The weight of a big brother crushing my lungs until they are ash. The warmth of a stronger boy pissing on the back of my leg and my delayed recognition of the fact igniting his cruel laughter. Unexpected ballsweat. A cold fish.
I didn't experience those brotherly rites, perhaps rights, until I was 15 and boarding-schooled, held down and tickled to the point of injury, whacked about the torso with a bar of soap in a pillowcase while pinned under cotton-poly sheets, made to hold the door for openly hostile, sneering guys (who currently cheat on their wives with their neighbors' husbands, I'm guessing).
But it was great! It was necessary to see the flash of evil in counterpart eyes, to know that my own lizard lurked as truly as theirs. To accept a rite. For its riteness.
The recentish PC abolishment of hazing may well save the 1 in 200 borderline boy from a night or month or years of tears, but it robs the other 199 of the knowledge that we are still just Vikings of darker hue, Hutus of the North, cuckolders all, cunts, stains, bullies full of untoild pain who cry at Harry Chapin anyway, despite.
Such an emotionally retarded generation of boys we are now rearing!
I myself fashioned a sawed-off lacrosse stick handle and carved the words, "The Avenger" into its shaft just after my 17th birthday. I hit first year boys, "rats," in the back of their thighs, hard, if I found them in the dorm hall after lights out.
They Hate Me. Still.
And that's how men learn to be kind, by disgusting themselves with unkindness. Only in betraying our better selves do we succumb to the good, for it isn't there first. We don't nurture naturally. We boyz 2 men echo what it was to kill and fear death, or remember that ugly equation louder than you ladies. So forgive us that period of acting out some barely concealed rubbing up against it. Look away, or down at your pleats and braids.
And you bitchboys who whine about hazing (and let me clarify--the good kind, known only subjectively--NOT the not over-the-top, truly reprehensible, ever-scarring, Catholic-style hazing we read about blushingly in Vanity Fair and Florida gossip rags)---- well for goodness sake, you fey bastards, quit sucking your stiff little thumbs and own your quivering hatred. Grow up and grow tired of it, take your kids to the zoo, change a few diapers, say your prayers half-drunk and pay down your mortgage.
That "hatred" (and I likely overstate the case), is mere exhaust from the engine of progress. It isn't pride, it's recognition: I "hate" some of those guys who hazed me, just like a dog is wary the cat that scratched his nose. The dog learned something valuable, though: cats are liable to scratch.
Huh. I think most of the literature on the psychological effects of hazing would argue that the what the dog actually learns is to be wary and distrustful of ALL cats, instead of just the one cat that hurt him. And that that isn't actually all that productive a lesson. That is, it might be a productive lesson for a dog in regards to cats, because dogs and cats are fairly simple and predictable creatures (a dog is not wrong to be wary of all cats, in other words). But I'm not sure it's a great lesson for a boy. On either side of the ritual, frankly.
Then again, I'm not a boy. I've never been hazed. I've never hazed someone else. I only know what violence I've experienced myself and the impact it had on me and on the person who perpetrated it (the latter at least in the short term). I would say that being on the receiving end of that violence made me a better person in some very real ways, without a doubt. But I do not know that I would say it made the perpetrator of that violence a better person. It's apples and oranges in some ways. But in others maybe not so much, really.
My personal experiences with bullies and the bullied seem to conform to this as well. The men I've known who were picked on a lot as kids tend to be the more empathetic, "kind" adults. The ones who were bullies as kids tend to still be bullies now; they're just often more insidious about it (personally, I think it's much easier psychologically when the bully just punches you in the face -- the more insidious bullying, like emotional abuse or the impact on others of absolutely refusing to trust anyone EVER, is far more destructive, from my perspective). Kids who learn to be violent through being the victims of violence tend to be the most fucked up of all, not the most peaceful (as a simplified combination of our theories might suggest they'd be).
That said, darlingest, I sort of like your theory on this -- that learning what you're capable of is a good way to learn where your lines need to be drawn. And I'm certainly not against hazing that is voluntary -- as a ritual to get into the Greek system, for example. Where you can get out if you want to get out. But what you described in your boarding school -- I have a hard time believing that did you long-lasting good overall, either as victim or as victimizer.
Then again, these are all generalizations and our mileage often seems to vary dramatically. Besides, I may have misunderstood your point in the first place. But my point is that I think there are better ways to go about learning what you think hazing teaches. And the research on bullying/hazing seems to confirm that. (Though, I will confess I tried to find research that was attempting to confirm your hypothesis and there doesn't seem to be any. And that would not necessarily be because your hypothesis is bullshit so much as it might be because your hypothesis is threatening. Know what I mean?)
In any case, I'm sorry to hear you were peed on while others stood by cackling at your humiliation. And I'm sorry to think of the boys you hit with your stick, for the same reason. But I'm glad to hear that you think that somehow made you a better man, because that implies that you might, in fact, BE a better man. Which would be good.
This is an interesting topic, and one with practical application for the parent of a school-age child. I, too, was unable to find the research that would support your hypothesis, Jumpy, and, as a result, fell back on anecdotal evidence. I took the content of your post and asked two deeply kind men I know if they agreed with the conclusions you draw. Both denied having been the victims of the kind of hazing you describe. I know both of them well, and I believe them. And yet their kindness is unmistakable, and they do not seem the worse for having skipped entirely what you posit as formative.
I also know that very young children of both sexes are capable of acting in ways that, at the very least, ape kindness. Whether they understand that what they do has a larger meaning is debatable -- but does that even signify? Mimicry is our earliest teacher -- we are what we see, we do what is done to us. What matters, to my mind, is the result: empathetic human beings. Or is empathy only the province of the diaper-changing, mortgage-paying "faggot," for whom you have such contempt?
I can also imagine that it would be painful, for the grown-up, grown-out-of-it bully to look back on the conduct of his younger self and search for justification. And, I would imagine, that those who were the victims of bullying likely learn to take on some form of protective coloration, for the purpose of avoiding further pain. Aping to some extent, again, what they saw, what was done to them. Which strikes me as sad. And purposeless.
Physical and mental hazing may not be good but they are not bullying. Hazing is not torturing the same kid for years for his lunch money. It is pagan and ritualized, an ancient twitch in the groin. A lizard, I am sure. Females do it too but it is different and not the subject here. Really I don't think woman understand it, maybe intellectually but we do not relate. It is a game both physical and mental, a transitional event, often ugly but men know that going in. "The Avenger" has ancestry and I'm not so sure it is in anyone's best interest to squelch the impulse that it represents.
The homogeneous response of the PC nation is an affront to rearing boys, there are plenty of studies to back that up. Seeing evil in violence, pretend or real, is a dangerous and irrational response. All violence is not evil. When something is bad it doesn't mean it is born from some twisted black psyche.
But all of this righteous understanding on my part doesn't lead me to believe that hazing results in future kindness, and obviously I'm not the only one. I believe nearly all men need to pass through a phase of physical cruelty or aggression to figure out what to do with their violence. But obeying the worst of yourself only makes what is not the worst seem better, it certainly doesn't lead to nurturing. It may be a pleasant mental game, "Fuck it, I know I can do worse.", but those games are about shame not kindness. Not being despicable is a lesson in not being despicable it is not teaching you to be decent. I'm all for a little brutality but look it in the face.
It may well make a better man to have the impulse and learn to deal with it. In fact, I would say it does make a better man. I would also say, better than what?
__I understand and I wish to continue. __I understand and I do not wish to continue.
Ah, the sweet power of choice.
Glorify the lizard. Explore the shadow. You have the perfect canvas for it --> yourself.
Rats.
Intricate snowflakes. Yes, for fuck's sake, "FUCK YOU" IF YOU LIKE, excuse me, snowflakes. Laugh all you want. If you want your eyes wide open, get them all the way open. Everyone's so hot for gritty realism. Get even more real, farther up close. Our fragility is real, our evil is real, our resilience is real. I'm not championing weakness. I'm saying respect the mystery that is another human being. Whatever meager nourishment is found at the heart of hazing is so trumped by the peril. You don't know who you're dealing with, see? You. Don't. Know. Who. You're. Dealing. With.
Bullying and hazing are so close they're practically fucking. I'm imagining the slippery hands of an adolescent trying pull them apart, and then I'm thinking that, right, they're not trying to.
[and, I want to go on record here. I fucking hate nicknames. Handles are stupid. I carry myself wherever I go. I own everything I say. There are light-years of distance in my life as it is. But I'll play along if that's the entrance fee. Fuck.]
Hazing is bullying larded up with ritual, institutionalized, fetishized. No less an expression of self-hatred, no less a ridiculous dance of fear and power. Maybe women don't get it, maybe we don't relate, because all women mark their passage into womanhood with blood. Depending on the amount of granola crunching around in your matrilineal heritage, that passage may be celebrated and sweet, or hushed up and shamefaced, but it happens to us all.
Maybe that's why all the dicking around with Avengers and someone else's warm piss seems so fucking pointless. So tragicomic. What kind of a bridge is built on someone else's humiliation? What the fuck do you learn, that you couldn't have learned in some other way, from a little boy's pain?
Jesus Christ, if femininity is flexible enough to admit to strength, to glory in it, why can't masculinity admit to a need for kindness? The way this conversation is trending, masculinity may as well be fragility's doppelganger. So brittle. So susceptible to the slightest of challenges. An onion-skinned hot air balloon.
Hazing is not bullying. Bullying is not hazing. It is not pointless. It serves the purpose of getting stupid teenage boys in tune with their inner men. If they cannot connect with that inner man within a greater, normative environment, they fail. Think about prison. Think about life. (BTW, an inner man does not have to be hetero.) Victorian man was conditioned to believe the greatest honor was to die on the battlefield. Post-modern man has no honor and thinks he can live forever.
I'm not supposed to be here, damn it, I'm supposed to be working.
Okay. I'm starting to feel some kind of meat in your point, there, as it were, on a gut level. Getting out of the ethereal, into the corporeal. That's it. Circling in on it. Physical testing. A man in his body. Pardon me while I think out loud. Yes, not just physical, of course, but dense. Embodied. Violent. This aspect of incarnation. Carnality. Animality. That we are animals and life is dangerous and we need to be prepared for it. Yes, I'm late remembering this.
