his say: bucking the trend
POSTED 11.01.2010 @ 16:16
Right, I have been charged with organising Pete’s bucks’ party. Send me your most debauched and depraved ideas. We’re going to DESTROY and HUMILIATE him!!! By the time we’ve finished with him, he’ll be missing his eyebrows, his anal hymen
and his dignity for life.”
This is a direct quote from a round robin email I received recently – only the name is different. I have always considered the sender to be 12 types of tosser. With this email, he made it 13.
Now, obviously most of this is bravado, designed to make the stag nervous. (It worked.) But it also reveals what happens to some blokes when you flick the switch in his brain that says “bucks’ party”. He turns into the evil
twin version of himself.
I’m probably going to get lynched for revealing this, but here is the awkward truth: when he goes to a bucks’ party, your boyfriend or husband is not the man you think you know. Everything that he suppresses when he’s with you, when he’s at work – when he is a normal, functioning member of civil society – is released.
“No, not my man,” you might be thinking. Yes, your man. That’s not to say he turns into a NRL player on tour. In the vast majority of cases, it’s all harmless fun – just normal blokes letting off a little steam. But nevertheless, if you saw the CCTV footage, you probably wouldn’t be happy.
I’ve been on about 15 bucks’ parties in my time. The vast majority of these have involved extreme drunkenness; about half have involved strippers; one resulted in an arrest for indecent exposure; another in a hefty fine for trashing a hotel room (and that was the buck’s dad).
I can honestly say that my own bucks’ do was one of the best weekends of my life (apart from the bit where I had to wear a matador’s outfit and stage a bullfight with some local cattle and a small child actually threw bull shit at me). That aside, I was made a fuss of, not a fool of. It was pitched perfectly: a happy mixture of the feral and the refined, and we pretty much drank the Hunter Valley dry.
Sam’s hens’ night sounded more debauched. They had strippers. I made it clear to my best man that I didn’t want any strippers. Why? Because I find anything more than a basic lap dance to be acutely embarrassing. But more so because the presence of a stripper can sometimes turn a good group of mates into a pack of disrespectful wild animals, like something out of Lord of the Flies. And I don’t like myself when that happens. But any regret or disgust must remain undiscussed for fear of breaking the first rule of bucks’ club: “what happens on buck’s night stays on buck’s night…”
For guys, the impending marriage of a mate is often just an excuse for a massive weekend without the pacifying influence of women. For the buck, it is either the final fling before the ring or a necessary evil to be endured.
Having been on a few of these shindigs now, I’ve begun to spot some behavioural patterns. Lawyers and bankers and guys who work long hours in macho, stressful jobs and earn more money than they have time to spend, tend to be at the centre of any shenanigans. Their free time is precious and they tend to try and play as hard as they work.
But guess who the real ringleaders are, cracking the whip (sometimes literally) when it comes to debauchery? The younger, single guys, right? Wrong. In my experience, it is normally the older guys who are married with kids. The ones who rarely get a free pass. The ones who crave a bit of time with the boys and who are determined to make the most of it when an occasion like a bucks’ party presents such an opportunity. The guy that sent the above email? Spends most weekends pushing a pram while being told what to do by his
overbearing wife. Go figure.
So how do you stop your man turning into his evil twin? You can lay down some basic ground rules by all means – such as no physical contact with the opposite sex. But if you want my advice, let him go on the odd boys’ weekend every so often, because if you keep him on too tight a leash, he will be straining to break away.
Think of it like human avalanche management. A controlled, small release every so often will prevent the huge disaster from building up. Give him a bit more freedom to have a boys’ night every now and then and he’ll be less likely to go wild when he is finally cut free.