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A few years ago I organised a stag party for one of my best friends in Carlingford, a lovely Co Louth town in the shadow of the mountains. Carlingford was full of roving stag and hen parties. There were cowboys there. There were also Mexican banditos, robots, people wielding plastic penises, racially sensitive native American costumes, people wearing bunny ears and school uniforms. There was even a gaggle of Mick Hucknalls with ginger wigs.
It reminded me a bit of the cult 1970s movie The Warriors, in which likeable hoodlums must safely navigate a city full of colourfully themed gangs (clowns, rollerskaters, mimes, baseball players) who are trying to destroy them. (Nobody was trying to destroy us in Carlingford; everyone was very nice.)
Now, my group all thought that, like the heroes of The Warriors, we didn't have a theme. But we were mistaken. In a nightclub, many hen parties wanted to dance with us. I thought this was due to our idiosyncratic dance styles. Kevin, for example, knows all the words to Boney M's Rasputin as well as an accompanying dance, and Jeremy likes to strip to his vest and slap the floor with the palm of his hand.
But then a nice woman dressed as a sexy bunny – people are attracted to rabbits now – said, “I’ve never met a gay stag party before.” She had worked out our apparent gayness from the fact we were a mixed- gender stag. (Okay, the groom was also wearing a pink sash with “princess” written on it, but that’s beside the point of this anecdote.) Many of the groom’s best friends (all also my friends) were women, and it just seemed weird to leave them out. I’m not saying this is particularly odd or unusual, just that that it was considered odd and unusual that weekend in Carlingford.
My group of friends has always featured a mixture of men and women. I never had a quota system or anything. It just evolved that way. Since my teens I have never known any different. I have never gone out with “the lads” or joined in a drum circle in the middle of a forest or smeared the blood of a dead animal across my face while on a cross-Tundra hunting expedition with my male relatives.
Fierce exotic
My first female friendships were made in my mixed secondary school, where I initially thought that having friends who were girls was fierce exotic altogether. I waited patiently to be inculcated in the arcane secrets of the other gender. I am still waiting. It turns out that, although these girls were funny and into stuff I was into, they weren’t any more sophisticated or mature than my male friends. (They did smell a bit better.)
As my male friends’ hygiene improved, narrowing the gap between the genders, I learned that, for me, the most lasting friendships are based on shared interests and values and humour, not the possession of similarly shaped genitals.
I understand where the separatism comes from. For huge swathes of human history, it was difficult for men and women to have overlapping interests. Male hobbies included warfare, hunting large mammals and being the only people who could own property. Women’s interests lay in darning, near perpetual pregnancy and trying not to die in childbirth.
Women and men no longer seem so different. It really is no longer necessary for women to retreat after dinner to sew while men have brandy and cigars and discuss affairs of state. It is perfectly possible for men and women to like the same things.
Here are some interests I share with various female friends: the films of Steven Seagal (particularly late-period Seagal); books; drooling competitions (just slacken your jaw and resist your urge not to drool); comedy; compiling lists of imaginary self-help book titles; music; the behaviour of charismatic local dogs.
Some people cite When Harry Met Sally and insist that the spectre of romance hovers over every male-female friendship. Let me amaze them by welcoming them to the 21st century and pointing out that the same erotic promise lurks over same-sex friendships. (Yes, Geoff, Anto did hold your gaze for a bit longer than usual today.)
Sometimes friendships stop being platonic. Sometimes romance develops (give in to it, Geoff). That’s okay. It happens. It can be a very good thing. (I should probably mention that I fell in love with and married one of my female friends.)
Overall I don’t see much difference between the quality of my friendships with males and females. For some men, a female friendship can be a place to explore a sort of emotionally healthy, feelings-based relationship they perhaps don’t experience outside of a sexual context. Not me. My male friends won’t shut up about their feelings, and many of my female friends are basically thugs.
That’s not to say there is nothing to be learned from friends of the opposite gender. The world treats men and women differently, and this seems more unjust the more it affects people you care about. Ultimately these friendships have taught me that the answer to questions such as “What do women/men want?” and “What is she/he thinking?” is “More or less what you would want or think yourself in the same circumstances”.
Gender separatists
There are still people who think that men and women have nothing in common and that this is a natural, scientific fact borne out by phrenology and the scrutiny of Palaeolithic tribal settlements.
These hardcore gender separatists would prefer to spend their time fist-fighting with bears or flouncing around in a princess costume, only coming together to mate and conceive, like the deer in Phoenix Park.
For them, stag and hen parties are necessary rituals that precede a time when they must leave their “people” and enter the terrifying domain of the unknowable other. “Bye mother. Bye father. I must go with the ladypeople now,” I imagine them saying. More power to them. But I like spending time with both ladypeople and manpeople, and I just don’t find them to be that different from one other.
People in general are pretty interesting, really.