I took a childbirth class before my first son was born. The teacher made us practice shoving our arms into ice water and holding them there for a couple of minutes, to give us something to work with to ape the pain of a contraction, figure out how we'd cope. She told us how in some Native American communities, there was a ritual - and fuck if I can't remember if this was for boys progressing to manhood or girls progressing to womanhood - I likely didn't give a shit because a head was going to be coming out of my vagina in a few weeks -- anyway. The youth in question...yes, a boy...built a canoe, and then the test would come. He'd be rowed out far, at night, and then he'd be pushed out of the boat and have to swim to shore in the icy water. And then some, uh, other shit would happen to him, something violent, and he would endure it and, um, then he'd be a man. Or a woman? Ha! I forget. Head, vagina. You understand.
Right, we don't have anything like that. We just have hazing.
Some value is palpable to me, now. I'm getting it.
And the question of honor, right. Hm. This is good, I have a lot to think about. I'm remembering that there is, indeed, a whole chamber of human experience that I have been removed from in this particular incarnation (oh, that's right, you heard me) as a woman. I frankly just feel like I'm starting to remember something.
JESUS, I HAVE TO GO WORK. I want to stay all day and talk.
Rites of passage. Women have been cursed with them. Young men have had them stripped away forcefully by society. Very uncool. Thankfully there are some institutions that remain untouched.
I'm typing this with filthy hands, taking a breather from my endless war on the head-high dandelions in my yard.
[yes, it's spring here in San Diego, Los Angeles' pretty but slightly retarded younger sister. Still eminently fuckable, but you wouldn't brag about it.]
Fully in touch with my physicality and completely in love with the violence. The soul-satisfying THWUCK when a particularly juicy specimen gives it UP in the face of my superior strength. The pop of earth-scent as it surrenders the ground. And, with every green soldier I add to the pile, an irritant fades:
*thwuck*
...Jumpy's casual contempt for daddies...
*thwuck*
...LivingStone's "is not" response...
*thwuckthwuckthwuck*
I kid. I do.
Let's talk about honor. Absolutely. That's an area I find fascinating. As an opening observation, it seems to me that, in those cultures where the veneration of male honor continues to hold the fort, the burden of enforcement and the penalties for infraction are largely, though not exclusively, borne by women. Reductively, what I see is women charged with maintaining the honor of their sex, via the pantomime of blushing withdrawal from the omnipresent male gaze, while male honor appears to be conditioned on Woman's preservation of the all-important hymen, until it can be rightfully sacrificed on the altar of a marital bed. Simply exhausting, to be impaled on both horns of that dilemma, from cradle to grave.
Now, I'm not saying there's a perfect parallel between present-day Afghanistan and the age of Victoria, but when men start looking for their missing "honor," my lady-parts get a little nervous. Disabuse me of this notion, please.
[and, confidential to l-stone: it's not a curse. it's a gift.]
First: I granted admin priveleges to Rowboat and Wendy--my suggested names for Tina and Sara, respec. (Sara, you might also go by Bony). You have the weekend to change clothes. If you don't, well, you'll have to wear the same thing in eternis. Lisa, no such choice for you as you have expressed a desire to call yourself Lisa, which is so wild that I will let it stand without further comment.
Second: comment on L'stone's latest? You don't have to have played football. Please? ps, I looove this several-posts-going-at-once thing. If any crew can maintain that paddle-shifting energy, this one can. Oh wait I'm about to c-c-c-c-c-come
I will not hand 'honor' over to thugs because that is the reason they claim excuses them. That is not honor. Fuck them. They don't get to decide what anything means. My vehemence comes from a soft and fierce place that wants honor to be left alone. I like it.
The word honor is a beautiful sound. So romantic and suspicious, like the actual word hesitates. It feels private and important to me, certainly not something we should cast off. I don't believe it is some soldier strong intractable code but something both more and less serious. Stout and true, maybe. The back is straight but the gate is easy. Correct and mindful. hm. It is not a virtue; it's something dirtier but no less good.
Men using their honor as an excuse to oppress are mistaking their egos for a seemingly more virtuous path. One they have long since left behind. Honor has been stripped of most of its obvious playing fields and become a sort of awkward thing. Used as an excuse for violence and pigheadedness when I think it is subtler and more difficult than that.
Hazing may be a primitive path that has an unpredictable outcome, but its wild swings are aimed at something. Something that may be harder to get to than we thought.
That said. I would never find the lesson in someone holding my down and putting their bare ass in my face.
I'm late to the party, friends, so let me catch up.
-- I fucking love nicknames.
-- Menstruation is an absolute hellish curse and, what's more, it makes no evolutionary sense whatsoever and ought be long gone by now. Come on, second-X, a third nipple would be far more useful. TIME TO UPGRADE, SYSTEM.
-- I think it's bullshit to suggest that men need to hurt people in order to learn how not to hurt people. That's like saying I need to drown (or at least nearly drown) before I can learn how to swim. I mean, that is certainly one way to learn how to swim, but I would argue there are far, far better methods. Equally effective, if not more so.
And I'm sorry, but I laughed out loud at the comparison of Victorian rites of passage (battlefield valor, e.g.) to modern-day hazing. Really? Pissing on each other, hitting each other with sticks you've carved cute little names into -- that's what you've got? And you're proud of that? That's how you earn your "honor"? That's the institution you are grateful you have not yet had stripped away?
Time to evolve out of that nonsense, how about? Violence is weakness, and if you haven't figured that out yet, then you haven't actually learned a goddamn thing. There's no honor in shoving your naked ass in somebody's face. The honor would be in NOT shoving your ass in somebody's face, despite wanting to do so very badly. "Getting it out of your system" is not honorable -- it's weak. That's why, on the battlefield, mercy is considered one of the most valorous acts.
I would argue that true honor comes from leaving the lizard right where it's always been -- right there in the forefront of your brain -- and refusing to let it have command. Because that's the HARD way. Honor has to be earned. It's a scorning of meanness, not a giving into it. It's a sense of allegiance to what is right or what's been earned.
But maybe "honor" was the wrong word to begin with. I'm open to semantic adjustment.
Semantic adjustment is indeed needed here -- LivingStone, I'd very much like to hear how you define the honor you believe is absent. And, I'd be most interested in (a) whether your definition is sex-exclusive, (b) if you believe [and I'm not assuming you do] honor is a fundamentally male need, why you believe same, and (c) whether honor functions most appropriately as an external, imposed construct or is capable of being self-generated and individually-defined?
While L wrestles with pop-culture references, I'll give this a go. Seriously, it would be helpful to hear what one of you fellas thinks about all this. Or are we being hazed? Oh well.
Curse and a gift, yes. Evolutionary nonsense, really? Unless we are going to start farming children outside the body, there is no better machine for reproduction. The cycle becoming obsolete brings to mind the worst of the sci-fi futures. Still. Sucks. Now that subject is firmly behind me.
Women have no honor. Please. The notion of women's honor has changed as much as men's but our evolution we embrace and relish in because women have been oppressed. Claiming our worth and integrity is our tough and beautiful right. But men's honor has shadows and skeletons that can't be so easily accepted.
My understanding was the Victorian man comparison only stands to point out how meager and base modern man has become in relation to his own sense of masculinity, fraternity, pride...honor? Throughout history there have been prescribed behaviors for understanding worth and integrity and, while those things have become no less important, society has come to openly scorn traditional male paths for that kind of understanding, not without good reason. Concurrently, we have done little or nothing to replace or cultivate new systems that support boys becoming men. I, for one, do not believe that saying "restrain yourself" is a legitimate way of handling the impulses and intrigues that boys gravitate towards. I don't believe hazing leads to kindness, integrity, honor or even a good nights sleep but the event speaks to boys' and young mens' need for fraternity and the need for the expression of that brotherhood to be uniquely male. Seeing who's got the mustard, as it were, and then looking to those people for what to do next.
Or maybe they are all just a bunch of brutes and society hangs in the balance between civilized and a worldwide wedgie. Could be.
(I wanted to say before replying to that this: Hi, Sara! It's nice to meet you, though I'm not sure this counts as meeting you. Let's pretend it does.)
And now for clarification of what I meant, because I think I must have explained it badly. If I keep replying to things here, you'll find this is one of my greatest personality flaws: A) bad at explaining things, coupled with B) inability to sit still when I'm being misunderstood. Which leads back to A. Which leads to B. etc. etc. ad infinitum (or nauseum, whichever comes first).
First off, I wasn't arguing that we aren't great baby makers. The evolutionary argument about menstruation isn't my own, it should be noted -- there's a lot of literature about this concept. The theory, in part, is that it sort of NEVER made solid evolutionary sense for us to menstruate the way we do, with the frequency that we do, because it's something that happens every single month and results in blood loss, fatigue, pain, and increased vulnerability overall. The system works perfectly in terms of procreating, but many scientists find it odd that it has changed so little.
Also, of course, we've already learned how to abolish menstruation for those who need or want to -- I haven't had a period in at least five years, myself. It's not freaky sci-fi futurism at all, believe me. It's quite marvelous. Where nature fails, science frequently cuts in, which is one reason why I likenzee science. Though, obviously, science does not always cut in all that gracefully at first. One, two, three; one, two, three; one, two, SPLAT.
Second! I'm definitely NOT arguing that men/boys should be told to "restrain themselves" and ignore all natural instincts in some Puritanistic quest for "virtue." I'm arguing that beating kids with sticks is bullying, not hazing, and that it has no productive value on either party.
Hazing I'm more gray about -- I see the usefulness, for example, of tearing down recruits in boot camp with ritualized mental and physical challenges designed to strip them of their self-focus and turn them into effective team members. Beat 'em to bond 'em, as my dad describes it (career Marine).
But I still think that's incredibly, INCREDIBLY different from peeing on a freshman to humiliate him simply because you're bigger and you can. I even find it incredibly different from fraternity Hell Weeks, even though I could see how that might be slightly more boot-campy at least in theory, if not in practice. But the things Court described do not strike me as "hazing." They strike me as bullying. And regardless, even the military has taken several steps back on their boot camp policies because they have found it's just as effective NOT to beat the recruits to a pulp.
In terms of honor, I reject the idea that this is the best way to teach men to be honorable -- to haze and be hazed. In Court's examples, I would argue that the honorable thing to do when faced with a stick and a boy is NOT to apply the one to the other.
I'm the aunt of five nephews, ages 1-8, and three nieces, ages 2-7. It's incredible to see how different they are. The boys are drawn to danger and fear and self-testing of an aggressive nature in a way the girls simply are NOT (which is not to say girls never are, of course, it's just dramatically different and, in my experience with these kids specifically, it's been that dramatically different from birth).
