Home Issues 38 Complementary points of view Hazing amongst blue-collar worker They served a variety of functions: as rites of passage, as brutal manifestations of domination or violence, or as pranks intended to make others laugh. This period of entry and testing, which also represents a moment of domination and bullying, is legitimized by implied tradition, and supposedly serves as a rite of initiation. The world of blue-collar labor — where professional training was traditionally performed on the job or during a period of apprenticeship 1 — also has its hazing rituals, however anachronistic the term may be particularly in French.
But these practices are not well known, on the one hand because they are informal, and on the other, because they are not approved of being either criticized or barely tolerated either by those in authority or by the labor movement, which has developed its own rituals. For this reason, they fluctuate between three categories: rites of passage; out-and-out bullying and domination of younger people by older ones; and practical jokes, roughhousing and horseplay.
And then, you know, the women were pretty cruel too, back then. Bad things happened when they could get their hands on a young lad! To embarrass him. It was really stupid. You can see why the women from the mill had such a bad name back then! The same thing took place elsewhere in the region, in the same industry. Thus the roughhousing acted as a rite of passage from childhood into adulthood.
The entry into the world of work, which takes place at puberty, becomes a potential opening up to sexuality. Which is why men also indulged in similar types of roughhousing: in the textile industry near Roubaix in the s, boys were stripped and masturbated to see if they were men. Until the s, year-old men would literally have to expose their manhood to the draft board, which literally checked it. Because these initiatory rites — known variously as ceremonies, receptions or baptisms — recognize that mastery in the craft has been acquired.
This passage can take a very long time, because many of them vomit. The older sailors scrubbed him, in their parlance. The others salted him: they kneaded his genitals with handfuls of worms until he fainted or passed out. Consequently, the brutal domination and bullying involved in hazing was nothing more than the radical and virtually final act because afterwards, the victim had become an adult of an every-day violence.
