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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.’

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We Cannot Touch Without Being Touched

Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam (detail), c. 1508–12.
The space between us. — Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam (detail), c. 1508–12.

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

Essay substantially revised on 26 August 2026.

Convicted murderer Peter Collins died of cancer after 32 years in a Canadian prison. In that time, he became a champion of prison rights, and made a short film called Fly in the Ointment about a prolonged period that he spent in solitary confinement:

Somehow, I felt [my wife’s] fingers on my leg. Shocked and excited, I opened my eyes only to realize it was a fly walking on me. I was greedy for human touch so I closed my eyes and pretended it was her fingers. I tried to stay perfectly still because I didn’t want to frighten the fly off and be left alone.

After that, Collins would bite his cheek and apply a mixture of his own blood and saliva onto his skin, to attract the flies that had become his only source of living touch.

The Need for Touch

Owing to smaller household sizes, greater migration, higher media consumption, longer life expectancies, and an increasing fear of touch, people today are more corporally disconnected than at any other time in human history.

Just like we crave food when we are hungry, or crave sleep when we are tired, so we crave touch when we are lonely—for, at least historically, to be alone is to be exposed and vulnerable.

Notice the ancestral wisdom transmitted through language. When someone is out of our social orbit, we do not say that we are out of sight, but out of touch; and we feel that we ought to reach out and make contact.

More than a mere superfluity or indulgence, human touch is, like food and sleep, a visceral need that is increasingly being met by third parties such as hairdressers, massage therapists, and even professional cuddlers. Maybe this is why the hug has been gaining ground over the simple handshake. Recently, a 21-year-old dinner guest I had never met greeted me with a hug, when, previously, a handshake and bottle of wine would have been more expected.

During the covid lockdowns, it was not so much that people were lonely, since they could still interact at a distance or remotely, but that they could not physically touch one another, not even to shake hands. People who lived on their own may have gone for several months without any human touch at all—leading, among others, to a surge in demand for puppies. A video call, AI chat, or pornography might alleviate loneliness, but no amount of technology could satisfy or abolish the need for touch.

Is Touch Taboo?

As a wine taster, I used to think that smell was the most neglected of our senses. But in our society, touch is even more so, because more taboo.

In the 1960s, Sidney Jourard, a psychologist at the University of Florida, observed the behaviour of couples in coffee shops around the world. He found that, in the space of an hour, couples in Puerto Rico touched each other 180 times. This compared to 110 times in Paris, just twice in Florida, and not at all in London. Jourard also found that French parents and their children touched one another three times more than their American counterparts.

The fear of touch in northern, Anglophone countries is deep-seated. In Victorian England and nineteenth-century America, people took to the language of flowers, or floriography, to fly feelings that could not otherwise have flown. In a book on child-rearing, first published in 1928, the influential American psychologist John B. Watson (made famous by his Little Albert experiment) advised:

Never hug and kiss [your children], never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight… In a week’s time you will find how easy it is to be perfectly objective with your child and at the same time kindly. You will be utterly ashamed at the mawkish, sentimental way you have been handling it.

Still today, many people flinch if the person returning their change accidentally brushes their hand. Maybe that is why the hug greeting is gaining ground, as a kind of legitimate pretext for properly touching someone—albeit only twice per visit.

Men and Touch

The fear of touch is generally much greater in men. Touch is seen as soft and effeminate, and many men are keen to appear macho or at least masculine. With women, they worry that their touch will be interpreted as a sexual advance. With other men, they fear that it will raise questions about their sexuality, or that it will feel awkward, or that it will be rejected, or that they might enjoy it a little too much. With children, they fear that it might raise suspicions of paedophilia—especially now that many schools operate a strict no-touch policy. I recently visited my old school in Switzerland, a once noble building which, with all its new fences and barriers, now looks like a prison. What a time to be young!

So with the exception of handshakes and the occasional awkward ‘man hug’, men must forego touch, especially warm, intimate touch, simply to reassure everyone, and perhaps also themselves, that they are decent, manly men.

As they take their first steps out of the warm embrace of their parents, boys might try to meet their need for touch through rough interaction with other boys. Probably, that’s what all the punching at aforesaid school was about. As they grow older, they may, often out of sheer desperation, fumble into a relationship, putting all their physical needs into the hands of just one other young and inexperienced person.

This puts a lot of pressure on their partner and relationship, and reinforces the link, and ambiguation, between touch and sex. But the two are not the same. Our libido can be assuaged with our hand in a way that our craving for touch cannot: as every sex worker knows, many people who think they are hungry for sex are in fact hungry for skin. But it is possible to separate the two, even with people to whom we feel sexually attracted.

The Benefits of Touch

To undermine the taboos surrounding it, I’m going to build a positive case for touch.

Touch is the most primitive of all the senses. It is the first sense to develop in utero and is already present from just eight weeks of gestation. With a surface area, in adults, of around two square metres, our skin is the largest organ in our body.