But I think my point is that we ought to consider how better to guide those instincts, if our goal is to create honorable, "better" men. I think that's actually the same as your point, in fact. It's just that you're stating your point twenty times better than I am stating mine.
"Seeing who's got the mustard, as it were, and then looking to those people for what to do next."
I think this is the crux of the matter.
There's a simple, but simply enormous, difference between the rite of passage Tina described way up-thread [canoes, etc.] and the piss/Avenger scenario: the former is administered by adults and the latter is administered by children. The former is painstakingly constructed by a broad adult cohort for the purpose, at least in part, of transmitting cultural truths -- self-sufficiency but also the fragility of life in the absence of the tribe, the need to grow-the-hell-up and just fucking GET it in a violent and dangerous world. The latter is the lunatics running the asylum.
Or perhaps undermining the asylum. A recurrent question as I participate in this discussion: I know Jumpy's hazing experience took place in a private, Episcopalian institution. How do you square, Jumpy, the religious instruction you and your fellow hazees received with the way you treated each other? Do you see an inconsistency? Where is the example of Jesus in the ritual you enacted? Does it matter? If not, why not?
[Also: Meggles -- I got your point re: the evolutionary shortcomings of menstruation just fine. Smooch.]
First, and listen well: the piss/shower incident was fictional, a way to bring Livvie's point into focus for those of you who didn't experience hazing (some passive-aggro boys did piss in other boy's shampoo bottles, a pathetic deed in keeping with Livvie's point about repressing their true need to express violence). The Avenger, an ironic comment on the need for males to own phallic objects (we were learning our Freud, our Jung and our Shakespearian symbolism at the time) was employed exactly once on a thigh, that of Buckley Fountain, a boy for whom discipline was tea in the Sahara. He begged for it in a language a PCer would misdiagnose as ADHD or some such, something to be treated with drugs. No, he just wanted to experience consequence, something he lacked in his home life. No, I didn't KNOW that at the time, but I intuited it--I was not a child, but a young man. Buckley was truly "sent away" to school in the cliche mold of boarding--and I don't imagine he enjoyed being smacked, but he sure asked for it. Perhaps he needed it. The soap-pillowcase incident is from a Vietnam movie. I'm (not) surprised that wasn't picked up, as certain of you appear not to be open to experiencing cultural realities outside of what affirms your beliefs. Sadly, for too many men and women, such a worldview is identical to the prescribed norms of the PC nation, which is what we're really arguing about in this post.
Now: before you get mad and fire off a half-baked and tangential response, hear me out. You might not want to say anything by the time I'm done.
Hazing is similar to bullying in its physicality, but there's a safety to it, rules that make its practice safe (all this assumes the kids doing it respect what's going on, that they are not so dull to rites of passage that they freak out and really hurt someone. Of course ugly incidents happen, mostly in drunken college rituals, and they are publicized and become the face for a word, a term. Certain minds are susceptible to believing this slow but consistent stream of media drivel: a teenager commits suicide while listening to Metallica, or after reading Salinger. Shall we damn literature and music? Perhaps modern literature and hard rock? Just Salinger and Metallica? Where to draw the line? Certain of you are nearly book burners of the new age in this particular debate).
I remember laughing while being hazed, and the hazers laughing. The most common form was called Boss. That was when dessert was served at sit-down meals. If it was good, the rats, or new boys, got none, and the older boys divided their shares. If it was awful, like Boston creme pie, the rats had to eat it all. Rats had to hold doors for old boys. Occasionally rats were pitted agaist each other by old boys in hallway wrestling matches. Chafe if you must at the images, or the outcomes you imagine, but you are simply out of your depth. Those were moments of growth, moments of fun and self-realization. You figured out where you stood in the of-the-moment moment (NOT permanent, as we were all still growing (ie, we knew it wouldn't always be that way), and hazing doesn't account for brain power, future earnings potential, etc--Revenge of the Nerds was in theaters). To hear some of you ladies talk about it, and judge, makes me do three things: 1) admire Livvie, as he may have predicted this scrum as a result of saying some bald shit. 2) recognize that women's thoughts on hazing are like men's thoughts on Barbies, or sleepovers, or gossipping. Women discussing the male urge to be violent have no more ability to make sense than do men discussing what it's like to bleed out of the thing for which women, historically, are most prized. 3) Appreciate that I have the vantage point of having been bullied and having been hazed, and that I know the difference, whereas most do not. Bullying was being beat up (mildly) and seeing other kids bullied (not mildly) at public high school. Having been hazed (mildly) at prep school, and having hazed (mildly) at the same. No one got beat the fuck up at prep school. We were a community, apprently ineffable, youthfully akin to how I imagine Meg's father feels about his Marine brothers.
mid-point-p.s.--Meg--who the hell compared hazing to battlefield "valor???" But interestingly, that's the point Livvie and I are making, more deeply--that the real rituals of violence have been abolished. Killing animals, for millenia a staple of boyhood rite, is gone. Boys are raised with little to no violence allowed (but check out he multi-Billion $ video game industry, where they are allowed to "safely" "live out" primal urges you simply don't fathom. Hello Columbine, hello Tony Soprano's son).
It has been an uneasy truce over millennia, the partnership of our sexes. We men could kill you, but then who would have our babies and keep the home, and masturbating isn't nearly as much fun as fucking, said the caveman. So said Chuck, class of 2011, Fresno State. Now granted, Chuck is an asshole by my standards and yours, but Chuck EXISTS. Damning him out of reflex, political or parental, gets nothing done. It doesn't change Chuck. But it makes You feel better. Now, I might also detest Sally, Chuck's classmate at Fresno, the girl who sleeps around, passes along chlamydia, gets knocked up and then kills a cell-cluster(?)human life(?) (take your pick, there'z no wrong answerz at Frezno!)as casually as she orders a double-caf half-fat at the mall.
So too exist the kind men, those who have (willfully?) forgotten, or chosen to lie about for cultural reasons, the awful things they once felt, acted upon or not. Oh wait, option 3--maybe their testosterone count is low, has always been, or their fathers ignored them. They aren't high on our hate list, but neither do they further the debate. Switzerland. Swiss boys.
(one more mid-point ps--Lisa--wtf, I don't hate on "daddies." Go back and reread the post--I am urging all men, myself included, to grow up and pay the mortgage, etc. Ugh, this point-by-point refutation is making me sick.)
Oh Lisa. Bringing the church into this was a surprising slip. Go after the shit-fingered Catholic "priests," go after the institution that formalized something truly reprehensible in its (ACTUAL) abuse of children by frustrated nuns--institutionalized Abuse. Go after the sale of indulgences (selling God on the streets), go after a bloodstained, malevolent archfucking guinea experiment.
Leave the liberals-with-balls church alone. The denomination of ordaining women, not just as priests, but as Presiding Bishop! and gays (a fearless, pioneering move that both strengthens and rends Episcopalians worldwide, as we gab on about this overhyped load).
Bringing Jesus into it? Check your shit.
Finally, to Lisa's last post, the question of Tina's "adult" hazing ritual and mine, classified as "children..." or "lunatics running the asylum," speaks most clearly to a simple lack of comprehension (not for a lack of trying!). Why? Because it bifurcates maturity. It splits us into camps of "wise" and "foolish," adult and child, with no in-between. Bullshit. I posit that teenagers, 15 to 18, are wrestling with the very idea of maturity. Hardly children, not quite adults...and yet, in recent centuries, they WERE adults, middle-aged, even.
Now. I can fairly hear already the cries of "but you said it was one way, and now you say you made some of it up! Unfair!" And that may be valid. But my best guess is that your feelings on the subject of hazing are as expresed, regardles of detail. Hell, I hope you have that much spine.
Awards ceremony! Most willing to consider another view, one she admits to not being chromosomally able to fully comprehend: Sara Hon. Mention: Tina 2nd runner-up: Meg in early posts Most likely to take things out of context later: Meg Most likely to step off a Spanish galleon disguised as a male Catholic priest, and understanding men about as well as a celibate might: Lisa
First off, this: "The soap-pillowcase incident is from a Vietnam movie. I'm (not) surprised that wasn't picked up, as certain of you appear not to be open to experiencing cultural realities outside of what affirms your beliefs."
Of course I’ve seen that in movies -- we all have. Are you suggesting that since we’ve seen it in movies, we should’ve known immediately you were lying about it having also happened to you? Because that’s completely illogical. More confusing to me is why you’d feel the need to exaggerate your bullying/hazing activities in the first place. If it was so you could strengthen your point, I think you just weakened your point.
I think it’s also worth mentioning that I can think of two films that involved soap/pillowcase attacks, and in both cases, the victims of those attacks ended up dead. In the first one, “Full Metal Jacket,” the victim later has a “major malfunction” and shoots himself in the head with his own rifle. In the second one, “A Few Good Men,” the victim later is killed (accidentally) in another hazing incident. That these are both military films is no coincidence -- this kind of thing happens more in the military that you might realize, and it’s one reason why physical/violent contact in boot camp was outlawed several years back. Unoffiicially, hazing in the military still takes place, obviously (you can handle the truth). But if you get caught doing it now, you’re out. There’s a reason for that. It is a good reason. It’s been proven NOT to be effective, at least in that setting.
I also wanted to point out that we’ve already been discussing the difference between bullying and hazing in posts above, and from my interpretation of what I’ve been reading, the majority of us seem to have come to the conclusion that A) some form of hazing-type behavior might, in fact, be something boys need to explore in order to grow up into men, but that B) what passes for “hazing” these days is pretty pathetic (to wit, see photo, above).
I don’t think any of us are necessarily against the idea of hazing as a concept, especially if it’s done following your rules, Jumpy (i.e. that it has rules) -- but instead are wondering how that process could be improved to be less stupid and more useful when it comes to rearing our boys into men. Trying to suggest that just because we’re women, our opinions on this are useless -- that makes no sense to me. Our acceptance of this idea has been gradual (at least, mine has been), and it has stemmed directly from this discussion, which is something I think you should be pleased about, Jumpy.
