Last month, I flew from New York to L.A. to attend the bachelorette party of a close childhood friend. I’m at that age when suddenly everyone I know is getting married at once—seemingly with zero regard for my bank account—so I’ve been attending a lot of these festivities lately. In my experience, most bachelorettes follow a similar narrative: They begin with good intentions—dinner at a trendy new restaurant; a hike to the Griffith Observatory; rooftop cocktails with bonding!—but then somehow, inevitably, you end up wasted at 2:00 p.m. on a wine-tasting safari, wearing a shirt that says “The Bride’s Bitches,” shouting obscenities at a giraffe. It’s in these moments that I try to remind myself: at their core, bachelorette parties should be about celebrating your gender equality by objectifying male strippers and drinking Vodka Red Bull through a penis straw. And then I feel better.
Bachelorette parties are a phenomenon that society has come to both detest and embrace with equal enthusiasm. The prevailing aesthetic of the modern bachelorette—princess sashes, genitalia-centric novelty items, fluffy cat ears, etc.—is a look that transcends social boundaries, welcomed by everyone from your high school class president, who still terrorizes your Facebook feed, to millionheiress Nicky Hilton, whose all-out bachelorette party in Miami last month could have easily been mistaken for a Toddlers & Tiaras 30-year reunion. The increasing indulgence of the ritual was perfectly summed up by Amy Schumer in her sketch “Bachelorette Party Disaster,” in which a bachelorette party bus crashes into a bachelorette booze cruise. The result is described as a “rat king situation,” with women “bound together in a wet tangle of hair extensions and feather boas.” Most of the fatalities in this disaster were bystander suicides.
But as bachelorette parties become increasingly debauched, bachelor parties seem to be taking a different course. Of my last three weddings, while the bridal parties terrorized Vegas, Los Angeles, and Provincetown, Massachusetts, the groom’s crews opted for chill camping weekends or hiking trips, and one groom skipped the ritual all together. In April, The New York Times published an article about wholesome, “mostly hangover-free” bachelor party ideas for this year’s wedding season. When did women start beating men at their own gross game?
The bachelorette party is a pretty recent phenomenon. For centuries, men had premarital parties while women just chilled at home, knitting or whatever—typical. According to the history books (read: Wikipedia), the ritual of celebrating the groom’s last night as a single man is believed to have started back in the fifth century B.C., with the ancient Spartans. The practice has obviously evolved over the years, but for at least the last century, bachelor parties have commonly consisted of men drinking a ton, ogling strippers, getting bromotional, and making decisions they later regret. (See: the 1984 Tom Hanks comedy Bachelor Party and The Hangover trilogy). The idea was that men were commemorating the death of their freedom with one final hurrah. Women, on the other hand, weren’t seen to be giving up anything for marriage, because they had no sexual freedom or independence to begin with; women were only gaining something—an owner, yay! So instead of raging, women had bridal showers, where they wore heinous Empire-waist dresses and opened toasters and anti-wrinkle creams in front of their grandmothers, while sipping tea. It was a riot.
Then around the late sixties, amidst the sexual revolution and a diminishing sexual double standard, the bachelorette party was born. Still, it was by no means common; it was more radical. Throughout the seventies, bachelorette parties were something some feminists did as an antithesis of the torturous bridal shower. But the bachelorette as we know it today wasn’t common until the mid-eighties. It was during this time that a new school of pro-sex feminism emerged, led by women like Madonna, which professed that sexual freedom is an essential component of women’s liberation. Women were entering the workforce and appropriating men’s styles of dress, wearing tailored skirt suits with huge shoulder pads, aka “power dressing.” The general idea was that women could be “like men”—could work like men, dress like men, fuck like men, and, essentially, ogle strippers while pounding shots like men. Sexual freedom means that women, too, are free to act like lecherous monsters and make decisions they’ll later regret. It’s only fair.
To get the inside scoop on modern bachelorette trends from an expert, I called up my lifelong friend Ashton, a 28-year-old who works at a Hollywood production company and for the last two years has been living a real-life 27 Dresses. She planned this recent L.A. celebration (complete with strip clubs, drag brunches, etc.), as well as most of the other bachelorette parties I’ve been to. I’m now accustomed to receiving 2,000-word emails from her that include things like, “If anyone Instagrams anything without the bachelorette hashtag I will literally waterboard you, you whores!”
Ashton told me that bachelorette parties aren’t just getting more depraved, they’re also getting far more extravagant, demanding, and expensive. It’s becoming increasingly common to do destination parties, some that last up to a week. Ashton said, “I literally have ten weddings in 2015, five of which involve bachelorettes. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to take any personal time off work until my early thirties because all my vacations for the foreseeable future are for bachelorette parties.” And then there’s the money issue. “One of the parties involves traveling around the islands in Greece, and you really feel guilty if you don’t go, because the bride puts a lot of pressure on you.” Add that to the cost of an engagement present, a wedding present, and traveling to the wedding, and you might as well shoot yourself now.
“I just went to Vegas for a bachelorette,” Ashton recalled. “There were 20 of us onstage at a strip club wearing sashes that said ‘Cheers bitches,’ getting individual lap dances while a stripper sprayed champagne into our faces. That was the funniest part of the weekend to me. We were staying in this huge suite that was decorated in glitter, which is where we’d pregame and play Pin the Dick on the Man. It was a mess. I’m surprised I didn’t come home with a tattoo on my face.”
I asked Ashton if the point of bachelorettes is to get crunk and throw up on yourself. She said, “Um, I don’t know if the point is to throw up on yourself specifically. But I do think what’s the point of having a bachelorette party if you’re not going to go all-out with with a six-foot blow-up dick and penis straws? Without those, it’s just a regular night out with your friends.”
I kind of agree with her. Really, why buy into any mainstream convention unless you’re just going to go for it? Acknowledge that having a bachelorette party is kind of a basic bitch thing to do to begin with and embrace the cheesy stereotypes. And sure, the performance of bachelorette parties are usually partly ironic, and a bit parody, but the reality is, even if you’re wearing a dick on your head at a restaurant “as a joke,” you’re still wearing a dick on your head at a restaurant. People can see you.
Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.
Hair and Makeup: Ingeborg
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