Mistake? Is that what you call it?

Jared Perry says chanting about raping underage girls was "the biggest mistake of his life..

The president of the St. Mary's University student council realizes only now, after five years repeating this orientation week ditty, that it's "wrong". He "feels terrible" about it.

Y is for your sister!
O is for oh so tight!
U is for underage!
N is for no consent!
G is for grab that ass!

St Mary's boys, we like 'em young!

Charming.

What I want to know is how anybody in his right mind could call this a "mistake".  You don't sing a chant "by mistake". It takes conscious effort to form the words, and I should think it would take a hell of a lot of effort to form those words and shout them out with the required brio. (I just bet the set response to this is the asinine "I...can't...hear...you!", just so the assembled can shout it louder. Isn't school spirit a wonderful thing? All hail the leaders of tomorrow!

I remember my own Frosh Week. I wish I could forget it. 1990, this was. The first clue that I had entered a world with entirely different norms was cheerfully waving in the wind, hanging from a bridge on the 401 approaching Kitchener-Waterloo. "Fathers, Thank You For Your Virgin Daughters", it read. There were team-building exercises galore, rife with sexual innuendo and worse (in one of them, we had to name a body part we liked on the person next to us and then kiss it. After the humiliation of that exercise, my room mate and I opted out of further Frosh Week activities. This did not go over well...we were called all kinds of names and told we were lacking in that ever-important school spirit.

At least there were no panty raids that year. They'd been a Wilfrid Laurier tradition since time out of mind, and 1990 was the first year we were regretfully told they would no longer be tolerated.  Regretfully. Some of the student council leaders were very upset about this, as I recall. Me, I was stunned. I spent most of first year that way, come to think of it...many of my floormates seemed to be majoring in Alcoholism, with a minor in Douchecanoe. But yes, I think it's fair to say university started to sour on me in the very first week.

Doubtless I'll be called a killjoy and a party pooper, but I have to ask: why? Why do we have these stupid, pointless Frosh Week rituals? To what purpose? What do they have to do with the three or four years of professors reading textbooks to you that follow them? And how can Jared Perry look in a mirror?