But I take issue with the fact that this is the second time in about as many weeks that you’ve leapt into the end of a conversation and insulted the ones who came before you -- however facetiously you think you may have been doing it. That makes me feel like my opinion is not wanted here and that if I dare to offer it, I better do it while also bracing myself for an imminent blow. I suspect some of my compatriots feel similarly. You can dismiss this as over-sensitivity, but is that really going to be a useful dismissal in the long run? It’s not productive to wing out direct or indirect insults as part of your reply. We’re clearly, ALL OF US, very open-minded and intelligent people. Don’t burn us for it. Listen, respond gently, see if we can’t all teach other something new. I, for one, found this discussion fascinating. And then after I read your post, I was sort of sorry I’d stepped into it. As someone who gives regular professional talks on how to moderate blog comments and develop your blog community, I can tell you this much: you’re doing it wrong.
Also, Livingstone is the one who brought up the concept of battlefield valor. Read back.
"And you bitchboys who whine about hazing ... well for goodness sake, you fey bastards, quit sucking your stiff little thumbs and own your quivering hatred. Grow up and grow tired of it, take your kids to the zoo, change a few diapers, say your prayers half-drunk and pay down your mortgage."
- This was the casual contempt for men -- for "bitchboys/fey bastards" who nonetheless have children and zoos and diapers and mortgages with which to concern themselves -- I referenced. I did not mis-read it. If your writing isn't communicating what you intend, that's your problem, not mine.
2.
"How do you square, Jumpy, the religious instruction you and your fellow hazees received with the way you treated each other? Do you see an inconsistency? Where is the example of Jesus in the ritual you enacted? Does it matter?"
- This was the issue I was attempting to address, not the issue you chose to read into my words. Nothing in what I wrote can reasonably be taken as an attack on your religion. I asked you, Jumpy, how you reconcile your religious beliefs [which I believed to be sincere] with your defense of manifestly un-Christ-like behavior [which I believed to be an accurate representation of your actual experience - more fool, me]? That was the long and the short of the question. You were not obligated to answer the actual question I asked [as opposed to a question I didn't ask], though I asked the question in good faith, just as I am not obligated to take up your straw-man and defend Catholicism, in comparison to your religion, to you or to anyone else.
3.
"[I now] recognize that women's thoughts on hazing are like men's thoughts on Barbies, or sleepovers, or gossipping. Women discussing the male urge to be violent have no more ability to make sense than do men discussing what it's like to bleed out of the thing for which women, historically, are most prized."
- You reveal an astoundingly low opinion of people, in general, and the female members of your cohort, here, specifically. If we have "no ability to make sense" of the issue, why allow us to comment? Is an echo chamber all you want? If so, you should have made that clear.
4.
"Most likely to step off a Spanish galleon disguised as a male Catholic priest, and understanding men about as well as a celibate might: Lisa"
Disclaimer: I am NOT being patronizing, or instructing or otherwise trying to guide. Just responding. Generally and specifically.
More Awards!!!
The Oh Brother Award goes to...Jumpy!! For saying the most and making it easiest to dismiss.
The Wizard of Oz Award goes to...Livingstone!! For saying the least and getting the most credit.
Jesus. Well done fellas.
I say all of the following knowing that I am a person that does not take things in these contexts personally. The ether is a cloak I wear well.
First.
Hello, Hello to you all. We are met!! (Thanks Meg, for introducing the introducing.)
Second.
Here come the sex girls. ROTN forever.
Third.
I have been meaning to tell Mr. L how much I appreciate the line, "Post-modern man has no honor and thinks he can live forever." Which, at its heart, may sum up our thesis with more poetry and less condescension than any of us have been able to muster thus far (Out of our depth. You have balls, Jumps, something you are intent on proving it appears.). If that seems like a leap don't take the phrase quite so literally, apply it broadly to the ideas that confine us in the name of preservation. What we are preserving is a very real concern without consensus. I would agree that our discussion distills to one of political correctness and also masculinity vs. femininity.
PC is a theory/philosophy I scorn as something that snuffs individual thought, judgment, and artistic expression. An idea that righteously upholds values and standards that should never be blanket-ly dictated. I believe the doing so, in fact, dries up most chances for real moral consideration or rigorous intellectual integrity.
To some extent we have agreed that the good hazing/bad hazing, man's honor/woman's honor debate has limits of understanding between the sexes.
But oh sigh. Rejecting being PC does make for more confrontation. And believing the sexes have limits to their understanding of one another does pose an interesting dilemma, for our current forum in particular. Oddly enough, both of these things seem to be playing out right in front of us. Please. No one feel that I am determining your positions for you. Or that any of us are actually trying to limit each others speech.
Meg, I was struck by you saying that Jumpy is doing this wrong. Granted, he doesn't have the lightest touch and clearly he pisses people off. But wrong? This room may not be gentle but some rooms aren't. Let's see. We have the opportunity to see what happens after we've acknowledge the violence, the sensitivity and the pussy vs. the cock. No one should think their opinion is not welcome here. None of us should regret. Fuck him. Fuck all of us. Claim this. Being misunderstood can redouble our efforts. Being offended can strengthen our resolve. If someone is sharpening their talons they are still vulnerable. And we have nothing to lose.
Now. More specifically.
Jump. Jump. Jumpy. I'm down with much of what you say. You're good and then...
"Women discussing the male urge to be violent have no more ability to make sense than do men discussing what it's like to bleed out of the thing for which women, historically, are most prized." Oh, fuck off. With love.
Really, what do you hope to get out of telling the people engaged in the conversation that they are not capable of making sense of the subject at hand? Just stand on your sturdy ground and make us wrong. If there is a chance for understanding it is eviscerated when our egos are coming to our defense. Be as rude as you want but it is such a deal breaker when people are trying to tell you that they make sense, it is an untenable position. Useless.
The end.
Oh Hurray, hurray!
I do love it here in space.
ps - I have no doubt that Buckley Fountain did beg for it. Poor Buckley. What a bust to be born into central casting. Easy breezy.
My best friend in the world with a penis was hazing me when we met. Livvie-boy started as a freshman and I as a soph. So in our mutual soph year, at roughly the same age, he was an "old boy" and I was a rat.
On a bus ride to Monticello, Mr. L decided to ride me a bit.
"Hey, rat! "..." "Rat!!" "..." "HEY RAT! I'm fucking talking to you!" I turned around. Mr. L was a pudge, but about 6'1". (He still had some growing to do, it turns out, above the crown and around the gut.)
"What." "Just checking in, rat. Seeing how you're doing." "I'm fine." "Ok, RAT, you fucking rat. Rat."
See, he was always verbally economical.
There weren't many old boys on the bus--Monticello was optional for them, required for us (little did I know Livvie was going to be a History major and actually enjoyed visiting TJ's home). So I felt bold.
"Why are you picking on me? Do you think that makes you cool? Next year, I won't waste my time being a dick to first year kids."
"Oh, I know. I know you won't, rat."
This went on until I surmised that behind that gum-cracking visage topped with a backwards cap (shudder, but still, this was before that particular fashion choice denoted a 80-and-below IQ with a tendency to sexually abuse) was a little boy-o, smiling in a defensive manner, trying to...make friends. By being a jerk. T'is the way of the gun.
I stopped by his room a week later to "hang a D," or dip, smokeless tobacco. We sat and spit into cups and learned the first few things about each other. He went to school in England for a few years, and there in Jolly Old he did his hair like the late Cory Haim. His nick was Surfer Boy. I told him about my purgatorial So. Dak. years. I made fun of his music (odd now, as he is the king of styles: his vinyl collection boggles and will be worth 6 figures someday).
ps, he prays half-drunk, has a mortgage, mows the lawn.
I think he's a brave motherfucker for having kids with a Virginia woman of the horsey set. Hell, I'd think him brave for having kids with Claudia Schiffer.
I have received a few missives from some of you today, and almost none of them were what I anticipated after last night's dump.
Meg, of course you are welcome here. No, you weren't invited by me, but I entrusted certain of us to invite, or mention, or casually fail to veil, Spaceage. And here you are. You are all you claim to be, and on top of it, a wild card. Monthly cycles? "SPLAT"??? Bravo. You bug the shit out of me 20% of the time, but you are needed. We had a certain chemistry here, a chemistry of nuance. But now that it's altered, I have (slowly) come to realize the new worth of nutty prods like you.
Lisa. Darling.
I will forever struggle to be nice to you, you who push ME sometimes in ways you know will hackle me up as well. And yes, I unload inordinate ordnance on your nance. I was thrilled to see you say 'fuck off,' as it was entirely deserved. I was prickly last night. I'll explain tomorrow. Until then, know you are loved and equally welcome. More so, even.
Ha.
Having said that, I thank Sara for pointing out that I am Penn to Livvie's Teller (true, except he is fat and I am skinny. The difference is, he doesn't give one whit in this forum that I say something so "rude" as that).
Where you, or any of you, err, to my small, too-protesteth-ing mind, is in the notion that that my rudeness serves no purpose.
The fact, empirically, is this: none of you would have been driven to such heights of righteous struggle regarding this banal question of hazing (banal because over it we have zero influence), to such depths of anger and mirror-gazing as have exhibited, without a prick.
I am that prick.
"What did they look like?" "I don't know, they were jammies! They had Yodas and shit on 'em!"
Sorry, I'm watching Raising Arizona.
More tomorrow.
Thanks Sara, and thank you Lisa, and Meg. And Livvie. And our Universal Mother, Tuna.
This is waaay too intense for me. I'd like to make one correction/suggestion: I am the Merlin Olsen or, better yet, the Victor French to Court's Michael Landon.
The weight of a big brother crushing my lungs until they are ash. The warmth of a stronger boy pissing on the back of my leg and my delayed recognition of the fact igniting his cruel laughter. Unexpected ballsweat. A cold fish.
ReplyDeleteI didn't experience those brotherly rites, perhaps rights, until I was 15 and boarding-schooled, held down and tickled to the point of injury, whacked about the torso with a bar of soap in a pillowcase while pinned under cotton-poly sheets, made to hold the door for openly hostile, sneering guys (who currently cheat on their wives with their neighbors' husbands, I'm guessing).
But it was great! It was necessary to see the flash of evil in counterpart eyes, to know that my own lizard lurked as truly as theirs. To accept a rite. For its riteness.
The recentish PC abolishment of hazing may well save the 1 in 200 borderline boy from a night or month or years of tears, but it robs the other 199 of the knowledge that we are still just Vikings of darker hue, Hutus of the North, cuckolders all, cunts, stains, bullies full of untoild pain who cry at Harry Chapin anyway, despite.
Such an emotionally retarded generation of boys we are now rearing!
