Arnold van Gennep Archives

Why the Bachelor Party Is the Opposite of What It Appears

Painting of a stag — The bachelor in his last days of freedom.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Ever attended a bachelor party and wondered what on earth was going on? Let’s investigate, like an alien might.

A bachelor party is an initiation into marriage, which, in modern times, is understood as a celebration, by the groom’s male friends, of the groom’s last days of ‘freedom’.

In the UK, the bachelor party tends to be called a stag (stag night, stag do, stag party…), and in Australia, a buck. The equivalent rite for the bride, attended by the bride’s female friends, is the bachelorette or hen party.

The original meaning of ‘bachelor’ in English is ‘a young knight who follows the banner of another’. ‘Stag’ and ‘hen’ used to be slang for ‘man’ and ‘woman’. The stag, standing proud and alone, has forever been a symbol of virility, with stags (and men with antlers) a common motif in cave paintings. Cernunnos, the Celtic god of life and fertility and a symbol of the masculine, featured the body of a warrior and the antlers of a stag. The stag’s antlers, which point to the heavens, serve to attract mates and fend off rivals. Mirroring the cycle of life and death, they grow and fall back each season, transmuting from soft, pulsing velvet into hard horn.

Although fairly recent in their modern incarnations, the stag and hen party descend from immemorial customs. In Ancient Greece, a bride joined her female relatives and friends in paying tribute to Artemis, goddess of childbirth and protector of young girls. In Sparta, friends marked the groom’s last night of bachelorhood with a banquet. By marrying six times at the cost of his wives, the party-loving Henry VIII (d. 1547) embedded the tradition into English society. For a long time in England, stags involved a formal dinner hosted by the groom’s father or best man, or, in more humble circles, a simple drink among friends.

‘Hen party’, initially ‘a gathering of women’, acquired its modern sense in the 1960s and 70s. The term first appeared in The Times of London in 1976, albeit in quotation marks, in the context of a male stripper fined by Leicester Crown Court for acting in ‘a lewd, obscene and disgusting manner’. Back then, the bride often celebrated with her co-workers, whom she would likely be abandoning for the life of a housewife and mother. In time, hen parties spilt out into nearby pubs and clubs, increasingly resembling stags in their raucousness.

Rites of Passage

A rite of passage marks a transition from one sphere to another, attended by a significant change in social status. According to the ethnographer and folklorist Arnold van Gennep (d. 1957), rites of passage have three ritual phases: separation, transition, and incorporation.

Separation rituals, such as the matriculation ceremony upon entering university or the crew cut upon entering the army, symbolise detachment from a former life. In French, a bachelor party is called, enterrement de vie de garçon, which means, ‘burial of the life of the boy’. In modern stags, the separation ritual often involves stripping or humiliating the groom.

Western culture lacks formal rites of passage for adulthood. In other cultures, these often feature tests of virility or maturity, which, in the West, tend to be subsumed informally into the stag or hen, often in the form of an alcohol endurance test or a two-fisted activity such as archery, hammer throwing, or bungee jumping. Bungee jumping also represents a leap and separation; it is, in effect, a symbolic suicide.

In many traditional societies, the separation ritual for marriage involves initiating the bride into the duties of marriage, including lovemaking and childbearing—a function which, in our culture, has largely been delegated to the stripper, or perhaps to a sex toy or pornography. This reveals an important function of the rite of passage, which is to guide and support us at a critical and challenging time in the cycle of life.

For the bride, another possible function of the separation ritual is purification. In Orthodox Judaism, the bride immerses herself in a ritual bath, or mikveh. In many Eastern traditions, the bride wears intricate henna tattoos, usually on her hands and feet, for decoration, purgation, and protection. In Germany, the bachelor party is called Junggesellenabschied (‘farewell to bachelorhood’), but there is another event called Polterabend on the night preceding the wedding at which guests break old crockery to drive out evil spirits. The modern heir to all of these traditions is, of course, the spa day. Purity, symbolised also by the white wedding dress, serves to reassure the groom and wider society that the seal on the milk bottle has not been tampered with.

Other, more minor functions of the stag and hen may include:

Making a mockery of marriage to make it seem less threatening.
Confronting a loss of freedom by desperately reaffirming it.
Snatching the groom back from the bride’s grasp, and vice versa.
Punishing the bride and groom for forsaking their friends.
Saluting one’s friends.
Saying goodbye to one’s friends.
Tying in one’s friends.
Creating a pretext to spoil oneself or one’s friends.
Creating a pretext for socially sanctioned release and debauchery—not dissimilar to the ancient orgy.
Celebrating the life of the groom or bride.
Celebrating manhood or womanhood.
Inducing social conformity.

The Modern Stag and Hen

In the space of a generation, hens and stags have evolved into elaborate affairs involving various degrees of drunkenness and debauchery, often over several days in some faraway city of sin. Such gatherings have spawned an entire industry, with event planners organising activities such as paintballing and tank driving, and arranging everything from dare lists to drinking games, and stretch-limousines to strippers breaking out of tiered cakes.

Why have stags and hens become so big? From an economic standpoint, travel has become cheap and commonplace. People are marrying later and earning more, leaving them with more disposable income than ever before. From a sociocultural standpoint, our generation is more liberated, and perhaps more self-indulgent, than any that has gone before. The stag in particular may represent a frenetic attempt to reaffirm increasingly threatened notions of masculinity—and, indeed, of marriage itself.

For most of human history, marriage stood as an inescapable familial, social, and economic imperative. But in recent decades, with falling infant mortality and overpopulation, rising life expectancy, and female emancipation, it has become something of an optimistic and atavistic lifestyle choice. Already in the nineteenth century, the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote: ‘If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or do not marry, you will regret both…’ Today more than ever, a part of the bride or groom remains unsure about tying the knot, and the stag or hen is, on some level, a manic defence against a loss of freedom and possibility; and, for the other revellers, against the loss of a friend to an increasingly arcane and remote institution.

There is an irony here. Whereas a rite of passage ought to help us confront and negotiate a difficult transition, the modern stag or hen, in its frantic excess, serves to prevent us from thinking about that transition at all—while making it seem that we have.

The purpose of the manic defence is to prevent feelings of doubt, fear, and sadness from rising into the conscious mind by distracting it with opposite feelings of euphoria and purposeful activity. In Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway (1925), one of several ways in which Clarissa Dalloway prevents herself from thinking about her life is by planning frivolous events and then preoccupying herself with their prerequisites—in the withering words of Woolf, ‘always giving parties to cover the silence.’