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Despite a nearly two decades' long war on high school and college hazing, the traditional practice of paddling male pledges on the buttocks persists as a physical and psychological test of worthiness for membership in certain all-male organizations. In its elements of nudity, homoeroticim, and stylized sadomasochism, this ritual condenses a great many of the psychological processes essential to male bonding in groups. An application of Freud's insights in his 1919 essay, "A Child Is Being Beaten," to the puzzle of posterior paddling reveals a complex psychological process by which the pledge is feminized by the paddling, represses the feminine part of his self, and is initiated into the status of a brother among other heterosexual males.
Keywords: initiation, hazing, homoerotic, psychoanalytic
Some time ago, in the midst of my ethnographic research on the Boy Scouts of America (Mechling, 2001), I corresponded with a sociologist who had written an essay recounting the hazing and initiation ritual he and his fellow Scouts had invented as a means of bringing boys into that male friendship group. Not at all surprising to me, the hazing involved brief nudity, a common feature of male adolescent hazing in American fraternities, athletic teams, and similar male friendship groups. Male friendship in the United States very often has a homorerotic element, and the nudity found so often in male play simultaneously draws on the energy of that homoreroticism and affirms the players' heterosexuality. The male friends can be nude in each other's presence precisely because they are not real sexual objects to one another. My correspondent's essay reminded me of a similar invented hazing ritual in my own Boy Scout troop as a youth, a test of courage and trust that also involved brief nudity. In both cases (occurring in the late 1950s and 1960s) these informal folk inventions took place quite apart from the surveillance of adult leaders on the campout. These customs must have been common in other troops and at other camps because the Youth Protection Program, created by the Boy Scouts of America in the 1990s in response to worries about sexual exploitation and abuse in the organization, specifically prohibits nudity (for example, "skinny dipping"), hazing, and "secret organizations" of any kind (http://www.scouting.org/nav/enter jsp?s=xx&c=yp). Adults may...