In a controversial experiment of the 1950s, the psychologist Harry Harlow offered maternally deprived infant rhesus macaques a choice between two inanimate surrogate mothers made of wire and wood: one bare, and the other covered in cloth. The monkeys preferred the cloth-covered surrogate to the bare one, even when the bare one carried a bottle of food.

In 1994, the neurobiologist Mary Carlson, one of Harlow’s former students, travelled to Romania with the psychiatrist Felton Earls to study the effects of severe deprivation on the decretei children who, in the years of Ceausescu, had been abandoned to understaffed orphanages. Typical findings included muteness, blank facial expressions, social withdrawal, and bizarre stereotypic movements—behaviours very similar to those observed in socially deprived primates.

More recent studies have reinforced the developmental importance of childhood physical contact, which has been associated with, among others, better performance on cognitive and physical tests, a stronger immune system, and reduced aggression. All other things being equal, premature infants that receive a course of massage therapy gain a lot more weight and spend less time in hospital.

It is possible, quite literally, to ‘hug someone better’. In adults, the benefits of touch include: reducing stress, lifting mood and self-esteem, strengthening interpersonal bonds, improving cognitive function, and boosting immune function. These effects are mediated by hormonal changes, not least a reduction of the stress hormone cortisol and a surge in the ‘love hormone’ oxytocin. Seen in this light, the kiss on the forehead or the hurting part is much more than just a kiss.

The benefits of touch accrue to the giver as much as to the receiver, for it is impossible to touch without also being touched: people who give out ‘free hugs’ in public places are, of course, also having their hugs returned.

Even self-massage reduces stress levels, which helps explain why we are constantly touching ourselves: wringing our hands, rubbing our forehead, brushing our hair and scalp, stroking our neck and upper back, and so on. But as Peter Collins knew only too well, self-touch is not the same as the touch of another.

Compared to children, adults are less dependent on touch, but older adults, who tend to be more alone, more vulnerable, and more self-aware, are likely to need considerably more skin contact than their younger counterparts—which is why, sometimes, my elderly patients won’t let go of my hand. Therapy animals have become common in care homes, and, despite a lifetime of inhibitions, residents can be encouraged to hold hands or rub each other’s shoulders.

The Uses of Touch

Just as we use speech and gestures to communicate, so we use touch. Words can say, ‘I love you’, but touch can also say how and how much, and, at the same time, ‘I respect you’, ‘I need you’, and ‘thank you’. For a long time, scientists thought that touch served merely to emphasize a verbal message. But now it is clear even to them that touch can be the message, and that it can be more nuanced and sophisticated than either speech or gestures, and more economical to boot. What’s more, touch is a two-way street, and a person’s reaction to our touch can tell us much more than their words ever could. Finally, while words can lie, or be taken for granted, primal touch is much more difficult to ignore or discount. Lying to someone while holding their hand is psychopath territory.

No surprise, then, that touch can also serve to convince and motivate, so long, of course, as it is natural and appropriate.

One study found that two-thirds of women agreed to dance with a man who touched them on the arm while making the request; but when the man kept his hand by his side, his success rate fell by as much as half.

Students who, upon returning a book, had their hand brushed by the librarian reported higher levels of satisfaction with the library and life in general, even when the touch went unnoticed.

NBA teams with players who touched one another more, for instance, by high-fiving or hugging, went on to win more games, with the more tactile players performing best.

Pupils who had been touched by a teacher tended to participate more in class activities (shame about those no-touch policies); patrons who had been touched by a waitress tended to tip her more generously; shoppers who had been touched by a store greeter tended to spend more time in the store…

As a psychiatrist, I try to shake hands with all my patients and often use comforting touch in moments of distress—almost invariably to good effect. Touch relaxes the patient, makes her feel that she has been seen and heard, and builds a bond of trust. It makes her, and me, feel more human, and, as a result, I think, we remember each other.

In another essay, I argued that all love consists in reaching out beyond our own being towards those things that lend purpose, weight, and meaning to our lives. Touch is the physical expression of that reaching out, when the boundary between self and other ceases to separate and begins to connect. This explains why touch is taboo, and why we do not want to be touched by just anyone.

In Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, God and Adam reach out towards each other, their fingers separated by the smallest of gaps. Everything is contained in that space: separateness, yearning, anticipation, connection, and the very spark of life. It is, after all, through the most absolute touch that we all came to be.

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If you enjoyed this article, you might also look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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References

  • Peter Collins, Fly in the Ointment. Retrieved from http://www.solitarywatch.com. Posted on 13 July 2015.
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  • Carlson M and Earls F (1999): Psychological and endocrinological sequelae of early social deprivation in institutionalized children in Romania. Chapter in The Integrative Neurobiology of Affiliation, edited by Carol Sue Carter et al.
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