An ethos of extreme masculinity characterises the societies of the eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea and is manifest in every sphere of social life. The preoccupation and emphasis on warfare is one indication. As well, leaders, often tending towards despotism, are marked by strength, force and behaviour which is at once feared by other members of the community and willingly countenanced by them, for their fortunes, even survival, are bound up with the fate of such leaders. Matoto ‘epitomizes’ (J. Watson 1971:267) this agressive male ethos; he is a ‘bad man’ yet accepted as a necessary evil in a climate of intense hostility. If societies of the eastern highlands do not appear to offer the potential for systematic inequalities through ‘economic intensification’ of the sort argued to be possible in the western highlands (Modjeska 1982), it can hardly be doubted that despots like Matoto were superordinate, if only temporarily so. Leaders of his stature might not have been ubiquitous, and certainly, his attributes were personal and could not be inherited (as wealth could be), but societies like Tairora were familiar with such men and tolerated the inequalities and excesses which went with them.