Tag Archives: pink

Hen nights! Thoughts after a hangover…

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I’m now pretty much recovered from last night’s hen night.   My cousin is getting married soon and this was actually a pretty sophisticated hen night – while hen nights I’ve been to in the past have had the male strippers and willy straws (and I insisted mine had the latter, when else do you get the chance to have really tacky sexist tat around in the name of innocent fun?), this was parent-friendly with 5 over 50s in attendance, and me weirdly about 10 years older than the younger hens and a good 15 years younger than the youngest of the parent generation.

Actually this gave me pause for thought – much as I love my mum, there’s no way I would’ve wanted her to be at my hen night. 
My hen night was the first opportunity for my female friends from different parts of my life to meet and see if they got on.  Happily they did (after all they’ve all got me in common!) but adding my mum into the mix too would’ve made this a bit more complicated. 
I wanted to be able to let my hair down, drink, laugh, dance if we needed to (we didn’t – we went to the theatre and laughed ourselves silly at The Producers) and I would’ve felt more inhibited with my mum there.
But it seems that’s a bit of a different relationship between some of my friends and their mums, a kind of best friend relationship where dancing til you drop and being carried home drunk is part of the deal (and just as likely to happen to either party).  I wonder whether that different relationship develops if you either go through a parental divorce, or if you move home after university and have to adjust to being two adults sharing a house?
Anyway I’ll get to find out a bit about the mum on a hen night thing - she’s coming on my other cousin’s hen night in July…  

Anyway, as I was saying, sophisticated.  No veil of condoms, no L plates.  Not much point all that stuff when most people live together first. 
The theme was pink, and we were allowed to embrace it as much or as little as we wanted.  I’m not a big pink fan and had to buy something specially so I went for a raspberry silk top and matching tights (and nails), teamed with silver-grey skirt and shoes that felt much higher after two hours of  salsa dancing.  I had to work hard actually – post-baby and with the stress of work and study too I find it a lot harder to feel glamorous and slightly underestimated the time I’d need to get ready.  Many of the hens had that 20-something easy gift of ironed-straight hair, perfect make up , minidress and heels – I felt quite old and fat in comparison.
But champagne is a great leveller -the pink champagne really fitted the theme and I soon got to know a few people.

We had a fab time – drinks at the Loft then dancing at the Cuban in Canterbury. Minibus door to door made it very easy indeed.

The Loft is… cool.  There’s no other word for it.  DJ, blue lights on the bar, exposed brick wall, no lock on one of the two ladies loo cubicles, if it wasn’t for the absence of a Madame Pipi it could almost have been in Brussels.  And no we didn’t feel guilty at getting the dare game going and singing baa baa black sheep and getting the bride to be to do starjumps in a strapless dress…

Top tip as someone who has not been out partying for a bit but used to live near Brixtonbut was never once offered anything - if random men come over asking if you want a snog, there will come a point where they say sotto voce “do you want anything?” and it’s not a snog they’re talking about. 
We scared the dealer away with a mask of the groom’s face. Yes really.
We had a bit of a “Being John Malkovich“  theme going – we had masks of the groom and almost every guy that came over to the group was persuaded to put a groom mask on and pose for a photo with us. So did bouncers, a band  leader and, in a fab bit of community policing, even one of the Saturday night police van policemen agreed to be the groom for a bit.

I learned to salsa with my son (see here and here), and last night at the Cuban that turned out to be really useful.  While we’d managed to book tables at the Loft, by the time we got to the Cuban it was fairly intimate standing room only, and the only way to handle that is to dance.  And drink, obviously, but mainly dance.  The band was brilliant, the dancing was great, and according to my aching muscles today, pretty good exercise as well as fun!

I’m sure that there are hen parties that snog everyone and even know the back alleys of party towns very well indeed (are they the ones that all wear cowboy hats and don’t feel the cold?) and the honeypot effect that we had suggests that this is so, but actually what we mainly wanted to do was have a drink, and a chat (hard with the volume of music in the bars on a Saturday night) and a bit of a boogie. 
Somehow the men that were out and about just didn’t get that inserting themselves into the centre of the group and trying to dance with the prettiest girls wasn’t really what we were looking for in an evening out (and as they were 30s-ish and balding what they actually got was not the 20 year old that looks like a model but 50-odd year old Aunty Bev who can salsa the boots off anyone!)  I guess my point is that, if there’s a group of girls dancing together it does not necessarily mean they are in want of a man to dance with.

So I suppose the hen nights I go to are tame in comparison with some: I’ve been to everything from picnics to kareoke and most involve dinner and a bit of wine. I’ve never been away to a hotel, or abroad for a weekend, and I guess it says something about my friends and me that the “last night of freedom” idea means time with friends doing things we like rather than random snogging and sex.

