The Spanish resort of Tossa de Mar has hit the headlines for announcing it will be banning stag and hen parties throughout the month of August, and introducing strict regulations for the rest of the year. The Costa Brava town will now require revellers to apply for a licence and impose hefty fines on partygoers deemed to be having too much fun.
This crackdown is just the latest example of insidious prejudice against the noble tradition of stag and hen parties, which dates back at least to the invention of the Jägerbomb (c. 2000), and possibly even longer. Barcelona moved to ban happy hour in 2009 to make the city less appealing to wedding parties, and Riga’s Mayor Nils Usakovs once bemoaned British stags and hens who visit the Latvian capital and “piss about all the time”.
But bachelor and bachelorette parties, as they are also known, are not all bad. Here’s why.
Acceptable male bonding
Despite the fact that it’s 2014 and David Beckham in a sarong happened 16 years ago, lots of men still find it difficult to embrace their emotional, less macho side. Thus stag parties offer the perfect excuse for men to hug each other and for Matt to tell Ben that he loves him, after 15 years of friendship. Stag dos offer a rare opportunity – along with football finals and war films – for men to get emotional collectively. And the best thing about it is the next day nobody will remember thanks to those last four pints.
Women get to turn the tables
Females really got the raw deal in the objectifying stakes. Straight men are sorted, with naked women plastered across billboards, on the sides of buses, and all over the TV. For women, hen dos often include a hired hunk to dance or wait tables or whatever it is that hired hunks do. This means women can ogle men’s abs, which is otherwise not a frequent pastime.
Similarly, if not at a hen do, when else can women get together, drink copious amounts of prosecco, and pass around a vibrator? OK, so most weekends, but the point here is the hen party is an equaliser of the sexes that Betty Friedan forgot.
Meet new people – from all walks of life
Perhaps there is a good reason why the betrothed has until now kept apart: his/her old school friends from the wrong side of the tracks; the pals he/she met at law school; and the people he/she met in rehab. But one of the true joys of stag and hen parties is the unlikely mix of people they throw together. Stag and hens take this chance to engineer a glorious melting pot of people from all walks of life to celebrate your forthcoming nuptials. Everyone will end up bonding beautifully, like Matisse’s The Dance.
Learn stuff, discover places!
It has become a trend to not simply get wasted on stag and hen parties, but rather for groups of buddies to better themselves in some way. These boutique, tailor-made hen and stag parties have only added to the already big-money wedding industry. Crafts are permissible, as is knitting and cocktail making. Butchering, baking, candlestick-making. It’s always good to learn new skills, right?
Plus, hen and stag dos are bona fide excuses to go on holiday and visit somewhere one probably otherwise wouldn’t. Breathtakingly beautiful, ancient cities of historical import and culture, like Prague and Riga and … Tossa de Mar.
It’s a better party than the wedding
There’s no pressure on the hen or stag do. Everyone is equal and there to have a great time. It’s not like at the actual ceremony, in which a strict hierarchy is in place and weird people are invited simply by accident of birth.
Stag and hen parties are much freer. They are events that allow one to escape the cruel, restrictive shackles society has placed on them. For women, this often takes the form of dressing as princesses, beauty queens, angels or learner drivers. For men: mankini models or committed fans of onesies. And, really, who can argue with a mankini?
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