I was reading the faggot etymology thread and was reminded of a line from* Four Weddings and a Funeral*. Hugh Grant is talking to a guy in the pub and this guy is recalling someone he knew in school.
“He buggered me senseless, of course”
Does that sort of thing actually happen? Underclassmen being used as sex toys?
Does it happen? It’s a tradition.
Well, N, I can’t tell from the brevity of your reply if you’re being facetious. If it is true isn’t it rather like, not to put too fine a point on it, rape? And how do the underclassmen feel about it? Aside from the fact that they’ll be dishing it out in a few years…
Perhaps it’s not so much a tradition (except at Cambridge), it’s more of a widely held view.
I didn’t attend a public school but I did board. There was never any suggestion of faggotry at my school.
Homosexuality at boarding schools in this country is a sphere of interest which is difficult to quantify. To try and answer your question, the law of averages suggests that it does happen. Wherever you have hundreds of teenage boys confined at close quarters it would be strange if it did not.
From one or two anecdotes I heard at the time (from boys at other schools) I suggest that any sexual interaction between pupils at a boarding school is inspired by curiosity, and it takes place between boys of similar age and inclination rather than the outright buggery referred to by Hugh Grant’s pub acquaintance. These second hand stories also indicate that very few boys would entertain full-blown anal sex.
I think that any incidence of senseless buggery is definitely overstated.
Sorry, no cite. 
Having been educated at an English public school myself, I can honestly say that there is no truth to it nowadays. However, this was not always the case. At the turn of the last century, the Provost of Eton’s wife allegedly remarked that buggery was ‘every Etonian’s way of passing the time’. Homosexuality was not something that people discussed openly in those days, so I feel that the anecdote may be slightly apocryphal. Nevertheless, anyone of my grandfather’s generation would certainly have come across ‘buggery’ in some form or another when they were at school. That is not to say that everyone was having sex but that it was tacitly understood to be going on all the time.
The authorities recognised this and did very little to stop it. At many of the schools, to be caught in bed with a boy would only warrant suspension but you would be expelled if you were caught in bed with a girl. I am told that this is still true today but have no examples of disciplinary action being taken on such matters.
The environment at a public school early last century was very different to what it is now. Aside from the fact that many have turned co-educational recently, there is much more exposure to the opposite sex generally. I was at a single sex school from the age of 8-18 and the environment is such that there is a HUGE stigma attached to homosexuality. I know of a number of people who ‘came out’ almost the day they left because the attitude of the other boys would have made life unbearable were they to admit it at school.
However, public schools are still intrinsically associated with ‘buggery’. To many, single sex establishments seem to be odd enough as it is. Combining that with a past reputation for homosexual activity and you have a bountiful source of jokes.
Your question ‘underclassmen being used as sex toys?’ is ambiguous. Just to explain - ‘public’ school in the UK means private school. The opposite is called a ‘state’ school. The reason for this was that a long time ago everyone from a ‘good’ background would have been educated by private tutors. People did not go to school and those that did were usually poor and went on some sort of scholarship to a school for the public. As the educational system evolved, people stopped using private tutors and started sending their children to these ‘public’ schools. The name has just stuck. Buggery is only associated as a generalisation to public (private) schools in the UK. Typically, private education is not associated with ‘underclassmen’ (it is associated with the aristocracy)and the man in Four Weddings to whom you refer was himself privately educated.
The humour is based on the long standing association of public schools with homosexuality and the character’s typically English indifference.
Just to clarify: I assumed from the character that he had attended a public school. Some of us Yanks know the difference. And, at least on this side of the pond, the term underclassmen refers only to Freshman or Sophomore standing, not to social classes.
And here be the problem.
Everyone is using terms that are specific to their culture but assuming that everyone understands them. Two examples:
1.The word “underclassmen” would only ever refer to social status in Britain. It has no meaning regarding standing in education.
2.You also refer to “Sophomore”. The word is not used in Britain and hence very few Brits know what it means.