I myself fashioned a sawed-off lacrosse stick handle and carved the words, "The Avenger" into its shaft just after my 17th birthday. I hit first year boys, "rats," in the back of their thighs, hard, if I found them in the dorm hall after lights out.
They Hate Me. Still.
And that's how men learn to be kind, by disgusting themselves with unkindness. Only in betraying our better selves do we succumb to the good, for it isn't there first. We don't nurture naturally. We boyz 2 men echo what it was to kill and fear death, or remember that ugly equation louder than you ladies. So forgive us that period of acting out some barely concealed rubbing up against it. Look away, or down at your pleats and braids.
And you bitchboys who whine about hazing (and let me clarify--the good kind, known only subjectively--NOT the not over-the-top, truly reprehensible, ever-scarring, Catholic-style hazing we read about blushingly in Vanity Fair and Florida gossip rags)---- well for goodness sake, you fey bastards, quit sucking your stiff little thumbs and own your quivering hatred. Grow up and grow tired of it, take your kids to the zoo, change a few diapers, say your prayers half-drunk and pay down your mortgage.
You seem sort of proud that they hate you still, Jumpers. I find that rather ironic.
ReplyDeleteThat "hatred" (and I likely overstate the case), is mere exhaust from the engine of progress. It isn't pride, it's recognition: I "hate" some of those guys who hazed me, just like a dog is wary the cat that scratched his nose. The dog learned something valuable, though: cats are liable to scratch.
ReplyDeleteHuh. I think most of the literature on the psychological effects of hazing would argue that the what the dog actually learns is to be wary and distrustful of ALL cats, instead of just the one cat that hurt him. And that that isn't actually all that productive a lesson. That is, it might be a productive lesson for a dog in regards to cats, because dogs and cats are fairly simple and predictable creatures (a dog is not wrong to be wary of all cats, in other words). But I'm not sure it's a great lesson for a boy. On either side of the ritual, frankly.
ReplyDeleteThen again, I'm not a boy. I've never been hazed. I've never hazed someone else. I only know what violence I've experienced myself and the impact it had on me and on the person who perpetrated it (the latter at least in the short term). I would say that being on the receiving end of that violence made me a better person in some very real ways, without a doubt. But I do not know that I would say it made the perpetrator of that violence a better person. It's apples and oranges in some ways. But in others maybe not so much, really.
My personal experiences with bullies and the bullied seem to conform to this as well. The men I've known who were picked on a lot as kids tend to be the more empathetic, "kind" adults. The ones who were bullies as kids tend to still be bullies now; they're just often more insidious about it (personally, I think it's much easier psychologically when the bully just punches you in the face -- the more insidious bullying, like emotional abuse or the impact on others of absolutely refusing to trust anyone EVER, is far more destructive, from my perspective). Kids who learn to be violent through being the victims of violence tend to be the most fucked up of all, not the most peaceful (as a simplified combination of our theories might suggest they'd be).
That said, darlingest, I sort of like your theory on this -- that learning what you're capable of is a good way to learn where your lines need to be drawn. And I'm certainly not against hazing that is voluntary -- as a ritual to get into the Greek system, for example. Where you can get out if you want to get out. But what you described in your boarding school -- I have a hard time believing that did you long-lasting good overall, either as victim or as victimizer.
Then again, these are all generalizations and our mileage often seems to vary dramatically. Besides, I may have misunderstood your point in the first place. But my point is that I think there are better ways to go about learning what you think hazing teaches. And the research on bullying/hazing seems to confirm that. (Though, I will confess I tried to find research that was attempting to confirm your hypothesis and there doesn't seem to be any. And that would not necessarily be because your hypothesis is bullshit so much as it might be because your hypothesis is threatening. Know what I mean?)
In any case, I'm sorry to hear you were peed on while others stood by cackling at your humiliation. And I'm sorry to think of the boys you hit with your stick, for the same reason. But I'm glad to hear that you think that somehow made you a better man, because that implies that you might, in fact, BE a better man. Which would be good.
This is an interesting topic, and one with practical application for the parent of a school-age child. I, too, was unable to find the research that would support your hypothesis, Jumpy, and, as a result, fell back on anecdotal evidence. I took the content of your post and asked two deeply kind men I know if they agreed with the conclusions you draw. Both denied having been the victims of the kind of hazing you describe. I know both of them well, and I believe them. And yet their kindness is unmistakable, and they do not seem the worse for having skipped entirely what you posit as formative.
ReplyDeleteI also know that very young children of both sexes are capable of acting in ways that, at the very least, ape kindness. Whether they understand that what they do has a larger meaning is debatable -- but does that even signify? Mimicry is our earliest teacher -- we are what we see, we do what is done to us. What matters, to my mind, is the result: empathetic human beings. Or is empathy only the province of the diaper-changing, mortgage-paying "faggot," for whom you have such contempt?
I can also imagine that it would be painful, for the grown-up, grown-out-of-it bully to look back on the conduct of his younger self and search for justification. And, I would imagine, that those who were the victims of bullying likely learn to take on some form of protective coloration, for the purpose of avoiding further pain. Aping to some extent, again, what they saw, what was done to them. Which strikes me as sad. And purposeless.
Bullying is bad. Being bullied is bad.
ReplyDeletePhysical and mental hazing may not be good but they are not bullying. Hazing is not torturing the same kid for years for his lunch money. It is pagan and ritualized, an ancient twitch in the groin. A lizard, I am sure. Females do it too but it is different and not the subject here. Really I don't think woman understand it, maybe intellectually but we do not relate. It is a game both physical and mental, a transitional event, often ugly but men know that going in. "The Avenger" has ancestry and I'm not so sure it is in anyone's best interest to squelch the impulse that it represents.
The homogeneous response of the PC nation is an affront to rearing boys, there are plenty of studies to back that up. Seeing evil in violence, pretend or real, is a dangerous and irrational response. All violence is not evil. When something is bad it doesn't mean it is born from some twisted black psyche.
But all of this righteous understanding on my part doesn't lead me to believe that hazing results in future kindness, and obviously I'm not the only one. I believe nearly all men need to pass through a phase of physical cruelty or aggression to figure out what to do with their violence. But obeying the worst of yourself only makes what is not the worst seem better, it certainly doesn't lead to nurturing. It may be a pleasant mental game, "Fuck it, I know I can do worse.", but those games are about shame not kindness. Not being despicable is a lesson in not being despicable it is not teaching you to be decent. I'm all for a little brutality but look it in the face.
It may well make a better man to have the impulse and learn to deal with it. In fact, I would say it does make a better man. I would also say, better than what?
Ah! Yes! Yes! Now we're getting somewhere. See, Hitchens, what good can come of polemics properly cooked?
ReplyDeleteI'll be back for you, Meg, Lisa & your Kind Men, and Sara Day O'Connor!
Sleep tight and dream not of men, either Kind or Unhomogenized.
(so excited)
--Yer Jumpson
__I understand and I wish to continue.
ReplyDelete__I understand and I do not wish to continue.
Ah, the sweet power of choice.
Glorify the lizard. Explore the shadow. You have the perfect canvas for it --> yourself.
Rats.
Intricate snowflakes. Yes, for fuck's sake, "FUCK YOU" IF YOU LIKE, excuse me, snowflakes. Laugh all you want. If you want your eyes wide open, get them all the way open. Everyone's so hot for gritty realism. Get even more real, farther up close. Our fragility is real, our evil is real, our resilience is real. I'm not championing weakness. I'm saying respect the mystery that is another human being. Whatever meager nourishment is found at the heart of hazing is so trumped by the peril. You don't know who you're dealing with, see? You. Don't. Know. Who. You're. Dealing. With.
Bullying and hazing are so close they're practically fucking. I'm imagining the slippery hands of an adolescent trying pull them apart, and then I'm thinking that, right, they're not trying to.
Exactly, Tina-who-may-not-be-Tina-much-longer.
ReplyDelete[and, I want to go on record here. I fucking hate nicknames. Handles are stupid. I carry myself wherever I go. I own everything I say. There are light-years of distance in my life as it is. But I'll play along if that's the entrance fee. Fuck.]
Hazing is bullying larded up with ritual, institutionalized, fetishized. No less an expression of self-hatred, no less a ridiculous dance of fear and power. Maybe women don't get it, maybe we don't relate, because all women mark their passage into womanhood with blood. Depending on the amount of granola crunching around in your matrilineal heritage, that passage may be celebrated and sweet, or hushed up and shamefaced, but it happens to us all.
Maybe that's why all the dicking around with Avengers and someone else's warm piss seems so fucking pointless. So tragicomic. What kind of a bridge is built on someone else's humiliation? What the fuck do you learn, that you couldn't have learned in some other way, from a little boy's pain?
Jesus Christ, if femininity is flexible enough to admit to strength, to glory in it, why can't masculinity admit to a need for kindness? The way this conversation is trending, masculinity may as well be fragility's doppelganger. So brittle. So susceptible to the slightest of challenges. An onion-skinned hot air balloon.
Hazing is not bullying. Bullying is not hazing. It is not pointless. It serves the purpose of getting stupid teenage boys in tune with their inner men. If they cannot connect with that inner man within a greater, normative environment, they fail. Think about prison. Think about life. (BTW, an inner man does not have to be hetero.) Victorian man was conditioned to believe the greatest honor was to die on the battlefield. Post-modern man has no honor and thinks he can live forever.
ReplyDeleteI'm not supposed to be here, damn it, I'm supposed to be working.
ReplyDeleteOkay. I'm starting to feel some kind of meat in your point, there, as it were, on a gut level. Getting out of the ethereal, into the corporeal. That's it. Circling in on it. Physical testing. A man in his body. Pardon me while I think out loud. Yes, not just physical, of course, but dense. Embodied. Violent. This aspect of incarnation. Carnality. Animality. That we are animals and life is dangerous and we need to be prepared for it. Yes, I'm late remembering this.
I took a childbirth class before my first son was born. The teacher made us practice shoving our arms into ice water and holding them there for a couple of minutes, to give us something to work with to ape the pain of a contraction, figure out how we'd cope. She told us how in some Native American communities, there was a ritual - and fuck if I can't remember if this was for boys progressing to manhood or girls progressing to womanhood - I likely didn't give a shit because a head was going to be coming out of my vagina in a few weeks -- anyway. The youth in question...yes, a boy...built a canoe, and then the test would come. He'd be rowed out far, at night, and then he'd be pushed out of the boat and have to swim to shore in the icy water. And then some, uh, other shit would happen to him, something violent, and he would endure it and, um, then he'd be a man. Or a woman? Ha! I forget. Head, vagina. You understand.
