by Siri Agrell
The other close encounter of the lurid kind came during a road trip to the city for a friend’s birthday. We went to a male strip club after taking in a performance of Les Miserables, a unique blend of high culture and low—Jean Valjean with a chaser of Lance Stallion.
Inside the club, groups of chain-smoking middle-aged women occupied a cluster of small, dirty tables, and our group of rowdy twentysomethings was ushered into a corner beside the bar and instructed to remain behind a wooden partition that separated us from the stage. We drank vodka and sodas inside our holding pen and laughed as a steroid-riddled dancer in a hot pink G-string shook his manhood in the birthday girl’s face; both of her hands were plastered firmly over her eyes. Onstage, a stripper was gyrating inside a glass stall, and women paid to go up and hose him down with a shower nozzle. At one point he flipped himself upside down, the force of gravity overpowering his own obvious excitement. Needless to say, once you’ve seen a naked man doing a handstand, the desire to hire a stripper never returns.
Our friend’s country weekend retreat, therefore, involved no men at all, save those on the pages of the trashy magazines we read poolside during the day. This relaxed, raunch-free take on the bachelorette party is definitely not the norm. Most women believe they are meant to live up to the mythical standard of the male stag party, the much talked-about (but rarely realized) evening of hot nudity, flowing booze, and rock-star partying. In the 1985 Tom Hanks film Bachelor Party, a friend of the shaggy-haired pre-Philadelphia, post-Bosom Buddies Hanks requests an event filled with “chicks and guns and fire trucks and hookers and booze! All the things that make life worth living.” Despite the fact that Hanks’s evening also involved sex with prostitutes and a donkey overdosing on cocaine and pills, this is the model women strive to achieve (usually minus the guns and whores).
According to Bachelorette.com, only about 20 percent of bachelorette parties hire a stripper, but if the events are organized around the things that make women’s lives worth living, then our gender is seemingly all about stretch limos, blender drinks, tiaras, inappropriately shaped pasta, and LifeSavers candy. And it has fallen to the bridesmaids to transform their love-struck single girl into a raging veil-clad hootchie clutching a penis-shaped straw in her sweaty hands.
Half-Cocked
Unlike men, most women do not get sexually aroused by watching the opposite sex perform a striptease. Some people say this is because we are turned on by nonvisual stimulants, such as conversation, emotional connection, and money. I believe there is a less cerebral explanation: many male strippers are distinctly unattractive, and the proximity to swinging male genitalia is enough to make even the straightest girl rethink her own sexual preference.
When she was a twenty-four-year-old bridesmaid virgin, Kaitlyn P. invited a stripper to perform at the apartment she shared with her mother, the most liberal of the bridesmaids’ parents. None of the girls had her own place at the time, and there were no male strip clubs in the city where the bridal party lived, which is unfortunate, because going to the strip club is always preferable to bringing the strip club to you.
Still, since Kaitlyn’s friend had been raised by her Catholic family to have a healthy fear of alcohol and adult situations to begin with, her bridal party agreed that she would be adequately traumatized by a private showing.
Despite her modest tastes, the blushing bride did have one major vice: police officers. The fact that she is aroused by men who can punish her probably has a lot to do with her religions attitude toward sex, but her friends left the psychoanalysis at home and just gave the girl what she wanted. The bridesmaids found themselves thumbing through the phone book, looking for Hot Man Action in between ads for Hotels and Housing Inspectors. Kaitlyn found a company that offered male dancers in a variety of costumes—from cop to robber—but that strangely also hired out birthday party entertainment and magicians. She momentarily considered hiring a clown to make X-rated balloon art, but ended up settling for Officer Steve.
The theme of the bachelorette evening was “Cougar Lounge Party,” the apartment decorated with leopard-print pillows and magenta streamers, and the guests dressed up like the cast of Charlies Angels after two decades of drug abuse and bad relationships. The bridal party had invited The Bride early to lubricate her with alcohol, but she arrived only half an hour before “the talent” was scheduled to show, and Kaitlyn worried that she “couldn’t get her to knock enough back to thoroughly enjoy the experience.”
