One of my best friends is getting married. This is a joyous occasion but one that has caused much stress and fear, mostly from me because along with the other bridesmaids, I’ve been given the task of organising the hen’s party.
We know what we don’t want, and that’s some aging male stripper with an orange tan waving his willy in our faces.
We’ve also ruled out phallic drinking straws, drunken cruise parties and any games where vegetables masquerade as genitals, but we’ve also been warned by other hens not to go overboard on the penis-policing, at the risk of the turning the whole thing into a big nana’s tea party.
I’ve never been to a bachelor party but I suspect they are worse. Sydney’s Kings Cross on a Saturday night gives away the clues.
Recently a friend stumbled across some poor drunk bastard in his boxers, chained to a street sign and puking down his own bare chest. His mates were nowhere to be seen. Call me a killjoy, but that doesn’t sound like much fun.
Maybe I’m being too uptight. Risqué hen’s parties are, after all, a tradition that took their cues from sexual revolution of the 60s, when women grew tired of seeing their men go off to have fun, threw down the washing up gloves and decided to cut some action too.
They are, without getting too philosophical, a ritual to mark the shedding a younger, freer self and settling into married life like a responsible, monogamous adult.
Men, on the other hand, seem to view their masculine equivalent like some sort of last supper before a lifetime of lock down and cruel subordination. It’s easy to see why some feel the need to drink it into oblivion: marriage sounds scary as hell.
Somehow, the modern hen’s has evolved into some kind of ultimate trashbag party. They’re like a dirty marathon for cramming in as much explicit stuff as possible.
Bridesmaids-to-be compete with each other, vying to make the event they’re hosting the most hedonistic of them all: slutty outfits, strippers, pole-dancing classes, champagne by the bucket and such a vast array of fake doodle you would think most grown women had never stumbled upon a real one before.
Blow-up devices of various body parts are also apparently hilarious; the bigger the better, and bonus points if you pretend to know what to do with it. That’s the problem with a party based on the loss of innocence. Most people are pretty hard to shock these days, and the bar is getting lower.
My friend, the bride, is acting coy. Being the first of our group to tie the knot, she is not sure what she’s in for. Like me, she is squeamish when it comes to crusty oiled men waving their bits around in public.
But I suspect she would be a bit disappointed if there wasn’t something naughty on the agenda. So she might get a stripper after all, if only to realise what she’s not missing out on for the rest of her life. But we might leave the L-plates and inflatables out of it – some things are better left undone.
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