Methinks both sides of the discussion have to be more clear in their terminology.
Having been to public school myself I have to call in with bmerton and say that it hardly exists at all anymore, and I’m sceptical if it ever did in the amounts that popular myth would have it. You’re living in a closed environment for months at a time; imagine a fire on a ship, you either put it out right away or everybody gets burnt. As for
‘the law of averages suggests that it does happen. Wherever you have hundreds of teenage boys confined at close quarters it would be strange if it did not.’
What is the basis for this suggestion? Do teenage boys have some predisposition towards homosexuality that is just waiting for release? I think not.
There was in the past something called ‘fagging’, which I believe still exists in the army in the form of your ‘batman’; I was the first year at my school who didn’t have this practice anymore. The fag was usually a boy in the lowest form, who had to assist one of the boys in the final year with just about everything so that he could concentrate on his studies. This would include cleaning his room, doing chores, that sort of stuff. I don’t think buggery was a part of being a fag though.
Well I’m a Brit and I want to know what you public school boys have to say about ‘Soggy Biscuit’.
To clarify my comment, if you take all the boarding schools in this country, there are many thousands of teenage boys sharing dormitories. It would be strange if sexual activity failed to occur in some of these dormitories.
This is because homosexuality exists in human society. There are people contributing to this message board who will confirm that assessment.
It might help if we defined it. It in the context of my remark is homosexual activity. It is not senseless buggery. It could be mutual masturbation for example. Or oral sex. I’m not an expert on the kind of physical love teenage boys can enjoy together short of full anal penetration.
Of course, this presupposes that masturbation and oral sex constitute sex. I think there was a cause celebre a few years ago, involving a failure to do some dry-cleaning on somebody’s part, which served to confirm at least that a blow-job is a sexual act.
Stephen Fry gives a first-hand account of public school life in his autobiography Moab is my Washpot.
He mentions that on occasion, some minor sex play would take place (mutual masturbation, etc.), but the rampant buggery that has become the stereotype was, in his experience, nonexistent.
I am not a Brit, nor have I attended British public schools, but from Fry’s book, I took away the impression that a schoolful of pre-adolescent and adolescent boys, paired with the complete lack of a female presence, led to somewhat higher than normal homosexual experimentation, but that’s about it. YMMV.
Well as the OP I can only say thanks, one and all. You guys are terrific as always…
I realise this is resurrecting a topic after eleven years, but it still crops up in a Google search, so in case anyone else who comes across it is seriously interested in homosexuality at Eton, I would like to point out that I have written a novel, Alexander’s Choice by Edmund Marlowe (available on Amazon), which describes attitudes in 1984 in detail, as well as their evolution in the preceding decades. Briefly though, I concur with everything bmerton says, though I was there well before him. The irony is that it was mostly the legalisation of homosexuality that killed it off in public schools.
I would think that isolated, same-sex schools have roughly the same incidence of “situational homosexuality” as prisons, that is heterosexuals having sex with each other simply because there is no one of the opposite sex available.
While there is considerable logic underlying your assertion, I think you will find that the prevalence of situational homosexuality in same-sex boarding-schools until the early seventies, and most certainly before the nineteenth century, was far greater than it has ever been in prisons. The key to understanding this is that old-time boarding-school homosexuality was pederastic, not gay. It typically invoked an intense bonding between lusty eighteen-year-olds and pretty, hero-worshipping thirteen-year-olds who were felt to have feminine appeal. The impulse involved was far more akin in spirit to the heterosexual one than to the modern gay one, so much more easily satisfied in a boys’ boarding-school than in a prison.
Edmund, Author of Alexander’s Choice, an Eton love story.
This is 11 years old!
Paging RNWTB
But it remains an interesting topic.
Reported post by Edmund as spam. He revived the thread merely to promote his book.
Why is it “spam” to mention having written a book that tries to answer the questions raised in this thread, one that remains of interest to many people? It is wrong to tell people where they may find what they say they want to know?
A lot like the US military schools, according to Kurt Vonnegut.