I saw the future last weekend — but at first I had to admit that it did look rather like a hen do. Yes, there was booze and some bad behaviour but — and this is the futuristic bit — there were also boys involved.
My friend Cat ignored boring old “rules” that say hen parties must be all-women. I suppose that was clear when she picked an Alexander to be one of her two bridesmaids, but actually I don’t think she’s unique. She’s on to something.
Others tell me they have tossed tradition aside too. One university friend took his gaggle of boys and girls to a house in Coventry for his stag-do. Another is braver. She’ll be the only girl with a bunch of lads. Her friends and family thought it was “really weird” but she thinks it’s “great, really healthy”.
Conventional wisdom, though, says a stag or a hen do is a wild bacchanalian affair, often sprawling over a number of days in some sun-soaked corner of a foreign country, undertaken exclusively with people your own gender. Boys sidle into strip clubs, girls sip through penis-shaped straws. That’s how it’s supposed to go, anyway.
Conventional wisdom can go rot. Not everyone believes boys will be boys and girls will be girls. Cat just wanted to see her close friends for an almighty knees-up before her wedding. She has been friends with both men and women for her whole life. So why start faffing about now with a “no boys” rule?
The idea that stags and hens must be mono-gender is an ego-pleaser and a thought-killer. Ego-pleasing because everyone likes being part of a special club as they got included and someone else didn’t. Thought-killing because a hen or stag do should be about good (if not clean) fun with the people you consider to be your friends. It’s just that the whole concept of these parties, as it is understood now, means “friends” applies only to mates who are the same gender as you.
And as for the idea that all-male or all-female parties mean you can really have fun, or really be yourself, where does that leave your friends of the opposite gender? Either they’re your friends and you can be yourself and go wild, in which case bring them along, or they’re not really your friends.
Anyway, every day this city offers a lesson that, with everyone living cheek-by-jowl, if a barrier is dull enough it will crumble.
London frees us from arbitrary divisions of all kinds. That’s partly why it makes little sense to me to reimpose some of those divisions for parties that are a celebration of life thus far.
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I’ve got to this point and not yet even touched on an issue that is growing in importance almost by the day. As Britons question their gender and their gender roles more and more, gender-locked stags and hens will be yesterday’s news.
So sod the clique, bugger the rules and stuff the tradition. Party with your mates, whatever gender they are.
