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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   2860 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 25, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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The reaction to fraternity hazing incidents is extremely funny to me. “These poor willing adult male participants were socially pressured to do something humiliating to strengthen the bonds of friendship. Such harm can’t go unnoticed; we must publicly humiliate them on the news for millions of people to see and comment on while showing their faces on video whenever possible.” It’s just so stupid.

I think outrage normally occurs only when the behavior is harmful, not just humiliating.

What's harmful about it, absent the humiliation, though?

It varies a lot. In decreasing order of normal-audience concern:

  • Stuff that's basically manslaughter, and only avoid premeditated homicide by sheer stupidity. Forcing people to jump off rooftops, playing with knives, where stupid frat tricks resulted in applicants dig their own graves, yada yada. Rare, but becomes state-level and sometimes national news when it happens.
  • Intentional harm that wasn't likely to result in serious injury or death but did anyway: beating someone until they died or they were aggressively bleeding, hits that most people would survive.
  • 'Unintentional' and unpredictable but obvious harm: drinking hard enough to literally kill someone, extreme physical exertion to the point of hospitalization, forcing people to drive after drinking or sleep deprivation or both, that sort of thing. Sometimes this is stuff that the median applicant had survived and someone just was unlucky or vulnerable, or sometimes the hazing got pushed that little bit further for this one person because they gave lip.
  • ... stuff that we don't call sexual assault or rape because everyone involved says they're a heterosexual man and not taking any gratification from it. Where a victim's willing to talk this can jump a lot higher, but since most of the time it's specifically built to be discrediting to reveal, it's mostly whistleblowers talking and that leads it to be pretty low on the concern level.
  • 'Aversives' that generally don't cause lasting injury, but are extremely unpleasant rather than socially humiliating. Forcing people to eat a raw onion, tasers, chemical sprays, and the conventional array of gross or foul-smelling and tasting stuff. This usually only gets local attention, if that.
  • Predicament bondage taken to extremes beyond what RACK would allow. It takes some actual effort to kill or break a bone, but actual BDSM practice keeps to short sessions because you can really screw up someone's musculature or joints in tens of minutes, and frats like to run for hours. Usually only gets local attention if someone's hospitalized.
  • Pure social humiliation, extremely tedious work, labor that's just unpleasant, or stuff that's just gross but not a disease risk (aka 'cleaning the latrines with a toothbrush'). Nobody really cares about this unless there's a culture war nexus, and even then, it tends to be the culture war nexus rather than the hazing.

This should get you started.

In the story du jour, the victims "had visible injuries consistent with being physically assaulted", and the text of the state's "hazing ban" criminalizes only "acts which endanger the physical health or safety of a student", without reference to humiliation. I believe past stories also have involved injury or death.

Kind of elides the nature of the injuries, and emphasizes the condiments though -- I'd think if there were serious (consentual in any case) injuries it would have been mentioned?

Athletes often have visible injuries too -- is college athletics considered harmful? (I suppose I should say "widely considered" given that the outrage machine is winding up on the concussion thing RN)

I don't claim to have investigated this topic in the slightest, but my impression is that hazing is considered bad because the details of the process are known beforehand only to the existing members: the victims don't know whether the hazing is humiliating or harmful, and therefore cannot consent properly. This goes double in sports and military situations where there's no expectation of hazing at all so the victims never consented even to humiliation, and triple in military situations where the victim was drafted and never had the opportunity to consent at all.

The purpose is to add a cost to just joining. This has benefits especially if membership in a group is particularly valuable. And in some cases, being a frat can give you a leg up in job hunting or provide scholarships among other benefits.

I'm the furthest thing from a frat-boy defender myself, but I think pretty much everyone knows that hazing is (by nature, really) going to involve some physical discomfort and embarrassment? In the case of frats I'd expect some pretty extreme BACs to be involved as well; that's about all I know!

"Physical discomfort" is not "harm significant enough to warrant assault charges".

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