Hazing

Hazing is often ritualistic harassment, abuse, or humiliation with requirements to perform meaningless tasks, sometimes as a way of initiation into a social group. The term often refers to either physical or mental forms of hazing.

Methods

Before the Great Depression, US hazing achieved an art form status amongst benevolent fraternities such as the Mooses and the Freemasons. The DeMoulin Catalog is a catalog of many hazing implements used, most famously the electric carpet. In many cases nowadays, the hardest abuse is usually only enacted for a photograph (sometimes even posted on the Internet) or video.

Related Topics:
Mooses - Freemasons - Electric carpet

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Reported hazing activities involve all kinds of ridicule and humiliation within the group or in public. They are often performed in combination, many of which could easily be considered gross or even child abuse if a candidate were not a consenting adult, while others are quite innocent, akin to pranks. Examples of hazing include:

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• Spanking. This is done mainly in the form of paddling among fraternities, sororities, and similar (e.g. athletic) clubs, sometimes over a lap, a knee, furniture or a pillow (pile) with the victim 'assuming the position,' or bending over. A variation of this practice is trading licks.
• This practice is also used in the military (where a new round of hazing can follow a promotion, etc.). Alternative modes (including bare-buttock paddling, strapping, and switching, as well as mock forms of antiquated forms of corporal punishments such as stocks, walking the plank, and running the gauntlet) have been reported in the US and other countries, even though all hazing is officially banned.
• Being wet (as by sprinkler, buckets, hoses), soiled with dirt or (often rotten) food such as eggs, tomatoes and flour (also as a food fight etc.), even tar (or glue) and feathers. As well olive- or baby oil may be used to 'show off' the bare skin, for wrestling or just slipperiness, e.g. to complicate pole climbing. Cleaning may be limited to a dive into water, hosing down or even paddling the worst off.
• Tedious cleaning. Examples include swabbing the decks, cleaning the heads (e.g. with a toothbrush).
• Servitude. This would include waiting on others (as at frat parties) or various other forms of housework, often "bunny boy" style.
• Being made to eat or drink too much. Persons are sometimes force-fed raw eggs, peppers, hot sauce, laxatives, various liquids or even alcohol (mainly beer). Some hazing may include eating vile things such as bugs, rotting food, even vomit or food from an absurd container (Frisbee, dog bowl, glasses tied to a ski for a collective gulping...) or through a straw, food fights, finding something in a messy dish without hands.
• Clothing. An imposed piece of clothing, outfit, item or something else worn by the victim in a way that would bring negative attention to the wearer. Examples include:
• Uniform (Toga in Greek societies)
• A leash and/or collar
• Humiliating dress and attire (e.g. soiled diapers, underpants (sometimes of the opposite sex) or a condom on the head; cross-dress or fake breasts; wearing just a box or a barrel)
• Complete or partial nudity (with or without being able to shield genitals). In the case of partial nudity, victims are sometimes allowed just an apron, jockstrap, loin-cloth or improvised version, thongs, towel, (under)pants torn or altered to expose the wearer's genitals, a strategically placed sock or tie, a tool belt, cardboard box, wrapping paper, foil, or duct tape. Sometimes the rule is 'anything but clothes', or victims are made to hold their crotches.
• Holding lowered trousers, shorts and/or underpants or underwear up 'revealingly'.
• Wedgies or things put in the shorts
• Forced mooning, sometimes accompanied by a slap.
• Being forced to wear a phallus or dildo, even in explicitly homo-erotic poses.
• Underwear wet to make it see-through; sometimes specifically with an audience, either internal or in a public place (such as college sports venues, ordered to be high profile supporters), sometimes specifically of the other sex (often associating a fraternity with a sorority). This often combined with other tasks or parading, performing (dancing, singing, reciting obscenities, skit, ...) or just being exposed.
• Markings. Victims are made to wear visible symbols, drawings or text (obscenities, instructions for abuse) on (under)clothing or on bare skin. They are painted on, tattooed on, written on or even shaved in (on head, legs, even pubic hair), sometimes collectively forming a message (one letter, syllable or word on each pledge).
• Being tied together. An examples of this would be eating together while all participants hands or food containers are tied to a long stick.
• Quizzes. Pledges might be required to study material relating to their school, fraternity or club history, rules and traditions and then tested on it. A ?quiz? may however also be given unannounced or even on 'general knowledge'. As the punishments for wrong answers can constitute the real fun, trick or nearly unsolvable questions are likely.
• Hierarchy. Slave-like veneration of the seniors and thus verbal or physical submission to them, is common. Etiquette required of pledges or subordinates include prostration, kneeling, literal groveling, kissing (sometimes dirty) feet, footwear or the crotch.
• Degrading positions. Some pledges are locked up in a cage or barrel, commanded to move on all fours or crawl on their bellies, eat or fetch "doggy style", kiss or urinate in public, having bodyparts and/or (under)clothing shoved into an orifice of their body (e.g. a burning candle in the rectum).
• Physical feats. Performing calisthenics and other physical tests, such as push-ups (sometimes as the hazer keeps his/her foot on the pledges? back), jumping jacks (under near impossible conditions), sit-ups, mud wrestling, forming a human pyramid or dog piling, climbing a greased pole, skinny diving, leap-frog, human wheel-barrow etc.
• Exposure to the elements. Examples include: Running, swimming or diving (almost) bare in cold water or snow. Holding ice water and/or having snow poured over a person or even sitting on ice in an open fridge holding more frozen objects.
• Orientation tests. Pledges are abandoned, often quite far or fettered without transport, in the dark and/or in a public place.
• Fundraising. Collecting money for the club or some charity, either by begging, selling a product, or performing services (such as washing cars).
• Treasure hunt.
• Dares. Examples are jumping from some height (bungee or in water), stealing from police or rival teams and obedience.

Some peculiar examples of named hazing practices:

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• Blood pinning among military aviators (and many other elite groups) to celebrate becoming new pilots by piercing their chests with the sharp pins of aviator wings.
• Burning desire and great ball of fire tests involve fireworks or burning objects (especially in mesh-form) fixed in the buttocks or on the testicles, remaining in position or running a distance.
• The elephant walk is a moving line of pledges, often naked or at least pant-less, that imitates an elephant herd (holding each other by the tail in nature). Each pledge grabs the one in front of him by the privates (tail is also a euphemism for the male member, and for the thus exposed butt, the favorite target in paddling traditions ), as photographed in this external link .
• On his first crossing the equator in military and commercial navigation, each 'pollywog' (sailor; sometimes even passengers) is subjected to a series of endurances usually including running and/or crawling a gauntlet of abuse (soiling, paddling, etc.) and various scenes supposedly situated at King Neptune's court.
• A pledge auction is a variation on the slave auction, where people bid on the paraded (often exposed) pledges.
• Either as an open fund raiser where the general public (or just an invited sorority/frat of the other sex) can bid,
• Or internally to decide which brother can impose his fantasies on which pledge.
• Treeing is binding up with ropes, chains, handcuffs or other means, to a tree or pole, or in some variations on a cross (mock crucifixion), to be helplessly abused and/or bound.
• The term tunnel seems to have various meanings in different traditions, such as a spanking tunnel. It may be appealing as a symbolic rite of passage: one goes in as a rookie and emerges as something of a brother or teammate,
• As in this version in rugby: the rookie crawls under 10 players who strip him down, push a carrot in his anus and tie a pink ribbon around his penis, which he must keep on for two weeks (which will be checked at each training session).