Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

The latest scandal to hit Miss Poubelle's local paper is the teabagging scandal at Averill Park High School. Averill Park is a wealthy suburb of Albany, New York, and a freshman there has filed a complaint alleging that he was teabagged in the school locker room during a football hazing. The Albany Times-Union rather uncomfortably explains in the story that the teabagging incident involved contact between the student's forehead and the genitalia of the other students.

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Miss Poubelle first noticed the increased use of teabag in this column in 1999 (see Just My Cup of Tea). It seems that the earliest widespread occurrence of the phrase was in John Waters's Pecker, which appeared in 1998. In that movie, there is a scene in a gay bar where tough straight boys earn extra money by teabagging the customers. Teabagging (as shown in the R-rated movie) consisted of the dancer letting the front of his underwear rest on the forehead of a delighted patron. In an interview, however, Waters explained that the word comes from an actual gay bar in Baltimore, and in that case teabagging involved hitting someone in the forehead with the balls.

It seems to Miss Poubelle that the word comes from a visual analogy. Setting a teabag down on a saucer makes the shape change as the bottom widens and the contents move apart from each other. And so does resting your scrotum on someone's forehead.

The police and the press have reacted with predictable hysteria to the Averill Park case. Two teachers who told the boy that the whole thing was no big deal and discouraged him from going to the police are being charged with witness tampering, and three boys on the football team are being charged with harassment, endangering the welfare of a child, and unlawful imprisonment.

What has gone unsaid in the whole incident is the role that homophobia plays here. Boys get taught that homosexual contact is the ultimate taboo, and that any contact with another man that might be viewed as sexual is extremely polluting and dangerous. At some time around adolescence many boys even begin to refuse any physical form of affection with their fathers, lest they be seen as queer. All-male situations that involve nudity and showers cause some of the greatest anxiety, and athlete and soldiers are notorious for both their homophobia and their hazing rituals.

Anthropologists around the world have studied initiation rites, and they find that one of the most common themes is symbolic death, followed by a rebirth as a person with a new status or life. In many African and Australian aboriginal societies, uninitiated boys of a certain age are taken away from their mothers by the adult men. The boys are frightened, and the mothers weep as for a death. In the woods, the boys undergo rigorous discipline and instruction in the secrets of male society. Finally they will be circumcised, and return to adult society with the status of men. The boy is dead; the man is born.

So why did the upper class football players teabag the freshmen? The crucial bit to understand is that this was part of an initiation ritual. When the football players teabagged the freshmen, they violated the taboo against male-to-male contact and made the freshmen symbolically queer. And being queer is a form of social death. What the initiation was intended to do was to bring them back to life by making the freshmen part of the most heterosexually admired group on campus-- the football players.

The newspaper reports seem to indicate that sexual horseplay had been a normal part of football initiation at Averill Park High School for as much as twenty years if not more. And reading between the lines, it seems as if the coaches knew enough not to interfere in the boys' ritual.

It's not clear what happened in this case to derail the process. Other boys who went through the initiation didn't emerge traumatized-- they emerged feeling part of a close-knit community. No longer boys, but 'fresh men.' What was different for the boy who complained? It's likely that some of the social hysteria over sexuality in the young had drifted down to him. Maybe in some elementary school classroom he learned that 'bad touch' has to be reported to the authorities. Or maybe the teabagging touched some deeper and more troubled uncertainty in him.

What is not in doubt is that the counseling now officially prescribed for every psychic pain is extraordinarily oriented towards the production of victims. Many therapists work with assumptions that are likely to turn an embarrassing incident into a major, life-altering trauma. Miss Poubelle fears that the boy will be urged to consider himself a survivor of rape and spend the rest of his adolescence in twelve-step meetings. What a shame that the pervasive homophobia of our society can turn a harmless event into such an appalling mess.