meant raining violence and retribution on his set's 'enemies,' who eventually became mostly other Crips in a rival set, the Rollin' Sixties. WHEN HE WAS 11 YEARS OLD, KODY SCOTT BEGAN TO 'PUT in work' with the Eight-Tray Gangsters, a set of the infamous Crips that dominated his South-Central neighborhood. There is no passage to manhood in such a world. At the close of the century, men find themselves in an unfamiliar world where male worth is measured only by participation in a celebrity-driven consumer culture and awarded by lady luck. Navigating the ornamental realm, much less trying to derive a sense of manhood from it, has become a nightmare all the more horrible for being virtually unacknowledged as a problem. The old American male paradigm can offer no help to a man competing with ghostly, two-dimensional armies of superathletes, gangsta rappers, action heroes and standup comedians on television. Not only are they losing the society they were once essential to, they are 'gaining' the very world women so recently shucked off as demeaning and dehumanizing. The aspects of this public 'femininity' - objectification, passivity, infantilization, pedestal-perching and mirror-gazing - are the very ones that women have in modern times denounced as trivializing and humiliating qualities imposed on them by a misogynist culture. These are the same traits that have long been designated as the essence of feminine vanity, the public face of the feminine as opposed to the private caring, maternal one. IN A CULTURE OF ORNAMENT, MANHOOD IS DEFINED BY appearance, by youth and attractiveness, by money and aggression, by posture and swagger and 'props,' by the curled lip and petulant sulk and flexed biceps, by the glamour of the cover boy, and by the market-bartered 'individuality' that sets one astronaut or athlete or gangster above another. He never finished his education, but what good is reading and writing to someone who doesn't intend to make a living legally? He would learn more exciting things on the streets instead.The Differential Association Theory states that 'all behavior, pro-social and anti-social is learned, and that we choose the behaviors that are the most. I believe that Kody was a very intelligent boy, but he also had a problem with his attention span. In one part of the book he said that the excitement of the streets was '.the only thing in life that had ever held attention for any serious length of time' (Scott, 1993: 5). People with lower arousals have a greater propensity to be criminally prone (Class Notes).Throughout the book there are several examples of how Kody was bored with the everyday happenings of his life. He worked hard to live up to his name, and soon the legacy of Monster was well known, by not only his own gang, but in others as well (Scott, 1993).In this paper I intend to show how Kody's early child hood and teenage years, both proceeding and during his life as a Crip, fit quite well with several theories that were discussed in class over the quarter.The Arousal Theory says that because some peoples brain's work differently than others, things that stimulate, or interest one person may not do so to someone else. During one incident, a police officer referred to him as a monster, and the name stuck. His potential for being in a leadership position became more and more evident as time went on. He held loyal to his homeboys and began to build up the Crips. It was this day that began what would become a career for Kody: banging (Scott, 1993).Kody worked hard to secure a reputation for his name. At the age of eleven he was initiated into the Crips, and committed his first murder. Gang Member, Kody Scott tells the story of the struggle between two significantly large gangs.

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