more on hazing...

...this time from an email from Canadian MB, who was something of an athlete in his prime, but has now foolishly foregone all that for the rigours of a (non-frat) academic life. It seems clear that the US isn’t the only culprit – I guess it’s just that the country that is powerful enough to foist Webster onto the (Western) world’s TV screens (and check out the message in the top right corner of the TV Guide!...yes, worthy of an exclamation mark) is powerful enough to hog the frat-house / hazing limelight. They’re welcome to it, mind you.

You are a lucky man never to have heard of hazing. Hazing was a ridiculous ritual on many of the competitive hockey teams I played on. The mild incidents included (sometimes injurious) gotchies [I think this is the same as a wedgie – SW], or head shavings of various, silly looking sorts. Of course, the sensitive kids who cared most about fitting in and not wanting a silly looking head always got the silliest looking heads. And never fit in. But things were sometimes much worse. E.g., marshmallow races (rookies have to pick up a marshmallow with their ass cheeks, race to a finish line, loser eats all marshmallows), cum cookie races (four or five guys jerk off on a cookie, last to shoot eats the cookie), bathroom antics (just before I joined the semi-pro team I played on, the 5 rookies, during one bus driven road trip, were stripped down, had their ankles and wrists taped together, and were all smushed together into the bathroom at the back of the bus; one of the guys got so scared with claustrophobia that he shat all over the lot of them as they sweated in out in close quarters for another 30 minutes). Somehow I always managed to get out of these nasty incidents. The worst I ever got a two inch shaved strip above each of my ears that was actually in style at the time anyways.

And this, from a follow-up email, further exemplifying the heights to which humanity can leap…

Reading it again, I forgot to mention that one of the teams I was on had had their "initiation" rituals severely curtailed because in the prior year, before I was there, they had heartlessly involved a mentally challenged water boy in the cum cookie game. Five or six guys all knew the slow kid would be the slowest, so invited him in and told him he simply had to eat the cookie because he'd failed to summon the sufficient mental images of Samantha Fox (recall: early 90s) in time. The poor kid just wanted badly to feel like one of the "normals". Unlike the normals, he yakked all over the place--after eating the cum cookie, unlike the normals.

Sometimes social intelligence alone was not enough to avoid hazing. Had to invoke other strategies. On one football team I was the rookie quarterback and it seemed the "chocolate swirl" was coming 'round to me (they'd dunk one's head in a toilet that had just been shat in and flushed). So I quit right before the semi-final game. "Fuck 'em," I thought. Two things then happened. The backup quarterback played a hell of a game. And, people on the team were so pissed off at me that word spread that there'd be a lynch mob if I didn't show up for the championship game. So I showed up. Didn't even get to play I don't think. The back-up played the whole game, we lost, and my initiation was just forgotten. When I was nominated for athlete of the year in final year (didn't win that either), the head of the atheletic program mentioned all the high school sports I'd played, except football.

The head athletic guy did include basketball though, perhaps because I opted out of initiation in a more graceful way there. I was on the junior team, and we were travelling by bus with the senior team. The seniors were going through the whole junior team, serving up gotchies. They sounded painful as all hell. Some guys bled. Some probably can't have children. I sat near the coaches at the front of the bus to avoid the gotchie. We stopped for gas and drinks. Smartly, I thought, I waited till I was the last guy in the store before re-boarding the bus. After all, school buses always fill from the back to the front, right? So I'd get to sit near the coaches again, right? (This was hard for me, since I was normally "too cool" to sit near the coaches). Not this time. At some point during the trip, the whole senior team had plotted to force me to the back of the bus: upon entering the bus, and in a world-view shattering change of high school social dynamics, all the coolest senior kids were sitting near the front of the bus, with the coaches. Only the very back seat, far from the coaches, was open. I had no choice, and had to walk by each and every one of the anxious senior players en-route. After sitting down, I saw the plan slowly enter its final phase. The three senior gotchie-givers (all the 7'0'' posts of course, and me the tiny guard) slowly moved to the back of the bus, displacing seat sitters row by row, over about 15 torturous minutes. I decided to fain illness. By the time they'd gotten to the back, I had the window open and looked green. As he got to the second last seat, just in front of me, the senior captain said, as if this made the whole think okay, "We're going to gotchie you now, okay?" I can't remember what I said in reply, if anything. But he said, "man, you don't look so well, are you okay?" I said, "Not feeling good, may barf." Continuing with the world-view shattering change in dynamics, the three guys had a change of heart and decided they should let me be. Or maybe I was just a lucky "cool" junior, since illness wouldn't have saved one of the "losers.” Had I been a "loser", the three posts would have set a new underwear stretch distance record, and now, E and I would be planning to adopt instead of to conceive.

Funny, there were never any initiation rituals on the tennis teams.

To which MG (US – and now also Candian – citizen) added:

…likewise in the theater arts department...yes...I'm a weenie...but I TOO have functioning balls.

north american culture really is the pinnacle of all human existence