05.17 | why act like it's a 'ball & chain' if you weren't forced to choose it?

✉️ letter #65

In my early 20s, confronted by tales of monetary woe as friends of mine attended bridal showers, bachelorettes, weddings etcetera that they could barely afford, I made a secret plea to the gods that be - let this be a very rare thing in my life, I wanted very little part of any of it.

Well, either my granted wish turned out to be a bit of a curse on all my friends - only a handful of them have gotten actual married - or I probably didn’t keep the secret very well that I found the whole matrimonial complex was a scam, and I just wasn’t really invited to many of them… but basically, for the most part, the only bridal showers, bachelorettes and weddings I’ve attended in the last decade have been that of relatives.

Now, my baby sister Jane is getting married. I’m kind of the de facto Maid of Honor. And with so little experience in modern marriage prep, I had to actually do research to understand what a Maid of Honor is expected to do these days.

One thing I kind of knew was my responsibility, was throwing the bachelorette party. That went off without a hitch last weekend in San Francisco. I’m proud to say I sparked the planning sessions that created the day, but the bulk of the work was done by my cousin and sister-in-law, Jane’s other two bridesmaids, who both actually live in the Bay Area.

🎼 the soundtrack | New World Coming - Cass Elliot

Like a good aunt, I flew in with gifts for their respective children. Like a piss poor Maid of Honor, I didn’t know we ought to be giving party gifts to each other. Oops!

Anyway, the day progressed so smoothly it shocked all of us. We got to each of our six (SIX!) stops with barely any rush - lucking out on seating, and on service, and even on parking at just about every stop we went to.

We celebrated Taiwanese snacking, we sipped spritzes to the Eurovision final, we got our nails done, we tried out trendy hot chocolate drinks, we gorged ourselves on elevated Hawaiian-Asian fusion cuisine (highly recommended: Liholiho Yacht Club), and we ended the night actually laughing as comedian Ronnie Chieng did standup.

And as each event unrolled, Jane exclaimed in audible relief that we weren’t incorporating penis memorabilia or embarrassing stranger molestation into the festivities. How nice it was to just have some wholesome fun.

Which is something I kept on wondering about as I was researching what to do for hen dos - why does the stereotypical agenda lean so hard into male genitalia? Why the general humiliation and debauchery for either side? From a cursory scour of the internet, it seems like it was a war of one-upmanship as women began doing what men did, and men tried to do it harder.

So apparently, the modern bachelor party got started sometime in post-war America - when a tradition of toasts to “boys growing up into men” by the groom’s father transformed instead into rowdy “last hurrah”-style nights out. It took until the 60s, with the sexual revolution in full swing, for women to push for their own “last hurrah.”

But if women were going out to giggle at good looking guys (by the 1970s, employing male strippers for “equality” was a recorded trend), then men had to go harder. Hence the sudden rise in sex comedies in the 1980s depicting insanely depraved nights out for grooms-to-be, a movie trope turned cultural staple. And if the grooms were getting insanely depraved nights out, brides deserve them too - in the 90s, the modern bachelorette party appeared, featuring drunk women wilding out and penises penises penises everywhere.

Ironically, there is no other time where the idea of a “last hurrah” has been less applicable. Most of us have had plenty of experience under our belts before we tie the knot, and it’s no longer that unusual to tie the knot more than once in our lives. If anything, couples ought to be celebrating the relief of having found someone they actually want to commit to in the too vast sea of choice we now find ourselves drowning in.

Which is probably why things have been shifting in a different direction for a while. Instead of one-upping each other on the salaciousness front, millennials (and, I'm assuming, the GenZ kids getting married somewhat early) are opting for "experiences" instead.

So we were on trend, I guess, by stringing together a bunch of lovely little experiences that valued togetherness over bawdiness. Compared to the very few non-family bachelorettes I have gone to that did get bawdy, I very much enjoyed this one a lot more.

🪢related threads

• In trend forecasting speak, "experiences" does also mean "expensive." Destination bachelor parties average $1,532 per person and bachelorette parties average $1,106 these days. Apparently Zillow's crunched the numbers to say that, yes, if you are being invited to too many destination bachelorettes, you are basically losing a down payment on a house. This is a silly use of your money if you were in fact saving up for a house. [GirlBoss]
• It’s the 50th anniversary of Mama Cass’ untimely passing at just 32, and an apt reminder of how important the body positivity movement has been (as well as why I’m picking a song of hers for this week’s soundtrack). Her weight was the punchline to her career, and even to her end - the myth being that she choked to death on a ham sandwich. It’s only now that we are reckoning with that legacy and rediscovering how amazing an artist she was. [New York Times]
• Another end of an amazing woman artist: The Nobel-winning short story writer Alice Munro passed away on Monday at 93-years-old, and I hope this is the impetus for you to think about and explore her ouvre, if you haven’t already. As said by Laura Miller, “Munro belonged to that handful of short story writers who never need to write a novel because they are capable of compressing the essence of an entire lifetime into a dozen pages.” [Slate]
• On the topic of book recommendations - Nature’s Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best recent science picks: Recycled sewage, public health and the memory of the world; oh my! [Nature]

✨enjoying: a piece of pop culture fun

Above, I noted that I was "actually laughing.” This is mostly because I've been pretty unlucky with standup experiences since coming back to the States.

Standup, even specials by comedians I know and like, seems to be going through some crisis phase right now - people are leaning so hard into personal confessionals that sometimes it feels like they’ve stopped writing jokes. Or, in the other direction, especially with “ethnic comedy,” you’ll often find people leaning really hard just into shared references, where all the punchlines turn into variations on “we all grew up with this, am I right?”

So it was nice to go out to watch a Chinese Malaysian guy on a big stage and actually hear a bunch of jokes. And it was a bonus that those jokes were actually astute, clever and funny.

Interestingly enough, it seems like I was the only person of our crew (and of several people I talked to) who had seen Ronnie Chieng’s work outside of his appearances on the Daily Show and in various Asian-American movie cameos. So that’s my pick for today. Watch this:

🗨️a final quote

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
-- Alice Munro

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