The Bride was still in the dark about the night’s surprise attraction, so the friends sat around in their tight pants and bustiers making polite conversation, as though gathered for an innocent yet strangely themed potluck dinner. Kaitlyn and the other bridesmaids were silently draining shots of vodka when there was a knock at the door. Although they weren’t actually playing music, a man’s voice identified himself as a police officer and informed them that there had been several “noise complaints,” his bellows ringing through the deathly quiet apartment. The Bride was dispatched to open the door, where she found a middle-aged man in a police uniform standing in the hall. She dutifully led the stripper into the apartment, where the wedding party watched as he set up his oversized ghetto blaster and rearranged the furniture.
“It was awkwardly quiet,” Kaitlyn said. “We just sat there and stared at him.”
Officer Steve was in his early forties, Kaitlyn guessed, at least fifteen years older than the women for whom he was stripping and only moderately younger than the host’s mother, who was watching the proceedings with a look of disgust from her seat at the dining room table.
“He looked like something off a soap opera, like Bo on Days of Our Lives,” said Kaitlyn. “He was very chiseled and he seemed very uncomfortable.”
Eventually, The Bride was handcuffed to a chair in the middle of the room and Officer Steve began grinding his body against her to the soothing beats of Rick Astley emanating from his ghetto blaster. Suddenly, much to the Bride’s terror, he tore off his police uniform, exposing a large orange G-string, which hit the floor a few seconds later.
“We weren’t really prepared for the horror of it,” said Kaitlyn, “and how raunchy it was going to be. He took everything off and got right up in it.” The host herself continued drinking heavily, reasoning that if no one was having a good time, at least she wouldn’t remember it in the morning.
The Bride remained a good sport, but the rest of the party sat in shocked silence, unwilling witnesses to middle-aged nudity. To make matters worse, the air-conditioning was on the fritz and the apartment was sweltering, causing beads of sweat to form on parts of the male anatomy that are unattractive even when dry. After dancing (if you could call it that) to just two songs on his outdated mix tape—a performance that lasted less than ten minutes—Officer Steve abruptly ended the show and walked into a corner of the living room to put his uniform back on. Unsure of the proper etiquette in such a situation, the ladies offered him dinner, and he picked over the plates of salad, cheese, and vegetarian lasagne that littered the table.
An obviously tipsy Kaitlyn collected $150 from her friends and escorted Officer Steve back out into the hallway to pay him and send him on his crime-fighting and ass-shaking way. He handed her his business card, a small headshot lifted from one of those charity calendars, and commented appraisingly on the tight purple velvet pants she was wearing. Then, perhaps in an effort to regain a degree of his dignity, the stripper lifted Kaitlyn up and enveloped her with a big wet kiss.
“He just started mauling me outside the door,” she remembered.
As luck would have it, at that very moment The Bride’s two Catholic sisters emerged from an elevator down the hall to see their host in the grip of a middle-aged cop, his uniform disheveled and a boom box resting at his feet. When The Bride found out that her best friend had swapped spit with a stripper, she proceeded to drink so much that she blacked out.
“I think she was just stunned,” Kaitlyn said of her friend’s response to the bachelorette p
arty. “We never spoke about it ever again.”
Fully Cocked
Seeing an older man take it all off is probably not as permanently damaging as imagining a family member naked—at least for most people.
Mary Beth K. attended a bachelorette party where the groom’s sister, a fellow bridesmaid, had come up with a disturbing game for the women to play. It was a take on the childhood favorite Pin the Tail on the Donkey, only in this case, the donkey was the groom and the “tail” wasn’t pinned to his bum. It wasn’t a tail, either.