Right, we don't have anything like that. We just have hazing.
Some value is palpable to me, now. I'm getting it.
And the question of honor, right. Hm. This is good, I have a lot to think about. I'm remembering that there is, indeed, a whole chamber of human experience that I have been removed from in this particular incarnation (oh, that's right, you heard me) as a woman. I frankly just feel like I'm starting to remember something.
ReplyDeleteJESUS, I HAVE TO GO WORK. I want to stay all day and talk.
Somebody pay me for that?
Anyway, thank you. I mean, uh, fuck you*.
*Not you. You.
Rites of passage. Women have been cursed with them. Young men have had them stripped away forcefully by society. Very uncool. Thankfully there are some institutions that remain untouched.
ReplyDeleteI'm typing this with filthy hands, taking a breather from my endless war on the head-high dandelions in my yard.
ReplyDelete[yes, it's spring here in San Diego, Los Angeles' pretty but slightly retarded younger sister. Still eminently fuckable, but you wouldn't brag about it.]
Fully in touch with my physicality and completely in love with the violence. The soul-satisfying THWUCK when a particularly juicy specimen gives it UP in the face of my superior strength. The pop of earth-scent as it surrenders the ground. And, with every green soldier I add to the pile, an irritant fades:
*thwuck*
...Jumpy's casual contempt for daddies...
*thwuck*
...LivingStone's "is not" response...
*thwuckthwuckthwuck*
I kid. I do.
Let's talk about honor. Absolutely. That's an area I find fascinating. As an opening observation, it seems to me that, in those cultures where the veneration of male honor continues to hold the fort, the burden of enforcement and the penalties for infraction are largely, though not exclusively, borne by women. Reductively, what I see is women charged with maintaining the honor of their sex, via the pantomime of blushing withdrawal from the omnipresent male gaze, while male honor appears to be conditioned on Woman's preservation of the all-important hymen, until it can be rightfully sacrificed on the altar of a marital bed. Simply exhausting, to be impaled on both horns of that dilemma, from cradle to grave.
Now, I'm not saying there's a perfect parallel between present-day Afghanistan and the age of Victoria, but when men start looking for their missing "honor," my lady-parts get a little nervous. Disabuse me of this notion, please.
[and, confidential to l-stone: it's not a curse. it's a gift.]
This is as close to Engine as I'd ever dared to hope.
ReplyDeleteSara. Weigh in.
First: I granted admin priveleges to Rowboat and Wendy--my suggested names for Tina and Sara, respec. (Sara, you might also go by Bony). You have the weekend to change clothes. If you don't, well, you'll have to wear the same thing in eternis. Lisa, no such choice for you as you have expressed a desire to call yourself Lisa, which is so wild that I will let it stand without further comment.
ReplyDeleteSecond: comment on L'stone's latest? You don't have to have played football. Please? ps, I looove this several-posts-going-at-once thing. If any crew can maintain that paddle-shifting energy, this one can. Oh wait I'm about to c-c-c-c-c-come
ReplyDeleteI will not hand 'honor' over to thugs because that is the reason they claim excuses them. That is not honor. Fuck them. They don't get to decide what anything means. My vehemence comes from a soft and fierce place that wants honor to be left alone. I like it.
ReplyDeleteThe word honor is a beautiful sound. So romantic and suspicious, like the actual word hesitates. It feels private and important to me, certainly not something we should cast off. I don't believe it is some soldier strong intractable code but something both more and less serious. Stout and true, maybe. The back is straight but the gate is easy. Correct and mindful. hm. It is not a virtue; it's something dirtier but no less good.
Men using their honor as an excuse to oppress are mistaking their egos for a seemingly more virtuous path. One they have long since left behind. Honor has been stripped of most of its obvious playing fields and become a sort of awkward thing. Used as an excuse for violence and pigheadedness when I think it is subtler and more difficult than that.
Hazing may be a primitive path that has an unpredictable outcome, but its wild swings are aimed at something. Something that may be harder to get to than we thought.
That said. I would never find the lesson in someone holding my down and putting their bare ass in my face.
You can change me name. The choice is yours. Don't let me down.
ReplyDeletesaid Molly O'Grady.
ReplyDeleteI'm late to the party, friends, so let me catch up.
ReplyDelete-- I fucking love nicknames.
-- Menstruation is an absolute hellish curse and, what's more, it makes no evolutionary sense whatsoever and ought be long gone by now. Come on, second-X, a third nipple would be far more useful. TIME TO UPGRADE, SYSTEM.
-- I think it's bullshit to suggest that men need to hurt people in order to learn how not to hurt people. That's like saying I need to drown (or at least nearly drown) before I can learn how to swim. I mean, that is certainly one way to learn how to swim, but I would argue there are far, far better methods. Equally effective, if not more so.
And I'm sorry, but I laughed out loud at the comparison of Victorian rites of passage (battlefield valor, e.g.) to modern-day hazing. Really? Pissing on each other, hitting each other with sticks you've carved cute little names into -- that's what you've got? And you're proud of that? That's how you earn your "honor"? That's the institution you are grateful you have not yet had stripped away?
Time to evolve out of that nonsense, how about? Violence is weakness, and if you haven't figured that out yet, then you haven't actually learned a goddamn thing. There's no honor in shoving your naked ass in somebody's face. The honor would be in NOT shoving your ass in somebody's face, despite wanting to do so very badly. "Getting it out of your system" is not honorable -- it's weak. That's why, on the battlefield, mercy is considered one of the most valorous acts.
I would argue that true honor comes from leaving the lizard right where it's always been -- right there in the forefront of your brain -- and refusing to let it have command. Because that's the HARD way. Honor has to be earned. It's a scorning of meanness, not a giving into it. It's a sense of allegiance to what is right or what's been earned.
But maybe "honor" was the wrong word to begin with. I'm open to semantic adjustment.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteSemantic adjustment is indeed needed here -- LivingStone, I'd very much like to hear how you define the honor you believe is absent. And, I'd be most interested in (a) whether your definition is sex-exclusive, (b) if you believe [and I'm not assuming you do] honor is a fundamentally male need, why you believe same, and (c) whether honor functions most appropriately as an external, imposed construct or is capable of being self-generated and individually-defined?
ReplyDeleteLisa kills the troll! Women have no honor. Steve Zissou is rolling in his watery grave.
ReplyDeleteStonehenge, you're ducking the question. Quit it.
ReplyDelete[Or don't. Your choice, obviously. But it's hard to take you seriously when your responses are so, erm, low-cal.]
While L wrestles with pop-culture references, I'll give this a go. Seriously, it would be helpful to hear what one of you fellas thinks about all this. Or are we being hazed? Oh well.
ReplyDeleteCurse and a gift, yes. Evolutionary nonsense, really? Unless we are going to start farming children outside the body, there is no better machine for reproduction. The cycle becoming obsolete brings to mind the worst of the sci-fi futures. Still. Sucks. Now that subject is firmly behind me.
Women have no honor. Please. The notion of women's honor has changed as much as men's but our evolution we embrace and relish in because women have been oppressed. Claiming our worth and integrity is our tough and beautiful right. But men's honor has shadows and skeletons that can't be so easily accepted.
My understanding was the Victorian man comparison only stands to point out how meager and base modern man has become in relation to his own sense of masculinity, fraternity, pride...honor? Throughout history there have been prescribed behaviors for understanding worth and integrity and, while those things have become no less important, society has come to openly scorn traditional male paths for that kind of understanding, not without good reason. Concurrently, we have done little or nothing to replace or cultivate new systems that support boys becoming men. I, for one, do not believe that saying "restrain yourself" is a legitimate way of handling the impulses and intrigues that boys gravitate towards. I don't believe hazing leads to kindness, integrity, honor or even a good nights sleep but the event speaks to boys' and young mens' need for fraternity and the need for the expression of that brotherhood to be uniquely male. Seeing who's got the mustard, as it were, and then looking to those people for what to do next.
Or maybe they are all just a bunch of brutes and society hangs in the balance between civilized and a worldwide wedgie. Could be.
(I wanted to say before replying to that this: Hi, Sara! It's nice to meet you, though I'm not sure this counts as meeting you. Let's pretend it does.)
ReplyDeleteAnd now for clarification of what I meant, because I think I must have explained it badly. If I keep replying to things here, you'll find this is one of my greatest personality flaws: A) bad at explaining things, coupled with B) inability to sit still when I'm being misunderstood. Which leads back to A. Which leads to B. etc. etc. ad infinitum (or nauseum, whichever comes first).
First off, I wasn't arguing that we aren't great baby makers. The evolutionary argument about menstruation isn't my own, it should be noted -- there's a lot of literature about this concept. The theory, in part, is that it sort of NEVER made solid evolutionary sense for us to menstruate the way we do, with the frequency that we do, because it's something that happens every single month and results in blood loss, fatigue, pain, and increased vulnerability overall. The system works perfectly in terms of procreating, but many scientists find it odd that it has changed so little.
Also, of course, we've already learned how to abolish menstruation for those who need or want to -- I haven't had a period in at least five years, myself. It's not freaky sci-fi futurism at all, believe me. It's quite marvelous. Where nature fails, science frequently cuts in, which is one reason why I likenzee science. Though, obviously, science does not always cut in all that gracefully at first. One, two, three; one, two, three; one, two, SPLAT.
Second! I'm definitely NOT arguing that men/boys should be told to "restrain themselves" and ignore all natural instincts in some Puritanistic quest for "virtue." I'm arguing that beating kids with sticks is bullying, not hazing, and that it has no productive value on either party.
Hazing I'm more gray about -- I see the usefulness, for example, of tearing down recruits in boot camp with ritualized mental and physical challenges designed to strip them of their self-focus and turn them into effective team members. Beat 'em to bond 'em, as my dad describes it (career Marine).
But I still think that's incredibly, INCREDIBLY different from peeing on a freshman to humiliate him simply because you're bigger and you can. I even find it incredibly different from fraternity Hell Weeks, even though I could see how that might be slightly more boot-campy at least in theory, if not in practice. But the things Court described do not strike me as "hazing." They strike me as bullying. And regardless, even the military has taken several steps back on their boot camp policies because they have found it's just as effective NOT to beat the recruits to a pulp.
