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These stories usually get public giggles and eye rolls. But these are bad dude training camps. They prey on insecure young men and offer a way out of their anxiety: aggression, stunted emotions, masculinism, punishment as “love.”

Yeah. Hazing is an issue that hits me hard, because of my history with it as a high school athlete. It is fundamentally disgusting, and the kind of dehumanizing that is very specifically cult shit. The people who engage in this behavior are trying to build cults.

When my alma mater (Northwestern) had a revelation of hazing in the football program a few years ago, it gave me the impetus to re-process a lot of my experience, particularly because I have a sort of vestigial tie to that football program (as a marching band alum). Hazing sucks.

Hazing sucks *incredibly* in fact, and it's pervasive, because so many of our institutions, both formal and informal, are grounded in cultish, hierarchical, violent practices. AND it's not actually that hard to prevent. You just have to put in leaders who are committed to ending that violence.

Speaking to my personal experience: The football coach at Northwestern, Pat Fitzgerald, was fired for cause, because there was hazing occurring in his program, under his watch. He was not a leader who was committed to preventing it. Now he's coaching football at Michigan State. God help them.

The marching band at Northwestern was and is an intensely weird group: we jokingly embraced that it's a cult, and a band. During my time there, in the 90s (when Pat Fitzgerald was playing football for NU), there were a few things that crossed the line. They were dealt with, subtly but effectively.

And I think of my high school marching band, in Ferndale Michigan, where there was a long tradition of hazing when our new band director came in. He made it 100% clear, there would be zero tolerance for it. It was reiterated consistently. And that worked, it changed the culture.

(Sorry, @jeffsharlet.bsky.social , for hijacking your post to re-process my trauma, and thanks for understanding why I wanted to walk all the way through it.)

I appreciate you sharing your thoughts & naming leadership as the one responsible. & the extensive damage when there is perverse negligence remains immeasurable.