Cold plunges and hot yoga. Meditation sessions and mindful crafting. While mere mention of these activities is generally enough to strike fear in my heart, I’m normally content to just avoid them. But as wellness-mania encroaches onto the previously purely feral territory of hen-dos, I can keep silent no longer. Keep your well-manicured hands off our shots and 2am kebabs, or else… and we all know who would win in a fight between a vodka’d up bridesmaid in a tacky sash and a Pilates princess.
In the not-so-distant past, hen-dos were an opportunity for a bride and her entourage to let loose. Think ill-advised cocktails, stumbling out of clubs, bedecked (bedicked?) in penis-shaped everything, from straws to confetti. Basically, the brief was to behave terribly in the name of having a lovely time – one’s hen-do was never their finest moment, but that was sort of the point.
No longer. More scandalous to my mind than any X-rated party game, is the rise of the “zen-do”, wherein time-honoured hedonism has been replaced by healthfulness, bars for barre classes, and, as far as I can tell, pleasure for punishing puritanism.
Things have gotten so bad that, according to a recent survey by wedding planning site Hitched, only eight per cent of brides today want a classic party vibe for their send off, with the rest preferring spa days or cosy crafting followed by a sensible dinner and presumably being tucked up in bed in time for Newsnight.
When did we all become so bloody well behaved? Most infuriating of all, the trend seems to play along weddings’ already hyper-gendered lines. I can’t help but notice there is not a similar rise in sauna stag-dos, or groomsmen swapping sambuca shots for ginger ones. You would think that the pressure on a bride to look perfect at her wedding would mean the run up to it already involved plenty of beauty sleep and treatments without cramming more into the hen-do – depressingly, apparently not.
This is by no means an uncompromising defence of hens as they have been. As someone who is allergic to both organised fun and fancy dress, there’s a lot that I don’t like about the traditional model. Over the years, hen-do creep means it has become de rigueur to plan a bash spanning multiple days and costing hundreds of pounds per person – something that should be recognised as the huge ask it is, rather than run of the mill.
square LUCY MANGAN
Hen dos in your forties are just indecent
Read MoreThe gender divide isn’t my favourite either – if I know and love both halves of a couple, I end up feeling like half the party is missing without the groom there to celebrate too. But for all its faults, this rite of passage shouldn’t be underestimated. Blowing off steam is important at the best of times, but there’s arguably no more transgressive moment for a heterosexual woman to behave badly than when she’s getting married.
Straight weddings often see us shelve decades of feminist progress in the name of tradition, harking back to a time when marriage was an economic arrangement between two people, rather than a celebration of them loving each other. Of course, getting married today needn’t signal complicity with the institution’s past – nonetheless, I think it’s important to recognise its remnants, because they linger, insidious.
Asking the father of the bride for his daughter’s hand and to “give her away” on the day; women feverishly dieting and wearing virginal white before taking their husband’s last name; all of these are still totally normal in 2025, even if the ideas underpinning them would make us retch in any other context.
As such, a night (or weekend) of being loud, raucous and stupid is the ideal antidote to all that pressure to be perfect and pure. If we must sit politely through a ceremony dripping with paternalistic hangovers, let’s precede it with some fun ones of our own, shall we?
A juice cleanse or exercise class might be done in the name of healthiness or self-care, but it also makes you smaller, more palatable, in a power structure designed to usher its women in precisely those directions. The average wedding is sexist and infantilising enough without turning hens into diligent fitness club attendees who head to bed at 9pm like good little girls. In an already problematic landscape, nixing hen-dos’ role as bastions of female rebellion would be a tragedy.
Take our matching outfits, our ice-breaker games, our karaoke (no, really, please, I hate those bits). But you can pry hen-do hedonism from my cold, drunk hands. What is bad for your body can be very, very good for your soul, especially when it’s preparing to take on patriarchy’s most stubborn ghosts in front of everyone you’ve ever met. Pass the penis-coladas.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( My hen-do era is over – wellness has killed the fun )
Also on site :
- Rock Legend Shares Bold Message About L.A. Protests
- Tony Awards draw best audience in 6 years for CBS
- ‘Mormon Wives’ Star Taylor Frankie Paul Posts About ‘Betrayal’ Ahead of Season 2, Part 2 Drop