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Apparently Public School is why we were so good at maintaining an empire on a shoestring with hardly any soldiers.


A greater mind than mine will work out how ritualised bullying prepares you for leadership, but it seems to do the trick, ask most of the cabinet!!


Hmm, on second thoughts becoming a leader and being any good at it are clearly two different things.

MrBen I think the rumour was that it was done with hot wax as a punishment - the principal being that it hurt to get it done, and it hurt to get it off.


I don't believe this version could ever have been done - wax doesn't melt until it's over the boiling point of water, meaning this treatment would leave someone hospitalised for months.


Blackballing in the sense of excluding people from a club was a regular occurence in schools with clubs. Maybe your old man was teasing you?

Don't have time to read all of this (too much work to get through), but just wanted to add something incase it hadn't been mentioned.


Most teenagers I've ever known want to grow up really quickly so having an older boyfriend or girlfriend can give the teenager access to the exciting world of grown-ups.


When I was at school, the boys were discouraged from having girlfriends older than them, not sure why, and I remember girls being slagged off for going out with a boy even 1 year younger than them.


So in my experience, I would submit that boys were probably less able to access this glittering adult world until they started getting hairy chins and deep voices, but the girls I know used to brag about their older boyfriends from the age of 13 or so, because it made them feel that they were more grown-up than their peers.


This wish to appear more grown up than ones peers is not merely a phenomenon found in teenage girls, the boys used to do all kinds of strange things such as leaving their tufty bum fluff to grow and not washing to show they were old enough to have BO!


The attraction of the exclusive, exciting adult world to teenagers is probably always going to be there, but at least now, society has recognised that just because someone very young looks like an adult and tries to act like one, it doesn't mean that they are one.


I think this applies to boys as well as girls, but it would appear that predatory peadophiles are more likely to be hetrosexual men and there are less older women who would entertain very young guys, so it is probably more relevant to teenage girls.


It is still the duty of adults to not take advantage of the natural curiosity and budding sexual feelings of young teenagers, because to do so when the power relationship is so one-sided can cause loss of self-esteem along with emotional and sexual problems for the teenager when they reach adulthood themselves.

Mr Ben - black-balling was when you got held down and your trousres/pants ripped down, they had a boot brush and a tin of black polish, they loaded the brush and you got it rubbed into your balls and cock. it takes a few days to fade off, there's only so much scrubbing you can do to remove it but luckily it's not visible to all. I'm not that old but it was standard inititation at my scout troop (until I became a patrol leader and introduced first time summer-campers to the delights of being rolled through a bed of stinging nettles, totally naked).

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