There's been a fair amount of attention this week to the issue of hazing and women's college sports teams. Earlier this week, a website published a number of photos depicting the Northwestern University women's soccer team conducting an initiation for new players. The women are shown being forced to chug beer, give lap dances to members of the men's soccer team, all while various words and pictures are drawn on their bodies. This morning, the same site has pictures from a dozen other colleges and universities, almost all of which focus on hazing/initiation rituals involving various women's sports teams. All of the colleges involved have anti-hazing policies, and all (naturally) prohibit underage drinking.
I'm not giving the name of this particular website, though national newspapers like the New York Times have linked to it and it's easy enough to find. I looked at a few of the pictures on the site and then chose not to view any more. In the national media, the faces of the women involved are obscured, but on the site that the Times linked to, they are in full view. Though it was obviously foolish for the teams involved to photograph their hazing rituals and post the pics on the internet, I grieve the embarrassment the young women involved must now be feeling, and I have no interest in staring pruriently at the various details of their humiliations.
What I've seen tells me what I already knew: the kind of hazing that goes on on contemporary college campuses is more or less identical to what happened when I was an undergrad twenty years ago. The essentials, then and now, are these: forcing the pledges/initiates/rookies/frosh to undress (at least to their underwear); forcing them to consume large amounts of alcohol; asking them to "perform" sexualized dances in front of members of the opposite sex. The Northwestern University women were required to give lap dances in their underwear in front of members of the men's soccer team -- while the Quinnipiac College men's baseball team is shown on the site stripping and dancing for a group of unidentified women.
As an adult who struggled with problem drinking for years, I am of course greatly concerned by any ritual that requires that folks consume large amounts of booze in a short period of time. I have no sympathy for those who see binge drinking as an essential rite of passage; I've seen the damage it can do to lives and bodies.
As a feminist, I'm grieved to see that ritualized sexual humiliation is still such a vital mainstay of initiation practices. It's not new, of course. When I was a freshman at Cal, I flirted with the idea of joining a fraternity (one to which my grandfather, a great-grandfather, and numerous uncles and cousins had belonged). In the end, I decided not to, both for reasons of principle and because I worried that I wouldn't fit in with the fraternity culture. I had lots of friends in the Greek system, however, and I heard their initiation stories. One of my former wives was a Pi Phi in the late 1980s; she told me that she had never gotten over her hazing. She recalled being stripped down to her underwear, and all the "actives" (members) of her sorority took magic markers and wrote on her body -- circling areas that they thought "needed work" and writing commentary about her attributes. She said she laughed at the time -- but years later, she would still sometimes gaze at those parts and think about the criticisms and obscenities she had seen written there.
I'm a fierce fan of intercollegiate sports. With the possible exception of golf, I love to watch men and women play any NCAA sport. (I'm very excited about the upcoming NCAA women's college world series, as I have a particular heart for softball.) I know the good that sport has brought to my life, and I've seen it bring discipline, health, camaraderie, and character to a great many young people. I'm not one of those professors who "goes easy" on the jocks, but I'm not someone who wishes that intercollegiate athletics would disappear, either. And as a fan of sports -- and former athletic department tutor at UCLA -- I've got at least a passing understanding of how vital it is to build close community on a team.
I think initiation rituals can be very valuable. Requiring frosh or rookies to go through a series of steps before they are accepted as full-fledged members of the team is healthy. It is axiomatic that to suffer together is one way to build community. But not all suffering is the same! Forcing the frosh to run extra laps or do extra push-ups or go through a weekend of brutal fitness camp can build community and fellowship just fine -- all without a drop of alcohol and without a single lap dance. Requiring frosh to put on silly skits that don't involve vulgar humor, nudity, or intoxication can have a similar bonding effect. The problem is not with the nature of sports teams/fraternities/sororities, or with initiation rituals -- the problem is with a culture that connects that valuable process of initiation to ritualized sexual degradation and binge drinking.
One of the reasons that this sort of hazing troubles me so much is because it is so fundamentally antithetical to what sports can be in women's lives. The beauty of sports for women, at the high school or college level, is that it teaches women that their bodies are not merely decorative objects to be gazed at. It teaches women that their sexuality and their potential reproductivity are not their greatest assets. Sport -- at its best -- teaches girls that their bodies are strong, and powerful; it teaches the athlete that she can transform and control her flesh for her own delight as well as for the good of the team. It turns objects into subjects, turns the passive active. I've seen sports from softball to track to soccer to basketball do that for countless women and girls in my life, and I rejoice in it. And thus I grieve when I see young female athletes forced to use their bodies so differently -- as objects of public, sexualized ridicule -- all for the sake of creating community that could so easily be created in a different way.
I'm not at all sure that suspension is warranted in the case of the Northwestern women's soccer team (and the other teams revealed today), but clearly, greater oversight and education are badly needed.
Since I've been slamming you a lot lately, let me jump in to say that I quite agree with this post.
Posted by: Stentor | May 17, 2006 at 03:50 PM
Yay! I needed that, Stentor...
Posted by: Hugo | May 17, 2006 at 05:09 PM
I agree with the substance of your commentary (the connection between true membership and sexual degradation is particularly depressing), but it seems to me the indefinite suspension of the team based solely on the discovery of the photos, which is what the news reports seem to suggest is happening, is a bit heavy-handed.
Posted by: djw | May 17, 2006 at 05:39 PM
This engenders team unity.....HOW, exactly?
Posted by: bmmg39 | May 17, 2006 at 06:11 PM
Building community thru suffering? Eeeughh.
Seems to me it might just as well be done by constructive work of some kind--giving both the body and mind a workout, but with emphasis on some sort of result, rather than suffering, and no one having to go thru it alone. Extra laps or whatever, for a sports team, would qualify, I guess--just so no one gets hurt.
I'm with you entirely about the binge drinking and ritualized degradation/humiliations.
Posted by: Angiportus | May 17, 2006 at 06:54 PM
I think schools should make -- and enforce -- a zero-tolerance policy on hazing that involves drugs/alcohol/nudity. Suspension makes sense (as a general rule, when there's been real hazing done, not necessarily in these cases), though there should be an announcement initially prior to that, since probably beforhand it was just winked at.
Part of the problem is the feeling of unfairness if there is no hazing -- one of those "we suffered, why do you get out of it?" This was a problem at my high school (not sexual or alcohol-based humiliation hazing), though eventually the administration just said no more: in a small school, it can be done fairly easily.
Posted by: wolfa | May 17, 2006 at 07:49 PM
What I mean by building community through suffering is CONSTRUCTIVE suffering -- the sort which comes from a communal fast, or from a very long run in the mountains that depletes the muscles, or two hours in a sweat lodge.
Posted by: Hugo | May 18, 2006 at 07:13 AM
"As a feminist, I'm grieved to see that ritualized sexual humiliation is still such a vital mainstay of initiation practices. It's not new, of course. When I was a freshman at Cal, I flirted with the idea of joining a fraternity (one to which my grandfather, a great-grandfather, and numerous uncles and cousins had belonged). In the end, I decided not to, both for reasons of principle and because I worried that I wouldn't fit in with the fraternity culture."
I'll never understand the concept of having to jump through hoops to prove you're worthy of being their friend, part of their little club with Greek letters affixed to it. I didn't even understand it on the playground in elementary school.
Posted by: bmmg39 | May 18, 2006 at 12:17 PM