The groom’s sister had found a picture of her betrothed brother buck naked, taken to memorialize a nasty sunburn he had endured on a family vacation. In the photo, he was covering himself with one hand while holding the other to his mouth in a gesture of mock surprise. She had it blown up to almost life-size, and instructed the female guests—including the Mother of the Bride—to draw a penis on a sheet of scrap paper and cut it out with scissors before the game began.
“I thought it was kind of gross,” said Mary Beth, “but we did it anyway.”
The bride’s mother, who is divorced and obviously does not have the most optimistic view of men, drew “the smallest penis you’ve ever seen,” according to Mary Beth, much to the delight of the other guests and the potential trauma of her daughter. The groom’s sister, however, had a more generous outlook on her family jewels.
“The sister drew a big one,” she said. “It was really bizarre.”
Live Rude Girls
Bachelorette parties, like their human equivalent Paris Hilton, are a child of the 1980s. According to Beth Montemurro, who studies the phenomenon in her book Something Old, Something Bold, the events were first mentioned in an academic paper written in 1985 by a woman researching female attendance at strip clubs. The first newspaper article to report on the parties appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times in 1988, penned by none other than Richard Roeper, he of the eagerly administered thumbs-up. His article, which ran under the headline HEY, BACHELORETTES CAN ACT SLEAZY, TOO, related stories of women drinking excessively, partaking in frank discussions of sex, and being entertained by strippers—and one assumes he gave the trend an enthusiastic review.
The parties may not be steeped in history or dignity, but they have become a required rite of passage for women and another mandatory event planned by busy bridesmaids. Men may be able to head out on the town with nothing but a dime bag and a wallet full of five-dollar bills, but women must plan the ultimate Girls’ Night Out.
Sylvanna N. attended a bachelorette party for her best friend that was an expensive, classy, and formally attired night on the town—exactly the opposite of what The Bride had requested. The event was the brainchild of Gayle, a Bad Bridesmaid in the evil sense of the term, who ignored The Brides preference for Kentucky Fried Chicken and dive bars and planned the evening to reflect her own highly refined tastes.
Sylvanna and the other guests were invited to a hotel, where they would be spending the night post-festivities. The boutique establishment was highly modern, coldly designed, and populated by guests who probably believed that White Castle is the name of Diddy’s Hamptons estate. Sylvanna walked into the stark, minimalist lobby and was greeted by an austere receptionist wearing an outfit that she estimates had the same dollar value as her own monthly mortgage payments. After registering, the bridesmaid was led through three different checkpoints, where her ID was scrutinized and her room keycard swiped.
“I haven’t had to deal with this level of security at the airport,” she said.
When she walked into the room, Sylvanna saw rugs, sheets, tables, chairs, and even curtains of a blinding shade of virginal white. Just the kind of place where you want to get good and loaded on red wine.
Gayle, on the other hand, gushed over the “tasteful, elegant” decor and scurried around the room inspecting the white accoutrements as the rest of the bridal party searched their handbags for shades. The Bride showed up a few minutes later looking irate. “I practically had to go through a strip search down there!” she told her friends.
After a few warm-up cocktails, the women headed out on the town, bypassing the sleazy bar The Bride had wanted to visit and instead lining up outside a pick-up joint for the rich and available.
“The entire evening Gayle approached various good-looking, well-dressed young men—not, of course, before deciding whether or not they ‘looked rich,’” Sylvanna remembered. The bachelor-ette party the Bad Bridesmaid had planned was not a chance for The Bride to sow her wild oats, but rather an intricate ruse for Gayle to score herself a man. The other bridesmaids encouraged her in her cruising, buying her drink after drink and sending her off after eligible bachelors as they plotted their escape.
“She proceeded to get completely wasted and tell everyone in the bar that she was looking to get married, that she wanted to be rich, and that she came from money, so they would be lucky to get her,” Sylvanna remembered.
