British boarding schools manage to educate young boys in spite of all the constant wedgieing that occurs. Male dorms are a semester-long wedgie proving ground. Brace yourself for gym class and don't stray too far at recess, and whatever you do, don't take the shortcut home through the vacant lot or the woods. The school library is safe the cafeteria is not. Some environments are more wedgie-prone than others. Sometimes the phone would ring in the middle of the night and your mom would announce at breakfast that Uncle Wedgie was in jail again.)

Sometimes Uncle Wedgie would pin your arms, sit on your chest and 'stinkyface' you. Sometimes Uncle Wedgie went over the line. (In some families, Uncle Wedgie was Cousin Wedgie, and sometimes you weren't entirely sure how, or if, you were related to him. Everyone has that one uncle - Uncle Wedgie - who can lift you all the way to the ceiling by your tighty-whities. Brothers wedgie one another from birth to grave. (Yes, even as it seems appallingly cruel.)ĭads wedgie sons. Is the wedgie healthy? Without interviewing a single child psychologist, we posit yes. Bullies use the wedgie as a means of control over the less dominant members of the herd other males of the species do it to one another - repeatedly, and with much innovation - as a show of friendship, with occasional masochistic overtones. Of the myriad things boys will do to one another, the wedgie is perhaps the most primal way of conveying an odd combination of terror and affection - at least since the invention of elastic-banded Jockey briefs, circa 1935.Ĭultural anthropologists seeking to understand male behavior should simply sit quietly in locker rooms and observe. Such troublesome fruit looms large in the psyche of the human male.

If I lean over, I leave myself open to wedgies, wet willies or even the dreaded 'rear admiral.' ' Elementary school kids are fawning over the 'Captain Underpants' book series, whose hero is vested with special wedgie powers, and we approve.Ĭan there be any more instructive example of playground social dynamism than the wedgie? Let us call upon those pundits of recess politics, Bart Simpson and Milhouse Van Houten, in a memorable 'Simpsons' episode years back called 'Treehouse of Evil':īart: 'Milhouse! Milhouse! Wake up! Quick, look out the window!' (Give the wedgie a fond tug.) Somewhere out there, freshmen boys are keeping the lowest possible profile in the hallways, hoping to avoid senior football players, who seek to wedgie them or worse, and this is a good thing, in that it's a firsthand lesson in the human condition: Sometimes life stinks. 'I still don't want to go to school tomorrow.' We all tried to get each other's underwear.

'Just got one of the worst wedgies in the world yesterday,' someone who calls himself Wedgie-a-Lot and claims to be in the eighth grade confided recently to a Web site devoted to all manner of underwear shenanigans, where anonymous wedgie givers and receivers share their feelings:

With millions of children scuttling back to those woefully substandard schools we keep reading about, it's reassuring to discover that the wedgie is alive and kicking:

Guy and girl wedgie game