And Now to the Stupid Ones...

Reported in the New Jersey Star/Ledger:

On January 27, six members of the Sigma Gamma Rho sorority at Rutgers University were arrested and charged with hazing after one girl was hospitalized from repeated paddling. The young pledge said she was told the beatings would "humble" her, that each flesh-rending strike with a wooden paddle would build love and trust between sorority sisters.

It wasn’t hazing, she said they told her. The women of Sigma Gamma Rho at Rutgers University didn’t condone hazing.

For seven nights the beatings went on, she said. In all, she was struck 201 times. On the eighth day — unable to sit, her buttocks covered with blood clots and welts — she went to the hospital. Then she reported it to the university.

I'd find a place in my heart to feel sorry for this young woman, and maybe even for all these young women -- except I can't keep myself from thinking, "well, that is just stupid!"

I've never been involved in the Greek system -- never joined a sorority; never wanted to join a sorority (nevermind that where I went to college, there was no sorority).  Nope.  I was part of the vast, unwashed majority who called ourselves "barbarians" -- "barbs" for short.  So, I have no sense at all of what might motivate a person to be willing to be hurt and humiliated for the sake of belonging to what looks to me like a social club.  That is just stupid.  To be sure, I absolutely "get it" if you are a person who is into being hurt and / or humiliated because it turns you on, scratches an itch, meets a need, feeds a hunger.  That kind of masochism is familiar turf, and I know the fires that power that engine.  But this -- THIS is not that at all.  This is a young person, presumably with a functional intellect, who agrees to be beaten repeatedly by the members of a private and elite club in the hope that she'll gain admittance and so be able to move up in rank and be able to become a beater rather than a beatee.  She went back for more, and then more, and then again -- for seven nights.  That's just stupid.

Ever since I first read this story, I've been all tangled up in reactions and responses.  It isn't a BDSM story.  This isn't about BDSM.  It is a sorority hazing episode pure and simple.  But then, there is the whole lurid fantasy that revolves around sorority and fraternity paddlings -- great, big, heavy, thick paddles that are more akin to clubs than to the best of our implements that are finer, safer, and much better crafted than those crude weapons.  Those of us who play in the BDSM realm tend to practice, study, and learn from one another.  We focus on not creating harm -- we know that our joy lies in giving and receiving pain, and we know exactly how to do that.  WE.  Together.  Consensually.  With knowledge and judgement and full consent.

The women of Sigma Gamma Rho were swimming in the deep waters of power-based relating, and we know that territory well.  The difference?  He had a choice.  I had a choice.  There never was a single moment of coercion in establishing the uneven power dynamic within which we live.  Coercion negates consent.  Hazing is not a practice that allows for consent.  It is abusive. It is assault.  It is just stupid.

Of course, stupid sorortity women are not the only example of this sort of thing among humans.  We seem to have a remarkable propensity for doing foolish and incomprehensible things --

What about the parents of the now imfamous "balloon boy?"
How about that stunningly self-absorbed pair that crashed the White House state dinner?
Or the Octo-mom?
John and Kate?

When it comes to stupid, it's hard to beat Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger stumping for "English Only" laws -- in his sometimes nearly unintelligibly accented English...
Or some poor fool who decides that he's got a bone to pick with the whole world, and so tries to explode his underwear on a plane high over the city of Detroit...

And, when it comes to stupid, sometimes a picture is worth way more than a thousand words:






Funny thing about it -- once I started to hear that "well, that's just stupid," refrain in my mind, I seemed to find stupid things going on everywhere.  I'm starting to feel like taking a page from comedian, Bill Engvall's book -- "here's your sign."

swan