Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn’t, they’d be married too. – H. L. Mencken
June is named for Juno, the Roman goddess of marriage, and so the Romans considered her month to be a particularly propitious one in which to marry. And just as in so many other cases I’ve discussed in my various holiday columns, the pagan tradition continued into Christian times despite its original reason being lost. Because weddings are more common in June so are bachelor parties, and since more bachelor parties means more employment for sex workers June was generally the last good month before the summer doldrums for the ladies of New Orleans.
I knew a number of girls who didn’t have the nerve to do such shows alone; though a timid whore is rarely a successful one, the idea of being the only naked woman in a room with a dozen fully-dressed guys is just too much even for most escorts. But it never bothered me; I recognized that as long as I kept to the better hotels and listened to my gut, I could manipulate the group dynamic to protect me just as easily (if not more so) as an evil leader could manipulate it to precipitate a gang rape. As long as a woman shows herself to be a real person, the “never hurt a girl” training kicks in and guys stepping over the line can be corrected by a simple stratagem such as slapping the offending hand, wagging a finger and saying with a smile and a wink “Naughty, naughty! Look, don’t touch!” This of course provokes laughter and good-natured ribbing of the culprit by the other guys, and his behavior is controlled by peer pressure without bruising his ego. But it was rare that I even had to do that; in over six years of doing bachelor parties, the only large group of men who ever worked together to victimize me were cops, and since I was tricked into attending that “party” I hardly think it counts.
I had a number of fun and memorable bachelor party experiences over the years, but I think my favorite one was from the client side (so to speak). It happened in June of 2006, my very last month as an escort, and I had already informed the agencies what my last day was going to be. One of my husband’s friends was about to get married, and his bachelor party was to be held at the club where I had first worked nine years before. I asked if they needed me to pick them up afterward; I was going to be working (as was my custom) until 2 AM, and figured they probably wouldn’t be much later than that. But the groom assured my husband that my kind offer would not be necessary, as the best man wasn’t a drinker and had agreed to be the designated driver. Well, about midnight my husband called from the club and asked if my offer was still good; I of course said that it was and asked what had happened to the best man. My husband replied that the guy was apparently a wimp whose wife had him on a very short leash and didn’t approve of strip clubs, so he had promised her he would be home by midnight (thus ruining the evening for everyone else by not telling them beforehand). But fortunately they had me to call on, so I told them to just keep having fun and call me when they were ready to go home.
Bachelor parties are a male rite of passage, a ceremony celebrating a man’s transition from one stage of life into another; the wise bride does not interfere with the proceedings unless she really wants to give her groom cold feet. Men have their ways and rituals, just as women have ours, and if a woman wants a man to respect her feelings and needs she should set a good example by respecting his first. I’m not saying you have to buy your husband lap dances and make out with strippers in front of him; what I’m saying is that if you give him opportunities for indulging his impulses in a controlled fashion, he’ll love and respect you all the more and you’ll win major cool points with his friends in the bargain.