Originally published in The Clifton Courier, April 26, 2017

My friends and I are planning on holding our second Fake Hen’s Weekend.

For those of you lucky enough to be past the age where every second friend of yours is having getting married, hens parties aren’t what they used to be.

They used to be trashy nights out during which the bride to be wears flammable accessories and a group of normally-respectable women sip drinks so strong they’re just a notch below metho out of phallic straws. This gaggle of 15 or so sloshy women would drag themselves from bar to bar and ruin every other patron’s night by screaming “sheeeeez gettin’ marrieeeeeeed” into the faces of strangers after demanding they buy the group a round of errotically-named shots.

And while those events are not yet totally extinct, the hens party has evolved over the past decade.

Now, hens parties go for entire weekends. They are destination getaways in small coastal towns or somewhere in hilly wine country. They are three-day events. They tend to involve more antipasto platters. And they tend to steer clear from the trashier aspects of women partying together.

They’re fancy as fuck (even if most of the guests usually aren’t so fancy). Participants expect more, and we’re often so bored in our own mundane existences that they’re also more than willing to shell out more. Standards are high.

It’s true. Someone I know went to a hens party recently where a lass, most unimpressed at the quality of her salami exclaimed, “I know fine meats, and this is NOT fine meat”.

Yep, the cubes of Bega and sliced kabana of our youth is no longer going to cut it.

Perhaps this has something to do with the rise of Instagram and the tendency for everyday nobodies to cultivate carefully-constructed personal brands on social media who don’t want to be shamed by being photographed wearing a cheap polyester pink sash with a fruit tingle in their hand.* Perhaps it’s because females tend to have more disposable income and less family obligations in their late 20s then generations before. Or perhaps it’s because we’ve finally realised how fabulous a big wheel of brie really is.

* Yeah, I’m aware of how long that sentence is. I don’t bloody care. You don’t come to this blog expecting something short, sharp and succinct. It’s not my jam. Even when I “cut a long story short” my stories still end up as long rambling messes. 

Don’t get me wrong, the plastic odes to the male anatomy still make an appearance, but that’s no longer the main event. And at my last hens party, the entire group was sorely disappointed when the stripper was actually trying to be sexy instead of being the Harry Potter impersonator like we actually ordered.  

I can’t speak for every hens party in south east Queensland, but the ones me, my sisters and my friends go to are more like the slumber party marathons we used to have as schoolgirls, only with waaaaay more vodka.

And while we probably do spend far too much on dips than we reasonably should be in this current financial climate (I live in Sydney, so I’m all too aware of the high cost of living), the time we’re forced to spend together is the real drawcard of the hens weekend.

Because when you rent a holiday house with less than a dozen close mates far away from your homes, you don’t have the option of heading after one night. You don’t have the proximity to partners, or other obligations, to distract you. All you can do is spend time with the people around you. And this takes us all back to when we were kids and we could just get ourselves around each other.

This results in way more burps than would be usually projected publicly, mooning strangers off yachts, frank admissions of our most appalling secrets and the overall feeling of being connected to other human beings. And because we are a bunch of gross, over-sharing sickos, me and my little posse bloody love the hens party.

So we’ve started having hens parties when there is no hen. Because we don’t think we should have to wait until someone proposes to one of us to have a three-day slumber party. As lovely as it is when it actually happens, we don’t need a fellow to decide one of us is good enough to marry to get together.

Which is probably a good thing, because if you saw the way we acted on a hens weekend – fake or not – you would see it would take a very special man to marry one of us.