Finally, Gayle was so drunk that the rest of the party had to take her back to the hotel, depositing her unconscious frame on the white bed that they hoped she would befoul in an unclassy way.
“Then we left her and went to the townie bar and the strip club,” Sylvanna said, “just like the bride wanted.”
Of course, not every engaged woman wants a simple party with her friends. Creative (and wealthy) bridesmaids may elect to plan the ultimate girls’ getaway, spending thousands on limousines, caterers, private clubs, and matching outfits for themselves and the bride. And why stop there? Destination bachelorette parties have become popular recently, and bridal groups are as common a sight in Vegas as Midwesterners on vacation from morality.
Inga S. and the rest of the bridal party took their friend on a surprise weekend trip to Las Vegas for her bachelorette weekend, but they were unprepared for post-9/11 security issues. They had booked the airfare and reserved a hotel suite, and on a warm summer Friday afternoon they put their plan into action. The bridesmaids had not even told The Bride’s fiance where they were headed because they wanted to catch her completely off guard. It tuned out their plan worked a little bit too well.
As their friend left work they grabbed her, blindfolded her with a stylish silk scarf, and shoved her in a taxi-van to go to the airport. They had packed a bag of her things so she wouldn’t have to go home, and cranked up the music in the cab so she wouldn’t be able to hear the sounds of traffic or the white noise of the airport and figure out what was up.
Understandably, perhaps, The Bride began to get nervous. ‘She starts panicking because she thinks we’re going to leave her somewhere,” Inga said. The women tried to calm her down without completely ruining the surprise they had so carefully planned, reassuring her that they were not going to take her to the woods and leave her for dead. When they arrived at the airport and successfully made their way to the check-in counter, an airline employee noticed that the blindfolded girl was somewhat distraught and refused to check her in or let her on the plane until she was thoroughly interrogated by security personnel.
“I have to know that she wants to be a part of this,” the employee explained, with the tone of a woman who just does not get paid enough to deal with this shit.
Luckily, The Bride recovered her poise before she was forced to endure a full body-cavity search.
Pole-r Opposites
The bride can refuse to partake in her forced kidnapping or to do body shots off a nubile bartender, but bridesmaids must throw themselves into the event with abandon, whether that involves a last-minute plane ride or a pricey bar tab.
Ella H. declined an invitation to her friend’s bachelorette party because she was low on funds and doesn’t drink, thinking that the combo would make her a bit of a buzz-kill on a night of debauchery. One bridesmaid suggested that she just come for the first hour and say hello to The Bride, to avoid hurting her feelings. Ella agreed and took a cab to meet the bachelorette party at one of the many bars they visited over the course of the night. She stayed for less than an hour and
drank a soda while the other girls tossed back shooters and swilled cocktails.
A few days later, another bridesmaid called Ella and instructed her to “pay up” for her share of the evening. The woman claimed she owed 15 percent of the total cost of alcohol, food, bar cover charges, hotel room, and limo. Ella protested, but her logic was met with a hostile rebuttal.
“She said, ‘If you show up, you pay up!’” the bridesmaid recalled. “So I did.”
Thirty-two-year-old two-time bridesmaid Hailey P., meanwhile, got in trouble with her friend The Bride after she resisted a bachelorette party plan to take a pole-dancing class. The outing involves a group of women learning how to swing around a metal stripper pole, courtesy of a private instructor. Considered a challenging workout by celebrities and crack whores alike, stripping is an increasingly popular bachelorette party activity. But Hailey, a mother of two who has mounted only one pole in her life, was not comfortable with the idea of unleashing her inner Demi Moore.
“I think of the connotations of pole dancing and I’m like, yuck, gross me out,” said Hailey. “You’re just grinding up against a giant phallic object.”
The rest of the frisky bridesmaids were dead set on pole dancing, as was The Bride, and they were unmoved by Hailey’s objections. If a bridesmaid is asked to swing around a greasy pole, she is expected to reply, “How high?”