Invitation to Depants edit
Here is a piece I wrote for Wikipedia in the talk page for debagging. It deals with the mild masochistic and exhibitionistic tendencies in many boys, a psychological feature typically unacknowledged in the vanilla world. I recounted an incident in which I had indirectly brought on my own pantsing when I was a schoolboy, and mentioning my surprise and sense of recognition when I saw much the same type of incident portrayed in an episode of the Simpsons.
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Pantsing, or depantsing, as we called it in my old school, was considered a harmless tradition, which everyone – except the boy being pantsed – found amusing, and that included the teachers, and most especially, the girls in the adjoining school. In the article it is unclear if the boys’ underpants are removed or just his trousers. It was always both in my experience, and indeed in my town, there would be little discomfort proceeding purely from mere trouser removal. The rules were that only the boys who were in the First Grade could be pantsed, and then only if they were pre-pubescent. Typically, after some playful monkey business on the part of the newbie, he would be seized by a group of older “hearties”, have his trousers and pants removed, and quite often his shirt as well. Then, he would be carried to the middle of the school ground, usually near and sometimes right in the girls’ grounds, and left there to make his way as best he might.
As is common in many institutions, the youngest forms were the – usually benign – target of all sorts of pranks and japes, and so it was that the 12 year olds suffered this indignity. It’s a sort of rite of passage, and the victim’s humiliation was alleviated by his knowledge that he would be neither the first nor last to be pantsed in public, and that it would soon be HIS turn to do the same to the incoming forms that followed him. Other rules were that the boy could in no way be harmed or hurt, that the act had to be done in a good-natured, jocular fashion, and that only boys who were lively, healthy, and cheeky were fair game.
One very common and largely unacknowledged aspect of this practice was that many of the boy victims brought pantsing upon themselves by being impertinent to and over-familiar with the older pupils, even daring them to do it, and thus incurring the penalty. I am sure that they secretly enjoyed the idea of being stripped and exhibited in this way in front of their classmates and the giggling girls always close by. I know, because I brought on such a pantsing myself after ragging a group of older pupils. It was sports day and I was barefoot, dressed only in shorts, underpants and a tee shirt. All this was quickly stripped from me, and I was carried by the others – quite naked – to the girls’ grounds, where the mob, reckoning that my impertinence had been especially intolerable, elected to bind me, standing, to the chicken wire that fenced the perimeter of the girls’ basketball courts. I struggled with all my might against this outrage, but my motives were not so much to save what was left of my modesty, as to take my mind off what was becoming quite an impressive and uncontrollable erection. As it is, the boys relented, and just as well, for while the headmasters of both the boys’ and girls’ schools would overlook a simple pantsing, the provocative diorama of a naked boy seemingly crucified on a wire fence and with a deeply incongruous prong pointing to the horizon, might have led them to ban the practice altogether.
The Simpsons, a cartoon that has touched on many themes never dealt with elsewhere, has an episode in which one of the characters – Martin – brings about his own unbreeching, as he frankly admits to himself. The incident reminded me vividly of the mild exhibitionism of my own schoolboy skylarking. A brief screenplay can be found here:
http://www.snpp.com/episodes/1F22.html
Martin wears 22 pairs of bathing suits to the pool, of which Bart manages to snatch 5. What happens next reveals something about Martin’s hidden motives.
Bart: [coming up for air] Look, Liz, I snatched five bathing suits - all Martin's!
Martin: Take your best shot! I'm wearing seventeen layers.
[Tough kids surround him and tear at his bathing suits]
Martin: Ha ha ha -- [gasps, notices his layers are gone] [quietly] I brought this on myself.
Later, the school bully, Nelson rips off Martin’s last bathing suit, leaving him standing alone, but strangely composed, by the pool. As he feels the breeze on his naked bottom, he sings a little song:
Nelson: [rips off Martin's bathing suit] Ha ha! Martin: Oh. The gentle caress of the summer breeze. [sings]
The summer wind
Came blowing in
From across the sea...