Here comes the battery hen...

Narrow and I have to go to a buck's and a hen's night, respectively. We are TERRIFIED.

I don't understand the purpose of buck's and hen's nights. The etymology even offends me. The connotation being that while the man is a free roaming wild creature, virile, powerful and independent, the woman is a clucking, broody, fat little thing stupidly running around in circles, scratching in the dirt and building up her nest to lay her many eggs.

A hen's night is a celebration of the things a hen represents: fertility, dependence, the catching of a man with your tiny malicious talons. A stag night is the mourning of the loss of all the things a man is supposed to want: wildness, freedom, ceaseless rutting of any and all things with tails.

Aside from the names, then there's the actual activities these nights entail. The female party celebrates the impending marriage with rituals of sympathetic magic: the construction of wedding dresses from toilet paper by the bridesmaids (to bring about weddings for the unmarried girls), the sculpting of plastic phalluses (beseeching the gods to endow the groom with rigidity and largesse), and the pinning while blindfolded of the penis onto the poster of the naked man, a ritual to bless the bride with seductive arts in the bedroom. And all the while, huge quantities of strawberry daquiri must be imbibed, to sustain the illusion that what they're doing is sexy and fearless, rather than sad and unimaginative.

In the meantime, the groom's friends must try their utmost to steer him from the path of self destruction he has taken. The method is quite simple - parade in front of him the many wonders he will no longer know once he is married: never-ending geysers of beer and Jagermeister, bars full of roaring drunk men, and of course a naked woman.

Under no circumstances should the two groups meet, regardless of the many other nights which they may have enjoyed as a co-ed group. If they did, the mutual disgust each group would feel for the behaviour of the other would result in an instant break of the union, and those of any other couples therein, a kink in the space-time continuum which would change the pattern of history.

That the happy couple must be divided in order to enjoy the evening, and that there is an air of mourning around the male celebration, and one of self-conscious raunch around the female one, is really just sad. To me, the upshot of feminism should have been that men and women would view each other not as adversaries but as friends, as essentially the same and equal. Instead, after nominal equality was gained, it all went right back to where it started.

Only now, instead of being fetishised by men, we fetishise ourselves. By participating in these outmoded rituals we only entrench the idea that women are worthless if they aren't sexy, and that men are deeply different and apart (although not necessarily superior). Why the hell would you want a stripper at your buck's night? You are going to be LIVING with a woman, who will be naked at least twice a day, for the rest of your life! It's particularly pointless these days, where most likely you've already been living with that woman for years.

The same goes for the hens - dicking around with plastic penises as if you've never seen one in your LIFE and it's so HILARIOUS because it's so NAUGHTY to play with genitalia! Go find me a pack of pink straws shaped like vaginas and I'll tell you that we're on an equal footing. Although I'll grant you they're less conveniently designed for ease of drinking.

Not to mention that if you're a couple with an engaged pair as friends, you BOTH have to go to these nights, or even whole weekends, and it costs a FORTUNE. We're going to end up in the poorhouse, and we're not even going to enjoy ourselves on the way.