The Right to Toast Bread: On Fagging and Other Engines of Male Status

I recently met a man in his early sixties who had been educated at one of Britain’s top private boarding schools. Stately, storied, and prestigious, it was the type of place that the British upper classes send their sons in order to preserve family tradition and status. As I listened to the man share school memories with his brother, I was not shocked by their discussion of how the school’s reputation had been tarnished by allegations of staff pedophilia. (A 2018 independent report had found "appalling sexual abuse...inflicted over decades on children as young as seven.") Perhaps because in recent years, sexual abuse at British boarding schools has come under scrutiny by government and media, what shocked me most was the man’s throw-away comment about toast.

Back in his day, during the 1970s, the school still observed the centuries-old British boys’ boarding school tradition of “fagging,” a term derived from a 16^th-century English word for working hard. Younger pupils were assigned as “fags,” or servants, to upperclassmen, receiving the protection of the older boys in return for performing tasks from shining their shoes to making their beds and breakfasts. Children’s novelist Roald Dahl, who served as one of what he called these “personal slaves,” at school, wrote of having to warm up his upperclassman’s toilet seat for him.

My acquaintance’s fagging story, while less icky, was still chilling: “When you were a fag, you weren’t allowed toast,” he recalled. “Only upperclassmen were allowed to have toasted bread.” Younger boys, who presumably had to make toast for the older ones, were restricted to eating their slices white and flabby.

But why? Could it have been a dearth of space, toasters, electricity, or a fireplace? Not likely, at a school whose mid-1970s fees were around half the annual wages of an average British worker. I’m guessing that this stupid rule was inflicted simply to remind everyone of hierarchy. A boy’s right to toast was rendered a status symbol.

Like so much of fagging, the nasty and pointless rule was in service of much larger hierarchies promoted in traditional British public schools. In earlier centuries, most were imperial training grounds, designed to train sons of the British empire to act as future rulers of the Punjab or a Kenyan province. In post-imperial Britain, top boarding schools switched to preparing boys for other forms of conquest, via glittering roles in banking, business, or government. A defender of fagging put it pithily to Time magazine in 1980: “You learn how to command by learning how to obey.”

The boarding school system works to stunt empathy, observes the psychotherapist Nick Duffell, whose book Wounded Leaders explored how boarding schools helped shape an emotionally impoverished ruling class in Britain. Early separation from their families at school means “Ex-boarder leaders cannot conceive of communal solutions, because they haven’t had enough belonging at home to understand what it means,” he writes. “Instead, they are limited to esprit de corps with their own kind.”

That is, the fagging system was a schoolboy’s chance to practice on the ladder of domination, that all-too-common order of things in the outside world. Among the key school lessons: yes, you’re demeaned and oppressed, but if you play by the rules, you’ll eventually get to do unto others what was done to you. The system “was a preparation for a life of lovelessness,” the style writer Charlie Porter observed in his book Bring No Clothes, “tasks and acts of generosity performed as duties, rather than out of a sense of community or compassion, never reciprocated.”

The toast rule was arbitrary, but like so many dictates designed to teach people about their own domination, that was a feature, not a bug. As we’re reminded almost daily by President Trump, top dogs make their own logic, and that logic is all too often just a show of power. Think of Mean Girls, and queen bee Regina’s famous dictum: “On Wednesdays we wear pink.”

As Regina knew well, cruelty can serve as a prerequisite for status, or at least, for group cohesion. A famous 1959 psychology experiment on initiation ceremonies found that people who have to perform unpleasant tasks or rituals feel more attracted to joining a group than do those who can join without having to participate in tough or shameful rites. On its website, the Navy unwittingly acknowledges these findings, as it describes its infamous “Hell Week” for aspiring Seals: “Above all, it tests determination and desire.”

Elite institutions, from investment banks to fraternities, frame institutional suffering as a route to building tough motherf*ckers. Too often, the mere survival of years of hundred-hour weeks or frat hazing gets conflated with excellence and exclusivity. US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth linked suffering to excellence last September: “Basic training is being restored to what it should be: scary, tough, and disciplined,” he announced. “We’re empowering drill sergeants to instill healthy fear in new recruits, ensuring future war fighters are forged.” When a group of Goldman Sachs employees leaked a PowerPoint detailing what they called “inhumane” conditions in 2021, the bank acknowledged they had a problem, but its spokesperson couldn’t resist a hint of a humble-brag: “We recognize that our people are very busy, because business is strong and volumes are at historic levels.”

Macho suffering is frequently cast as a means to an end. The pain of the mostly-male elites, whether unhappy boys at posh British schools, or aspiring bankers and military cadets, is endured with the promise of future power. And when these men are unleashed on the world, the power they display is often shot through with the cruelty and cluelessness of schoolboys.