Dear Sasha, As the youngest person in my sister-in-law’s upcoming Vegas wedding, I got blasted by her maid-of-honour for “not knowing any better” than to allow my husband to go to a strip club for the bachelor party. Apparently, all the other women in the wedding, except my sister-in-law, were planning to “show a united front” and keep the men from seeing any flesh not their own. I’m not a rebel, but the last thing I expected was every single one of these 30-something women to be freaked out at the thought of their husbands seeing someone else’s tits.
I recently immigrated to Florida from Canada and these chicks are actually trying to blame my “liberal Canadian upbringing” for not knowing any better. I even half-jokingly suggested we go to a strip club so she could see what went on but the idea terrified her. Then I made the mistake of adding, “Besides, you said we were taking M. to a Chippendale’s for her bachelorette, right? That’s way worse.”
I think the pot is calling the kettle black here if she wants to have some oiled-up stranger waggling something in her face while all her husband can do is sit around in his hotel room and think about Maxim and divorce. She says I’m wrong and that her party at Chippendale’s will be completely innocent, and besides, male strippers are tame.
—No Witty Nickname to Be Had, Sadly
Dear Witty,
Pretty much everything about this situation is fucking ridiculous (it’s true, a liberal upbringing, which all Canadians get, makes a person more ignorant), but in my opinion, the most obnoxious thing is the way this group of women is downplaying the complexity of feminine desire as a means of making the equivalent seem all the more deplorable in their menfolk. Do they really think they’re helping themselves in any greater sense by pandering to the idea that female sexual expression and the services geared towards it are trivial and non-threatening while male sexual expression and its analogous rituals are authentic and therefore require constant policing?
Now admittedly, this is the genius behind an operation like Chippendales—the understanding that this kind of denial is crucial for many women to indulge—but even if the maid-of-honour’s intention is truly innocent fun (whatever that means in a roomful of naked men) it doesn’t stop the exchange from having sexist, condescending overtones. And yet that doesn’t bother her. What a surprise.
As you yourself point out, even in their most sanitized states, these places can be outrageous. If one of the points of argument is that female strippers have looser boundaries than male ones, rest assured, this is a weak case. I don’t know a lot of straight male strippers, but every one I do know (along with a couple of the queers) has fucked a fiancée and a bridesmaid or two. It seems an informal right of passage in their profession and one that is effortlessly facilitated by the calculated blamelessness that’s already being spouted by your bridal party—groupthink which is only five frozen daiquiris away from being, “We didn’t meeeaaaaan to, we just came in here for a girls’ night out, but the next thing we knew, Tammy was blowing Gunner in the limo! We couldn’t help it!”
Here’s another piece of news that might be displeasing to your two-faced abolitionists: there are ways of dealing with unreasonable spousal boundaries without leaving a Las Vegas hotel room. Have you seen the colourful business cards with ladies in bikinis offering companionship littering the parking lots of the casinos? They belong to prostitutes who, while your shitfaced bride-to-be is getting teabagged on a smoke-filled catwalk, will be more than happy to come up and blow every single one of your hubbies (or spank them with a rolled up Maxim magazine if they so desire) and none of you will be the wiser.
This is a comparably cost-effective solution too, as there are no champagne room fees and overpriced drinks to worry about. Bottom line? Don’t get married if you can’t handle the occasional controversy and if you do, don’t get a self-deceptive control freak that is obviously no longer putting out to organize your bachelorette.
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