I'm a child of the '60s/'70s ~ and yes, sex was on everyone's mind ~ "peace, love, and rock 'n roll" ~ granted, my own college days are far behind, but I honestly don't remember ever hearing this kind of targeted, brutal misogyny while I was still in school OR for the vast majority of the decades since then ~ ~ there are "live links" to more/corroborating info in the original ~ Sooz

Friday, Jan 24, 2014 02:30 PM CST
College group suspended for offensive “S&M” chant
A university doesn't find "The S&M Man" so funny.
Mary Elizabeth Williams

Wow, you college kids really love your rapey chanting, don’t you? Last September, student leaders at Halifax’s Saint Mary’s University were disciplined after a video surfaced of an orientation week chant featuring lines like “SMU boys, we like them young. 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.” Now, a McMaster University engineering students’ group has been suspended for using a songbook the school’s provost and vice-president David Wilkinson calls “highly repugnant.”

In a release sent out Thursday, the school describes the songbook as containing “sexist, violent and degrading material” and says that the student group, known as the redsuits, “will not be allowed to run or participate in any events on campus and the student group will not be permitted to participate in the organization of this year’s Welcome Week activities,” and that a full investigation into the songbook controversy is being launched.

In its announcement, the school declined to cite the exact nature of the “repugnant” lyrics, but its paper, The Silhouette, published them Thursday – along with a useful trigger warning. Many of the “engineering cheers” contained within are standard issue odes to inebriation, with lyrics that, though “mainly for males,” have been incorporated in ways “that will appeal to females so that anyone can enjoy singing” them. And if ladies want to sing songs about how “Bestiality’s Best,” well, there’s not a whole lot of harm in that. But the main bone of contention is a song the book’s compilers say that “cannot omit,” even as they warn, “People will be offended.”

“The S&M Man,” to be sung to the tune of “The Candy Man,” has been around for almost as long as Sammy Davis Jr.’s original 1973 hit. It’s featured on the Wilkes Barre/Scranton rugby team’s list of songs to learn and “try to memorize,” and it’s on song lists of other sporting clubs, mostly rugby, around the world. It’s pretty much a musical version of “A Serbian Film.”

Now I’d wager that nobody, not even those naughty kids from the engineering department, truly wants to sodomize babies or “electrocute the bitch.” The song is meant to provoke and shock, preferably in a frenzied moment of sporty bloodlust. It’s just a stupid, stupid song.

But let’s just hope for a moment that a gathering of college students isn’t a rugby game in the seventies, and let’s hope that despite the fact that there will always be power and even release in shock, the world has progressed somewhat in the past 40 years. Maybe there was a time when guys could hang out and sing collectively about doing things to a nun “till she wants to be a Jew” with impunity, but you know, maybe not so much anymore. It’s not exactly cool to go around singing odes to sexual assault, especially when rape is an all too common reality of college life. Sorry.

In its intro, one of the book’s compilers (the name has been redacted) writes, “It is my dream that this document will survive my graduation, and grow beyond my work on it as time goes on… This way, there will always be a written history of these songs, so that they will, God willing, never be forgotten.” Consider it done, pal. They will never be forgotten. But you might want to consider where they’re repeated.

http://www.salon.com/2014/01/24/college_group_suspended_for_offensive_sm_chant/

I hope they realize that when they ban these they should ban a lot of the rap songs that are out there, too, for the same reasons.

Who's "they"?

But let’s just hope for a moment that a gathering of college students isn’t a rugby game in the seventies,

What in the hell is this guy talking about????

Apart from anything else most Rugby players in the 1970s WERE "college ... (university) ... students" (or had been), mostly from upper-class "elite" private schools and residents of "prestigious" colleges.

Of course, I'm referring to Rugby Union players. Us working class lads who had to make our own way in the world played the far superior game of Rugby League.

(Honestly, even as an 18 year old rough country boy I was absolutely shocked and horrified the first (and last time) I ever went to a college function - at St Andrew's College, Sydney University - and heard some of the residents talking about girls. I still remember being stunned at a group of "upper class" students casually referring to their girl-friends as their "pigs".)

Whether they actually thought the way to what they were saying it is disgusting and should have been suspended and made to shut down this group for good.

Prohibitions don't generally work. They merely drive the problems underground.