AGXStarseed
Well-Known Member
(Not written by me. I edited to remove a curse word. For those unfamiliar with the lingo, a "Stag Night" - or rather "Stag Weekend" nowadays - is another name for a Bachelor Party; been thrown as a celebration for a man who is about to get married)
Expensive, monotonous and painful: it's time men admitted that stag weekends are no fun at all, says Richard Innes.
If you told me you were going to keep me awake for three days, pump me so full of alcohol that I would be ill for a week, force me to do all this in the company of (some) people I don't necessarily like and then charge me £500 for the privilege, I would assume you were in the kidnapping and/or extortion business. But say the words “stag” and “do” and not only would I accept your offer, I’d most likely slap you on the back and ask if we were getting some beers for the journey.
Why? Why do intelligent, relatively sensible men regularly put themselves through the physical, emotional and spiritual trauma of a stag do? From the moment you receive an initial email from a supposed best man, demanding you immediately book half a week off work and transfer him several hundred pounds for "flights, the hotel and activities", alarm bells should be ringing. But no, before you know it, you’re on a three-day trip to somewhere in eastern Europe, surrounded by a group of miscreants who have all clearly decided that two hours with RyanAir is all it takes to leave behind the boring limitations of normality. You know, those dull social conventions that stop a person from being a [censored].
The sad irony is that whatever the destination, almost every stag do feels identical, thanks to the primary activity always being the same: getting so drunk that your central nervous system can’t help but collapse under the strain. I have now been on approximately 15 of these stag travesties, and every supposedly unique and "kerrr-azy" activity has felt as derivative as the last. Go-karting in Berlin? Bull fighting in Madrid? Jumping off cliffs in Cornwall? They have all amounted to the exact same thing: men with hangovers so ghastly they don’t know what country they are in, stumbling about and trying to delay the next inevitable bout of heavy drinking.
The real insanity is that there are usually not one but two nights of madness to contend with. And yet on it goes, as you consume enough alcohol to kill a small elephant. This all leaves you a) suspecting you are in need of a kidney transplant, b) feeling like you would gladly kill someone just to get a cuddle from your wife and c) supressing urges to murder everyone in your party, possibly by beating them to death with their own tongues. You are not enjoying yourself, but nor is anyone else, yet no one would dare let on that they are not having the absolute time of their lives.
The best part is finally arriving home, calculating how much it has cost you to feel suicidal and realising you have just coughed up a significant slice of the £500m that sloshes around the stag industry every year.
It didn’t used to be like this. When I asked my dad to regale me with the tale of his last night of "freedom", granted, I wasn’t expecting him to launch into a yarn about strip clubs in Tallin, but I was still a little disappointed when he told me about a simple evening in a pub with a few of his closest pals. A chat with other men of my father’s generation quickly revealed a universal amazement at the contemporary approach to something as simple as a stag night (a phrase that doesn’t even exist any more, as no-one actually spends just one night on a stag). Far from being envious of the way we have taken their little tradition and developed it into a multi-million pound industry, the consensus was pity – pity that, for us, a friend getting engaged simply means our livers, wallets and brains are in for a pounding.
The old boys are quite right, of course. So, here’s my suggestion: we all agree now to go back to simple stag nights in the pub. If we all stand together, we can make this work. Hell, we need to make it work. After all, in the space of a generation, stag dos have gone from a few quiet pints in the local, to a weekend of strippers and shots in the Balkans – so how exactly are our sons going to celebrate getting hitched? A fortnight spent shooting up heroin and hunting the homeless with machine guns?
Source: The modern stag do: a rite of passage no one should have to endure
Expensive, monotonous and painful: it's time men admitted that stag weekends are no fun at all, says Richard Innes.
If you told me you were going to keep me awake for three days, pump me so full of alcohol that I would be ill for a week, force me to do all this in the company of (some) people I don't necessarily like and then charge me £500 for the privilege, I would assume you were in the kidnapping and/or extortion business. But say the words “stag” and “do” and not only would I accept your offer, I’d most likely slap you on the back and ask if we were getting some beers for the journey.
Why? Why do intelligent, relatively sensible men regularly put themselves through the physical, emotional and spiritual trauma of a stag do? From the moment you receive an initial email from a supposed best man, demanding you immediately book half a week off work and transfer him several hundred pounds for "flights, the hotel and activities", alarm bells should be ringing. But no, before you know it, you’re on a three-day trip to somewhere in eastern Europe, surrounded by a group of miscreants who have all clearly decided that two hours with RyanAir is all it takes to leave behind the boring limitations of normality. You know, those dull social conventions that stop a person from being a [censored].
The sad irony is that whatever the destination, almost every stag do feels identical, thanks to the primary activity always being the same: getting so drunk that your central nervous system can’t help but collapse under the strain. I have now been on approximately 15 of these stag travesties, and every supposedly unique and "kerrr-azy" activity has felt as derivative as the last. Go-karting in Berlin? Bull fighting in Madrid? Jumping off cliffs in Cornwall? They have all amounted to the exact same thing: men with hangovers so ghastly they don’t know what country they are in, stumbling about and trying to delay the next inevitable bout of heavy drinking.
The real insanity is that there are usually not one but two nights of madness to contend with. And yet on it goes, as you consume enough alcohol to kill a small elephant. This all leaves you a) suspecting you are in need of a kidney transplant, b) feeling like you would gladly kill someone just to get a cuddle from your wife and c) supressing urges to murder everyone in your party, possibly by beating them to death with their own tongues. You are not enjoying yourself, but nor is anyone else, yet no one would dare let on that they are not having the absolute time of their lives.
The best part is finally arriving home, calculating how much it has cost you to feel suicidal and realising you have just coughed up a significant slice of the £500m that sloshes around the stag industry every year.
It didn’t used to be like this. When I asked my dad to regale me with the tale of his last night of "freedom", granted, I wasn’t expecting him to launch into a yarn about strip clubs in Tallin, but I was still a little disappointed when he told me about a simple evening in a pub with a few of his closest pals. A chat with other men of my father’s generation quickly revealed a universal amazement at the contemporary approach to something as simple as a stag night (a phrase that doesn’t even exist any more, as no-one actually spends just one night on a stag). Far from being envious of the way we have taken their little tradition and developed it into a multi-million pound industry, the consensus was pity – pity that, for us, a friend getting engaged simply means our livers, wallets and brains are in for a pounding.
The old boys are quite right, of course. So, here’s my suggestion: we all agree now to go back to simple stag nights in the pub. If we all stand together, we can make this work. Hell, we need to make it work. After all, in the space of a generation, stag dos have gone from a few quiet pints in the local, to a weekend of strippers and shots in the Balkans – so how exactly are our sons going to celebrate getting hitched? A fortnight spent shooting up heroin and hunting the homeless with machine guns?
Source: The modern stag do: a rite of passage no one should have to endure
