I am not sure that anthropological parallels are helpful
When stag nights go wrong: Now, stag dos are a ritual of male friendship. “The stag passes from unmarried man to married man. The cultural urge to mark that transition causes all the hedonistic and ostentatious behaviour you see on stag weekends.
I would find this a more compelling argument if I didn't suspect that in many cases, the intending groom has already been living with his intended bride for a significant length of time and indeed they may even already have offspring, this being the twenty-first century. This is so very much not the major life-change that it might have been in earlier eras.
Though I think also of how very elaborate and ritualised weddings have become in an epoch when marriage is no longer as enduring monolithic and central an institution as it heretofore was, and the curious relationship between this somewhat excessive performativity and the relative decline of the meaning of the ceremony itself.
Possibly it might be more interesting to look at these as modern phenomena...?
Also I am not entirely persuaded by the invocation of 'rites de passage' when talking about modern masculinity, as in this piece by Tim Winton in which he mourns that We’ve scraped our culture bare of ritual pathways to adulthood (and dates that back to the 60s: really?).
Quite apart from the primitivist nostalgia that tends to be embedded in the notion, isn't it trying to turn something that is a continuing process into a once-and-done thing?
However, reading that stag party article, and the ridiculous and dangerous things that men in all-male groups ended up doing, having just come across something about male supremacists, I was given to feel some slight optimism that the latter just possibly might end up being primarily concerned about proving who was the alphaest of alpha males, with, perchance, Darwin Award-style results - that there's a significant element of posturing between men involved. Maybe? This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2749515.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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