Going along to keep up
The Guardian reports on a study that found men don’t love stag parties but go along with them because of bullying. That doesn’t surprise me – the way men bully other men is horrifying.
…a study suggests that men do not enjoy the debauchery or the “extreme shaming, humiliation, and deviance” that are part and parcel of most modern stag dos.
According to the report, men succumb to peer pressure to celebrate one final night of “freedom” with the groom-to-be, despite the fact that the hedonistic experiences can leave them feeling scared and degraded.
So the experiences can’t be all that hedonistic, can they.
The researchers found instances of men being pressured into doing things they did not enjoy but nonetheless going along with to keep up with the other men in the group.
They record one groom-to-be who said he had no desire to see “half-naked dancing women, let alone pay them” in a lapdancing club that his best man insisted they go to. However, he went along with the group and spent a dismal evening “declining offers from various women for private dances, but did not reveal his desire to leave to the best man or the rest of the group”.
This is one way men have it far worse than women. Ironically that’s because it doesn’t really work to try to shame a woman by calling her a woman, whereas it works all too well to shame a man that way, so the worse is ultimately ours after all…But all the same, it’s a nasty form of bullying and shaming that we aren’t subject to.
At least, not from our friends. In the outside world of course there’s a lot of pressure on women to be not woman-like, and that sends a loud misogynist message. But we don’t have to choose between acting like an asshole and being taunted as a pussy or worse.
Or maybe I just mean I feel sad for men who have friends like that.
According to the research, “extreme shaming, humiliation, and deviance often plays in the stag party experience for all those involved, not just the stag”.
The authors report how they witnessed one man on a stag weekend with his friends being subjected to sustained ritual humiliation. His drinks were spiked with shots of spirits leaving him so incapacitated that he passed out in the bar, soiled himself and was tied up with cling film in their accommodation while still unconscious.
The study concluded that men on stag dos are “performing” a role rather than taking any real pleasure in their extreme antics. “We argue that these men are merely reproducing exaggerated forms of behaviour that are expected of them and that they expect of themselves in a pocket of available time to celebrate,” it said.
Poisoning someone with alcohol is not “antics.” Alcohol poisoning can be fatal.
You know what’s fun? I’m told? Dancing. Try that! Skip the naked women and the roofies, and just dance til you drop.
I can personally recommend greasy burgers, three intense rounds of lasertag, and lots of cocktails. There were suggestions of going to a strip club but my refusal was honored.
Speaking to the degradation bit though, I was wearing a shirt that said “I like fucking goats, literally.”
That seems to be the sort of thing that a best man does because he is “supposed” to do it, even if it’s not necessarily something that he wants to.
Horrifying! Time to stand up, men, and demand this is not how to send off a guy getting married. For my bachelor night, I requested our group of 9 guys go bowling, then we did some late night karaoke at an infamous Chinese restaurant/bar. It was a great night—it had nothing to do with women or shaming anyone. It was just some good guys having fun. (Still faithfully married to the same great gal, going on year 21).
Isn’t it just sad as hell that that’s not the preferred option for everyone?
It should be a fundamental rule. Partying with friends is not at all the same thing as humiliating people. Those are entirely separate activities. Humiliating people is not a subset of Fun.
Ah, this brings back such fond bachelor party memories… Like forcing myself to stay awake; mostly sober, bleary-eyed, and exhausted at 5:35 a.m. because of the looming (and potentially realistic) edict adopted by some of the harder-partiers of the group: first guy to “pass out”, no matter the hour, would wake up with a penis drawn on their forehead in permanent marker. Good times – nothing like sitting through the next day’s wedding and reception with a zombie-like disposition and crippling headache.
Best bachelor party ever: we dressed in our best suits and spent the evening at a fancy scotch-bar puffing stupidly-expensive cigars and sipping stupidly-expensive drinks (sobriety-by-sticker-shock) while reminiscing on the past and swapping stories of the present.
My husband’s bachelor party was just a couple of friends at a pizza buffet. But then, he was 47 when we got married, and his friends were also mature adults. That might make a big difference.
One buck’s night I’ve been on was a night of bar hopping while the groom carried a blow-up sex doll in full view… he had to introduce her as his date for the evening for anyone that asked what the hell he was doing. The other was much much more fun: on a river boat somewhere on the South Australian portion of the Murray, playing board games while getting sloshed for three days. Much cooler.
I’ve done exactly that riverboat thing on that stretch of river. Awesome fun as long as I stayed on board. I have an irrational fear of snakes and especially spiders, so Australia is always vaguely challenging – like the time my brother asked me to hold something up, then explained he was wiping the red backs off the bottom of it…
I think it’s getting worse, even. It’s a bit like college fraternity hazing; in each group, the older members decide that they need to up the game as they initiate the younger ones. Increasingly extreme conduct occurs, partially obscured because of the codes of silence that surround such affairs, and meanwhile, you get Hollywood movies glamorizing the conduct without showing the actual downsides. And, yes, the youth of most of the participants feeds into it, as well, simply because they fail to realize how much of both the media and the grognard’s portrayal of the stag nights of yesteryear are inflated beyond all measure–they just figure that’s the measure they’re supposed to live up to.
I’ve heard of a stag night where the groom-to-be was actually locked up in the boot of the car and taken to the party location chosen by his so-called friends. Another stag night where the groom-to-be was stripped and tied to a lamppost. An outing with friends should be fun, it shouldn’t be an occasion where those ‘friends’ assault you.