In terms of honor, I reject the idea that this is the best way to teach men to be honorable -- to haze and be hazed. In Court's examples, I would argue that the honorable thing to do when faced with a stick and a boy is NOT to apply the one to the other.
I'm the aunt of five nephews, ages 1-8, and three nieces, ages 2-7. It's incredible to see how different they are. The boys are drawn to danger and fear and self-testing of an aggressive nature in a way the girls simply are NOT (which is not to say girls never are, of course, it's just dramatically different and, in my experience with these kids specifically, it's been that dramatically different from birth).
But I think my point is that we ought to consider how better to guide those instincts, if our goal is to create honorable, "better" men. I think that's actually the same as your point, in fact. It's just that you're stating your point twenty times better than I am stating mine.
Shit, I have to go. I hope this made some sense!
"Seeing who's got the mustard, as it were, and then looking to those people for what to do next."
ReplyDeleteI think this is the crux of the matter.
There's a simple, but simply enormous, difference between the rite of passage Tina described way up-thread [canoes, etc.] and the piss/Avenger scenario: the former is administered by adults and the latter is administered by children. The former is painstakingly constructed by a broad adult cohort for the purpose, at least in part, of transmitting cultural truths -- self-sufficiency but also the fragility of life in the absence of the tribe, the need to grow-the-hell-up and just fucking GET it in a violent and dangerous world. The latter is the lunatics running the asylum.
Or perhaps undermining the asylum. A recurrent question as I participate in this discussion: I know Jumpy's hazing experience took place in a private, Episcopalian institution. How do you square, Jumpy, the religious instruction you and your fellow hazees received with the way you treated each other? Do you see an inconsistency? Where is the example of Jesus in the ritual you enacted? Does it matter? If not, why not?
[Also: Meggles -- I got your point re: the evolutionary shortcomings of menstruation just fine. Smooch.]
Wow, I've been away far too long.
ReplyDeleteI.
First, and listen well: the piss/shower incident was fictional, a way to bring Livvie's point into focus for those of you who didn't experience hazing (some passive-aggro boys did piss in other boy's shampoo bottles, a pathetic deed in keeping with Livvie's point about repressing their true need to express violence).
The Avenger, an ironic comment on the need for males to own phallic objects (we were learning our Freud, our Jung and our Shakespearian symbolism at the time) was employed exactly once on a thigh, that of Buckley Fountain, a boy for whom discipline was tea in the Sahara. He begged for it in a language a PCer would misdiagnose as ADHD or some such, something to be treated with drugs. No, he just wanted to experience consequence, something he lacked in his home life. No, I didn't KNOW that at the time, but I intuited it--I was not a child, but a young man. Buckley was truly "sent away" to school in the cliche mold of boarding--and I don't imagine he enjoyed being smacked, but he sure asked for it. Perhaps he needed it.
The soap-pillowcase incident is from a Vietnam movie. I'm (not) surprised that wasn't picked up, as certain of you appear not to be open to experiencing cultural realities outside of what affirms your beliefs. Sadly, for too many men and women, such a worldview is identical to the prescribed norms of the PC nation, which is what we're really arguing about in this post.
Now: before you get mad and fire off a half-baked and tangential response, hear me out. You might not want to say anything by the time I'm done.
(to be continued)
II.
ReplyDeleteHazing is similar to bullying in its physicality, but there's a safety to it, rules that make its practice safe (all this assumes the kids doing it respect what's going on, that they are not so dull to rites of passage that they freak out and really hurt someone. Of course ugly incidents happen, mostly in drunken college rituals, and they are publicized and become the face for a word, a term. Certain minds are susceptible to believing this slow but consistent stream of media drivel: a teenager commits suicide while listening to Metallica, or after reading Salinger. Shall we damn literature and music? Perhaps modern literature and hard rock? Just Salinger and Metallica? Where to draw the line? Certain of you are nearly book burners of the new age in this particular debate).
I remember laughing while being hazed, and the hazers laughing. The most common form was called Boss. That was when dessert was served at sit-down meals. If it was good, the rats, or new boys, got none, and the older boys divided their shares. If it was awful, like Boston creme pie, the rats had to eat it all. Rats had to hold doors for old boys. Occasionally rats were pitted agaist each other by old boys in hallway wrestling matches. Chafe if you must at the images, or the outcomes you imagine, but you are simply out of your depth. Those were moments of growth, moments of fun and self-realization. You figured out where you stood in the of-the-moment moment (NOT permanent, as we were all still growing (ie, we knew it wouldn't always be that way), and hazing doesn't account for brain power, future earnings potential, etc--Revenge of the Nerds was in theaters). To hear some of you ladies talk about it, and judge, makes me do three things:
1) admire Livvie, as he may have predicted this scrum as a result of saying some bald shit.
2) recognize that women's thoughts on hazing are like men's thoughts on Barbies, or sleepovers, or gossipping. Women discussing the male urge to be violent have no more ability to make sense than do men discussing what it's like to bleed out of the thing for which women, historically, are most prized.
3) Appreciate that I have the vantage point of having been bullied and having been hazed, and that I know the difference, whereas most do not. Bullying was being beat up (mildly) and seeing other kids bullied (not mildly) at public high school. Having been hazed (mildly) at prep school, and having hazed (mildly) at the same. No one got beat the fuck up at prep school. We were a community, apprently ineffable, youthfully akin to how I imagine Meg's father feels about his Marine brothers.
mid-point-p.s.--Meg--who the hell compared hazing to battlefield "valor???" But interestingly, that's the point Livvie and I are making, more deeply--that the real rituals of violence have been abolished. Killing animals, for millenia a staple of boyhood rite, is gone. Boys are raised with little to no violence allowed (but check out he multi-Billion $ video game industry, where they are allowed to "safely" "live out" primal urges you simply don't fathom. Hello Columbine, hello Tony Soprano's son).
-----to be continued in a moment------
III.
ReplyDeleteIt has been an uneasy truce over millennia, the partnership of our sexes. We men could kill you, but then who would have our babies and keep the home, and masturbating isn't nearly as much fun as fucking, said the caveman. So said Chuck, class of 2011, Fresno State. Now granted, Chuck is an asshole by my standards and yours, but Chuck EXISTS. Damning him out of reflex, political or parental, gets nothing done. It doesn't change Chuck. But it makes You feel better.
Now, I might also detest Sally, Chuck's classmate at Fresno, the girl who sleeps around, passes along chlamydia, gets knocked up and then kills a cell-cluster(?)human life(?) (take your pick, there'z no wrong answerz at Frezno!)as casually as she orders a double-caf half-fat at the mall.
So too exist the kind men, those who have (willfully?) forgotten, or chosen to lie about for cultural reasons, the awful things they once felt, acted upon or not. Oh wait, option 3--maybe their testosterone count is low, has always been, or their fathers ignored them. They aren't high on our hate list, but neither do they further the debate. Switzerland. Swiss boys.
(one more mid-point ps--Lisa--wtf, I don't hate on "daddies." Go back and reread the post--I am urging all men, myself included, to grow up and pay the mortgage, etc. Ugh, this point-by-point refutation is making me sick.)
Oh Lisa. Bringing the church into this was a surprising slip. Go after the shit-fingered Catholic "priests," go after the institution that formalized something truly reprehensible in its (ACTUAL) abuse of children by frustrated nuns--institutionalized Abuse. Go after the sale of indulgences (selling God on the streets), go after a bloodstained, malevolent archfucking guinea experiment.
Leave the liberals-with-balls church alone. The denomination of ordaining women, not just as priests, but as Presiding Bishop! and gays (a fearless, pioneering move that both strengthens and rends Episcopalians worldwide, as we gab on about this overhyped load).
Bringing Jesus into it? Check your shit.
Finally, to Lisa's last post, the question of Tina's "adult" hazing ritual and mine, classified as "children..." or "lunatics running the asylum," speaks most clearly to a simple lack of comprehension (not for a lack of trying!). Why? Because it bifurcates maturity. It splits us into camps of "wise" and "foolish," adult and child, with no in-between. Bullshit. I posit that teenagers, 15 to 18, are wrestling with the very idea of maturity. Hardly children, not quite adults...and yet, in recent centuries, they WERE adults, middle-aged, even.
Now. I can fairly hear already the cries of "but you said it was one way, and now you say you made some of it up! Unfair!" And that may be valid. But my best guess is that your feelings on the subject of hazing are as expresed, regardles of detail. Hell, I hope you have that much spine.
Awards ceremony!
Most willing to consider another view, one she admits to not being chromosomally able to fully comprehend: Sara
Hon. Mention: Tina
2nd runner-up: Meg in early posts
Most likely to take things out of context later: Meg
Most likely to step off a Spanish galleon disguised as a male Catholic priest, and understanding men about as well as a celibate might: Lisa
First off, this: "The soap-pillowcase incident is from a Vietnam movie. I'm (not) surprised that wasn't picked up, as certain of you appear not to be open to experiencing cultural realities outside of what affirms your beliefs."
ReplyDeleteOf course I’ve seen that in movies -- we all have. Are you suggesting that since we’ve seen it in movies, we should’ve known immediately you were lying about it having also happened to you? Because that’s completely illogical. More confusing to me is why you’d feel the need to exaggerate your bullying/hazing activities in the first place. If it was so you could strengthen your point, I think you just weakened your point.
I think it’s also worth mentioning that I can think of two films that involved soap/pillowcase attacks, and in both cases, the victims of those attacks ended up dead. In the first one, “Full Metal Jacket,” the victim later has a “major malfunction” and shoots himself in the head with his own rifle. In the second one, “A Few Good Men,” the victim later is killed (accidentally) in another hazing incident. That these are both military films is no coincidence -- this kind of thing happens more in the military that you might realize, and it’s one reason why physical/violent contact in boot camp was outlawed several years back. Unoffiicially, hazing in the military still takes place, obviously (you can handle the truth). But if you get caught doing it now, you’re out. There’s a reason for that. It is a good reason. It’s been proven NOT to be effective, at least in that setting.
I also wanted to point out that we’ve already been discussing the difference between bullying and hazing in posts above, and from my interpretation of what I’ve been reading, the majority of us seem to have come to the conclusion that A) some form of hazing-type behavior might, in fact, be something boys need to explore in order to grow up into men, but that B) what passes for “hazing” these days is pretty pathetic (to wit, see photo, above).