Several of us said it though – going out last night was a reminder of how little we’d actually enjoyed being single.  I know there are people that love being single, that have a thriving social life and are not out to find a life partner. 
I was never one of them.  I hated being single and the desparation that you could feel radiating from some of the people, especially when their pressing themselves that close to you reminded me why. 
I met my husband in a bar, but it was early evening, we were both there with the same group of friends, and all went off for dinner together afterwards.  But the idea that you might try to meet your partner as a stranger in a drunken, sweaty noisy bar while trying to avoid trampling the feet of a couple of dozen people around you - I wonder how often it really happens? 

If I was designing the ideal hen night venue, I’d have a room with big tables to let groups eat together, plenty of seating in the bar to allow chatting and resting of feet worn out in high heels, outrageously extensive but not expensive cocktail menu and cava not just champagne, music that doesn’t leave you with tinnitus, a safe place for bags and coats, a little bit more personal space on the dance floor,  spa treatments available (even just back and foot rubs), sofas in the rest room and everything else in there working properly… and party bags with something sparkly in to leave.  Because if there’s one time in your life that pink is just about acceptable, it’s on a hen night.

Why this image makes me unspeakably angry

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bounce and spinWhat on earth is all this about???
Have you ever seen a pink zebra?  Why is there any need for a pink version of a perfectly good black and white “bounce and spin”?  Yes it’s a lovely, happy girl in a green t-shirt that’s riding it, but honestly, who came up with this – “y’know, we’re selling loads of the bouce and spin zebra, so I don’t know, let’s make it appeal more to girls. What about making a pink one?”

Let me calm down for a moment. And visit Pink Stinks as an antidote.
 Natasha Walter’s book “Living Dolls” is getting a lot of coverage at the moment.  The criticisms of this book seems to be that, in getting older, Walter has lost a sense of perspective, that feminism that has got us to where we are has given women “free choice” and that if they choose to strip off as “empowerment”, fetishize pink, be judged on their looks etc. etc. then that’s their choice. She’s even been accused of not having a sense of humour. 
But she has a point. Several in fact.

She points out that Marks and Spencer markets toy irons as “Mummy and me” – and they do.  My son loves the realistic toy iron at nursery and shows off to us how he can use it.  But I am finding it hard to buy him one for playing at home that isn’t pink.
Toy kitchens seem to have pink plastic all over them – yet my son loves Cbeebies’ “I Can Cook” and carries around a measuring cup and wooden spoon shouting “yum! Taste!” when he’s watching it.  Sure I can buy him the pink kitchen, but why on earth is it pink?  Our kitchen is black, white and charcoal with flashes of lime green in the accessories – my son wouldn’t associate pink with kitchens.

I love buying him clothes, but it doesn’t matter where I go, I’m lucky if the section I get to choose from is even half the size of the girls clothes section.  He has school shoes, wellies and a pair of crocs for the beach, but again the choice is much more limited for boys. Do baby girls have more feet(!)?
But we’re teaching our kids that girls have to have more choice (or more clothes).  And when that includes croptops for tweenagers, push-up bras for nine year olds and sexually provocative slogan t-shirts, as opposed to combats, cheeky monkey-bad boy t-shirts for boys we have to wonder what we’re playing at.  

This isn’t something new for me to worry about.  When I was at university I had a column in the university newspaper “Bare Facts”. 
It came about because I had been submitting sports reports on a regular basis (at the time I was dating the American Football team captain, which apparently made me the First Lady and gave me a responsibility to do things to promote the team), and because a friend and I had written in to the letters page about the clothes being worn in the Union.
As we were writing we had a bit of a problem.  We were feminist not prudish, felt that women should have more self-respect than to dress as they were rather than because it was something from which men should be shielded for fear of their actions being uncontrollable, and while we were grateful that the women had the choice to dress that way if they wished we had to wonder what led them to choose to do so. This was the mid-nineties and we were observing a trend that Natasha Walter has now written about… 

I’ve never been silph-like, but I was a happy 12-14 and I think made the best of my particular best assets.  I didn’t object to the bratops being worn with microshorts that seemed to be increasingly popular because I couldn’t wear them, but because these were women studying for degrees, and as Dara O’Briain puts it in “Tickling the English” surely getting a degree means not having to expose your body to get anywhere in life.

My worry is that in accepting “glamour modelling”, lap dancing and pole dancing as empowerment, sacking of older women from anchor roles for wrinkles on TV but accepting older men as having “gravitas”, focusing on women as individuals rather than on society and family (hence the debate in the press on whether maternity leave has damaged women in the workplace rather than whether by concentrating just on women rather than parental leave it has damaged a family’s free choice to arrange childcare between the parents),by businesses not considering how culture in workplaces including presenteeism damage the chances of women who do not act like the men do getting to the top means the problem perpetuates despite starting off with loads of very bright women lower down in the workforce, that some how we’ve missed the point of feminism.

It wasn’t supposed to be about us getting the right to sleep around, dress provocatively and behave as badly as the men in the name of free choice was it?  I really hope not.  I hope that if anyone tries to write a book on the new feminism now, they realise its ok to say that it’s still a work in progress…