‘Hazing’ story could use
a dose of truth
"Except, of course, for the brave young girl who would not bow to the tyranny of the sexist establishment, and instead took the repeated beatings and social persecution with her head held high in the name of civil rights."
If this is indeed your view of the recent soccer girls' initiation, then you are an absurd ninny succumbing to an overblown case of stupidity and a hungry press' abuse of a situation just to entice readers. The resulting commotion has angered me to near tears.
I do not know where to begin to express my distaste at how much attention and negative reproach the soccer girls,their coaches and my school have received because of this one, infinitesimal unimportant event that was certainly NOT a case of sexual harassment.
I'll tell you what it was. It was a silly game. It was a way for the older girls to tease their younger friends, and for the rookies to pay their dues in a funny way that they might have remembered fondly forever. And yes, it was a way for the older, more experienced girls to pull some rank and express some authority. This is the point that everyone whines about. Everyone is seeing this as a bully situation; masters with whips beating small children because they didn't lick the toilets clean enough.
YET, people pull rank every day. New employees for companies have to fetch coffee, get mail and park four miles away from their office. Remember when you had to sit on the floor of the gym during school assemblies? Hell, I have to sit on the concrete floor everyday during school, eat crappy food, sit at broken desks and be denied permission to use the restroom simply because I am a student and not a member of the faculty. It's all the same thing and it's reality. Except with the soccer girls. They were just kidding around. And it was fun for those who participated. I know because I asked.
Besides, in the end, the girls didn't have to go through with that initiation if they didn't want to. There were other options. The girls who ran out on the field did it because it gave them a rush. They weren't naked and they were not asked to perform any lewd acts. It was about a minute and a half of nonsense, which, had not all of this ridiculous attention been paid, would have been forgotten in about the same amount of time.
What really gets me about this situation is how the parents of the one "brave" girl have acted. If she was so modest and emotionally shaken that she couldn't wear pajamas in front of some boys for a minute or two, how could they have thought it would help her to announce to the free world that she had been molested as a child?
I could see why she would not want to participate, and she
didn't have to. But for her parents to make such a fuss and share their sensitive, private affairs with all of Hawaii, I'd think the girl might as well have done the initiation, or worse, and be less exposed.
The media frenzy is an insult to real victims of hazing rituals, like the women at the Citadel, or military recruits who have had to endure having their hair set on fire, their mouths washed out with cleansing agents or pins stuck into their flesh.
It is only the media and their groupies who have turned a high school prank into some controversial Hollywood-worthy topic. Girls' varsity soccer team captain Courtney Sullivan is not Jack Nicholson. Initiations are not Code Reds. And any bored, conspiracy-hunting twiddle who thinks otherwise obviously can't handle the truth.
but has friends on the team.