Mars vs. Venus
A little over a year ago I was in Vegas, heading from my room at the Bellagio to the tournament area, when I was tapped on the shoulder. I turned around to find a young girl, with a giant foam penis on her head and a t-shirt with LifeSavers sewn onto it, who asked me if I had a condom. At first I thought that she should maybe reconsider her nuptials but as it turned out her bridal party had sent her on a scavenger hunt and she had to get one from a guy. I showed her where the poker room was and told her to look anywhere but there, unless she wanted to use the needle in a haystack approach, but that it would be a good place to sell some candy. I saw her leaving the tournament area maybe ten minutes later and sure enough she had no condom and no LifeSavers.
Seeing that made me wonder about two things. First, if it wasn’t for bachelorette parties would LifeSavers still exist? I can’t remember the last time I saw one that couldn’t be sucked off of a t-shirt for a dollar. When I was in elementary school they were our primary form of currency, like cigarettes in a penitentiary, and now they are nearly obsolete. Once somebody figures out how to stitch a Jolly Rancher in place they may go extinct. And second, why do women torture each other before they get married?
It seems like the bachelorette party is just an excuse for all of a bride’s unmarried friends to take out their frustrations over their own failure to find love on her. It’s a whole day devoted to embarrassing a woman as much as humanly possible. “Ok, Susan’s getting married, let’s make her wear a shirt that ensures every nasty guy in town will lick her torso, have her walk around in public sporting as many penis-shaped objects as we can possibly find, and then get the nastiest male stripper available to swing his cock in her face for half an hour. That’ll teach her.”
Men take the exact opposite approach. We figure the guy’s already signing up for a lifetime of torment, so we want to give him one last night of the craziness he’s promising never to enjoy again. If he wakes up the next morning and doesn’t think about how much he’s going to miss being single, we haven’t done a very good job. Movies often show the nervous groom with cold feet in the morning, who is suddenly rethinking his life strategy. What they don’t often show you is the party the night before that caused it.
At one bachelor party that I went to, rather than getting nasty girls to lick the groom, as females do, we went all around the bar and got every hot girl in the place to make out with him. One blogger I read was a best man and flew the groom and friends out to Vegas and paid some porn stars to do things I never even knew could be done without someone ending up in a hospital. He ended up spending a couple months worth of salary on things I won’t even describe here. That’s a friend.
And even the lowest-key bachelor parties, which I assume mine will be one of, are basically just a guy’s night out and are fun for everyone. I’ve never once heard of men spending an entire evening trying to embarrass the future groom. We just try to send him off with a bang, bad pun intended. Maybe that says a lot about how both sexes view marriage. Or maybe it just says that women are, at heart, truly sadistic and men are really the fairer sex. Either way I’m glad I’m on the LifeSaver eating side of the equation.