I don’t think any of us are necessarily against the idea of hazing as a concept, especially if it’s done following your rules, Jumpy (i.e. that it has rules) -- but instead are wondering how that process could be improved to be less stupid and more useful when it comes to rearing our boys into men. Trying to suggest that just because we’re women, our opinions on this are useless -- that makes no sense to me. Our acceptance of this idea has been gradual (at least, mine has been), and it has stemmed directly from this discussion, which is something I think you should be pleased about, Jumpy.
But I take issue with the fact that this is the second time in about as many weeks that you’ve leapt into the end of a conversation and insulted the ones who came before you -- however facetiously you think you may have been doing it. That makes me feel like my opinion is not wanted here and that if I dare to offer it, I better do it while also bracing myself for an imminent blow. I suspect some of my compatriots feel similarly. You can dismiss this as over-sensitivity, but is that really going to be a useful dismissal in the long run? It’s not productive to wing out direct or indirect insults as part of your reply. We’re clearly, ALL OF US, very open-minded and intelligent people. Don’t burn us for it. Listen, respond gently, see if we can’t all teach other something new. I, for one, found this discussion fascinating. And then after I read your post, I was sort of sorry I’d stepped into it. As someone who gives regular professional talks on how to moderate blog comments and develop your blog community, I can tell you this much: you’re doing it wrong.
Also, Livingstone is the one who brought up the concept of battlefield valor. Read back.
1.
ReplyDelete"And you bitchboys who whine about hazing ... well for goodness sake, you fey bastards, quit sucking your stiff little thumbs and own your quivering hatred. Grow up and grow tired of it, take your kids to the zoo, change a few diapers, say your prayers half-drunk and pay down your mortgage."
- This was the casual contempt for men -- for "bitchboys/fey bastards" who nonetheless have children and zoos and diapers and mortgages with which to concern themselves -- I referenced. I did not mis-read it. If your writing isn't communicating what you intend, that's your problem, not mine.
2.
"How do you square, Jumpy, the religious instruction you and your fellow hazees received with the way you treated each other? Do you see an inconsistency? Where is the example of Jesus in the ritual you enacted? Does it matter?"
- This was the issue I was attempting to address, not the issue you chose to read into my words. Nothing in what I wrote can reasonably be taken as an attack on your religion. I asked you, Jumpy, how you reconcile your religious beliefs [which I believed to be sincere] with your defense of manifestly un-Christ-like behavior [which I believed to be an accurate representation of your actual experience - more fool, me]? That was the long and the short of the question. You were not obligated to answer the actual question I asked [as opposed to a question I didn't ask], though I asked the question in good faith, just as I am not obligated to take up your straw-man and defend Catholicism, in comparison to your religion, to you or to anyone else.
3.
"[I now] recognize that women's thoughts on hazing are like men's thoughts on Barbies, or sleepovers, or gossipping. Women discussing the male urge to be violent have no more ability to make sense than do men discussing what it's like to bleed out of the thing for which women, historically, are most prized."
- You reveal an astoundingly low opinion of people, in general, and the female members of your cohort, here, specifically. If we have "no ability to make sense" of the issue, why allow us to comment? Is an echo chamber all you want? If so, you should have made that clear.
4.
"Most likely to step off a Spanish galleon disguised as a male Catholic priest, and understanding men about as well as a celibate might: Lisa"
- Fuck you, Jumpy.
Disclaimer: I am NOT being patronizing, or instructing or otherwise trying to guide. Just responding. Generally and specifically.
ReplyDeleteMore Awards!!!
The Oh Brother Award goes to...Jumpy!! For saying the most and making it easiest to dismiss.
The Wizard of Oz Award goes to...Livingstone!! For saying the least and getting the most credit.
Jesus. Well done fellas.
I say all of the following knowing that I am a person that does not take things in these contexts personally. The ether is a cloak I wear well.
First.
Hello, Hello to you all. We are met!! (Thanks Meg, for introducing the introducing.)
Second.
Here come the sex girls. ROTN forever.
Third.
I have been meaning to tell Mr. L how much I appreciate the line, "Post-modern man has no honor and thinks he can live forever." Which, at its heart, may sum up our thesis with more poetry and less condescension than any of us have been able to muster thus far (Out of our depth. You have balls, Jumps, something you are intent on proving it appears.). If that seems like a leap don't take the phrase quite so literally, apply it broadly to the ideas that confine us in the name of preservation. What we are preserving is a very real concern without consensus. I would agree that our discussion distills to one of political correctness and also masculinity vs. femininity.
PC is a theory/philosophy I scorn as something that snuffs individual thought, judgment, and artistic expression. An idea that righteously upholds values and standards that should never be blanket-ly dictated. I believe the doing so, in fact, dries up most chances for real moral consideration or rigorous intellectual integrity.
To some extent we have agreed that the good hazing/bad hazing, man's honor/woman's honor debate has limits of understanding between the sexes.
But oh sigh. Rejecting being PC does make for more confrontation. And believing the sexes have limits to their understanding of one another does pose an interesting dilemma, for our current forum in particular. Oddly enough, both of these things seem to be playing out right in front of us. Please. No one feel that I am determining your positions for you. Or that any of us are actually trying to limit each others speech.
Meg, I was struck by you saying that Jumpy is doing this wrong. Granted, he doesn't have the lightest touch and clearly he pisses people off. But wrong? This room may not be gentle but some rooms aren't. Let's see. We have the opportunity to see what happens after we've acknowledge the violence, the sensitivity and the pussy vs. the cock. No one should think their opinion is not welcome here. None of us should regret. Fuck him. Fuck all of us. Claim this. Being misunderstood can redouble our efforts. Being offended can strengthen our resolve. If someone is sharpening their talons they are still vulnerable. And we have nothing to lose.
Now. More specifically.
Jump. Jump. Jumpy. I'm down with much of what you say. You're good and then...
"Women discussing the male urge to be violent have no more ability to make sense than do men discussing what it's like to bleed out of the thing for which women, historically, are most prized." Oh, fuck off. With love.
Really, what do you hope to get out of telling the people engaged in the conversation that they are not capable of making sense of the subject at hand? Just stand on your sturdy ground and make us wrong. If there is a chance for understanding it is eviscerated when our egos are coming to our defense. Be as rude as you want but it is such a deal breaker when people are trying to tell you that they make sense, it is an untenable position. Useless.
The end.
Oh Hurray, hurray!
I do love it here in space.
ps - I have no doubt that Buckley Fountain did beg for it. Poor Buckley. What a bust to be born into central casting. Easy breezy.
My best friend in the world with a penis was hazing me when we met. Livvie-boy started as a freshman and I as a soph. So in our mutual soph year, at roughly the same age, he was an "old boy" and I was a rat.
ReplyDeleteOn a bus ride to Monticello, Mr. L decided to ride me a bit.
"Hey, rat!
"..."
"Rat!!"
"..."
"HEY RAT! I'm fucking talking to you!"
I turned around. Mr. L was a pudge, but about 6'1". (He still had some growing to do, it turns out, above the crown and around the gut.)
"What."
"Just checking in, rat. Seeing how you're doing."
"I'm fine."
"Ok, RAT, you fucking rat. Rat."
See, he was always verbally economical.
There weren't many old boys on the bus--Monticello was optional for them, required for us (little did I know Livvie was going to be a History major and actually enjoyed visiting TJ's home). So I felt bold.
"Why are you picking on me? Do you think that makes you cool? Next year, I won't waste my time being a dick to first year kids."
"Oh, I know. I know you won't, rat."
This went on until I surmised that behind that gum-cracking visage topped with a backwards cap (shudder, but still, this was before that particular fashion choice denoted a 80-and-below IQ with a tendency to sexually abuse) was a little boy-o, smiling in a defensive manner, trying to...make friends. By being a jerk. T'is the way of the gun.
I stopped by his room a week later to "hang a D," or dip, smokeless tobacco. We sat and spit into cups and learned the first few things about each other. He went to school in England for a few years, and there in Jolly Old he did his hair like the late Cory Haim. His nick was Surfer Boy. I told him about my purgatorial So. Dak. years. I made fun of his music (odd now, as he is the king of styles: his vinyl collection boggles and will be worth 6 figures someday).
ps, he prays half-drunk, has a mortgage, mows the lawn.
I think he's a brave motherfucker for having kids with a Virginia woman of the horsey set. Hell, I'd think him brave for having kids with Claudia Schiffer.
ENOUGH.
NOW, onward.
I have received a few missives from some of you today, and almost none of them were what I anticipated after last night's dump.
ReplyDeleteMeg, of course you are welcome here. No, you weren't invited by me, but I entrusted certain of us to invite, or mention, or casually fail to veil, Spaceage. And here you are. You are all you claim to be, and on top of it, a wild card. Monthly cycles? "SPLAT"??? Bravo. You bug the shit out of me 20% of the time, but you are needed. We had a certain chemistry here, a chemistry of nuance. But now that it's altered, I have (slowly) come to realize the new worth of nutty prods like you.
Lisa. Darling.
I will forever struggle to be nice to you, you who push ME sometimes in ways you know will hackle me up as well. And yes, I unload inordinate ordnance on your nance. I was thrilled to see you say 'fuck off,' as it was entirely deserved. I was prickly last night. I'll explain tomorrow. Until then, know you are loved and equally welcome. More so, even.
Ha.
Having said that, I thank Sara for pointing out that I am Penn to Livvie's Teller (true, except he is fat and I am skinny. The difference is, he doesn't give one whit in this forum that I say something so "rude" as that).
Where you, or any of you, err, to my small, too-protesteth-ing mind, is in the notion that that my rudeness serves no purpose.
The fact, empirically, is this: none of you would have been driven to such heights of righteous struggle regarding this banal question of hazing (banal because over it we have zero influence), to such depths of anger and mirror-gazing as have exhibited, without a prick.
I am that prick.
"What did they look like?"
"I don't know, they were jammies! They had Yodas and shit on 'em!"
Sorry, I'm watching Raising Arizona.
More tomorrow.
Thanks Sara, and thank you Lisa, and Meg. And Livvie. And our Universal Mother, Tuna.
This is waaay too intense for me. I'd like to make one correction/suggestion: I am the Merlin Olsen or, better yet, the Victor French to Court's Michael Landon.
ReplyDelete"No one should think their opinion is not welcome here" is, in fact, the exact opposite of what I was saying.
ReplyDeleteNot even sure what that means. Sigh.
ReplyDelete