|
You don’t have to be an athlete to know that peer pressure is a bitch—though, I guess it may be more severe for those people. No one secular category of peeps are more rooted in their traditions then sports teams, and the pressure to fit in can sometimes lead new members to do some questionable things.
Take the Simon Fraser University swim team, for example. A few weeks ago, almost every member of both the junior and senior teams was suspended from play for conduct that the University considered to be “hazing.” What was this conduct? Well, I’m glad I assumed you asked. The “hazing” included each member describing detailed sexual fantasies about other members and taking suggestive photos wearing team uniforms. You homophobes need not worry—both male and female members took part. The University suspended all but three members of the team because this contravened the swim team’s guidelines for “rookie rituals.”
Now, I have a couple questions. First, how do I join the SFU swim team? Because honestly, I’m pretty down for girls being forced to think of me sexually. Second, was this actually hazing? Don’t get me wrong; I’m a firm believer that hazing is a cruel and unnecessary practice. However, none of the information released by SFU can suggest to me that any of this was involuntary. No one was reportedly hurt, and from what we’ve been told, no one was naked. None of the pictures that were taken were plastered all over campus or anything like that.
So why exactly were these teams suspended one week before defending their North American championships? All it sounds like to me is a pretty bitchin’ party.
I’m not trying to marginalize the gravity of hazing rituals, but quite frankly, there are much worse things that these kids could have done. When I was in ninth grade, my music class spent a week at a band camp that, at the time, was also being used by some high school music classes. About a week in, the tenth-graders convinced some of us youngsters to help participate in a “hazing ritual.” The older kids convinced one of my friends to shave his pubic hair off, and in the middle of the night, tape it to an unsuspecting victims’ face during their slumber. Suffice it to say, the victim was not a happy band-camper when he woke up, and a lot of the older kids got in trouble. It was a degrading stunt, and the poor guy never came back to music class.
However, all this swim team was doing was getting drunk and telling hormone-inducing stories. By reacting so strongly to this, SFU accomplishes nothing. I’m entirely confident that there are much worse things going on within other SFU teams that could be getting much more attention; and even if this was an attempt to prove the University’s stance on hazing to the other teams, it’s made trivial by how minor the swim team’s indiscretions actually were. I mean, it’s not like they behaved like, say, the McGill football team. Though I guess it’s hard to sodomize a swimmer—I hear they do a lot of clenching.
|