Stagxiety.

There’s nothing worse than someone in their twenties complaining about the onward march of time. It’s one of the most self-regarding anxieties: ‘Oh no, I’m starting to get grey hair, I’m so old!’, ‘Poor me, my hangovers are slightly worse than they used to be, death is around the corner!’, ‘Even though I don’t have any children or meaningful responsibilities, I just don’t have any time to myself these days…where did my youth go?!’. For anyone older than you, hearing someone in their twenties whinge about life’s progression is like hearing someone with two homes complain about a lack of living space (apologies if this cuts a little too close to the bone for my core audience). 

This performative, self-pitying navel-gazing is tedious, ridiculous and the basis for this article (arguably a grandiose term for what is just a Substack that I myself have started). At the ripe old age of 28, I have begun the first steps into aging. I’ve bought an ice bath, started sharing Whoop data with my friends and now stand at the first yardstick of adult maturity: everyone I know is getting married. 

Heterosexual commitment season is in full bloom. The metaphorical dam has burst and WhatsApp groups everywhere are awash with imagery of engagement rings of varying sizes. People I used to go on nights out with who would say things like ‘monogamy is a social construct upheld by Judeo-Christian values which themselves foster misogyny and reinforce patriarchy’ are now clamouring to ask their girlfriend’s parents’ permission to marry their daughters. My female¹ friends (yes, I do have them) are all sheepishly putting their feminist principles to one side and admitting they actually do want to feel like the most beautiful girl in the world for a day at least. Nearly everyone is rising from the radically progressive ashes of their post-university selves, a little more conservative than they thought they’d ever be (you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself start to become Mark Corrigan). 

I’m a little crestfallen about this. It feels like we’re waving goodbye to the much cooler, radical, principled versions of ourselves we’d all self-deluded into thinking were actual possibilities. But I’m not here to complain about the inevitable road to moving to Surrey, writing wine reviews and taking up road cycling. I'm here to complain about the ritual we must participate in long before the bride walks down the aisle…The Stag Do. 

The Stag Do, with its long history of male drunkenness, infidelity and violence. The perfect illustration of why single-sex spaces and activities are often (not always! Let’s not get into that one, shall we?) a terrible idea. It’s my genuinely held belief that men bring out the very worst in other men, and this is very much supported by the historical record, as men everywhere, through the annals of history, have been tied to lampposts, been pissed on and had things inserted into their rectums (the anals of history) all because ‘it’s a laugh’. Nothing screams male friendship like violating someone you presumably love… 

But is this ritual still as coarse, seedy and toxic as it used to be? Or has it modernised to allow for a more sensitive type of masculinity in 2025? This weekend I shall find out, as I travel to Munich on my first Stag Do of the year. 

If I’m honest, I’m simultaneously excited and afraid. 

I’m afraid for the same reason I’m always a little afraid to spend time with large (or small) groups of men (or in fact, people). I fear the artillery fire of someone’s ‘banter’ (often just hurtful jibes repurposed as ‘comedy’) will wound me. Anyone who has seen my work will know I am a serious artist, like Banksy or Bob Dylan,² but most of my friends are not serious artists; they do generic things in the City and think Patrick Bateman is an aspirational figure³ rather than a psychopath.⁴ As a result, they often don’t speak to me with the awe and adoration that I frankly deserve, and what if I can’t deal with this emotionally? 

I’m not trying to position myself as some sort of Andrew Garfield ‘oooh please pick me I’m crying on a podcast about a couple driving a car’-type man⁵ I'm not trying to be performative about my sensitivity (I mean, I am; I’m writing about it in an article for public consumption). I just know what will happen: some fucking management consultant⁶ will be like, ‘So when are you going to get a real job?’ and I’ll take it in good humour at the time (cc: hairline ‘banter’ at university), and then internalise the comment, hang onto it for maybe ten-plus years and wait until my smouldering, unresolved resentments come out as aggressive and resentful stand-up comedy. I can’t be doing with the psychological toil I know this will require⁷. As a result, I fear men. I fear the lads. 

And yet, like a moth to a flame, I’m drawn to lad culture and the wildly intoxicating prospect of group male approval. I crave male approval, in fact, perhaps to an unhealthy extent. Maybe all men do? We want other men to think we’re cool or accomplished. Drinking a creamy pint of lager slightly quicker than another man, telling a particularly well-received anecdote, ordering a round of drinks in a foreign language, winning an arm wrestle, catching a pint as it falls off a ledge, reversing seamlessly one-handed – these are all fantasies of mine, all set after one thing: that nod of approval from your peers. For some reason (which almost certainly has its origins in deep psychological problems) I feel ready to risk it all to get the men around me to like me. 

It’s this weakness that worries me. The instinct to ‘put it all on red’, to do the modern equivalent of strapping on waxy wings and flying towards the sun, which is presumably to drink five pints in a row or shoot someone at close range with a paintball gun. 

Perhaps this captures another aspect of what is quite exciting about the Stag Do: how regressive they are. Particularly as a London-dwelling, bourgeois, performatively progressive-type man, the idea of potentially taking a holiday from the constant, nagging liberal anxieties cacophonously echoing inside my head is very appealing (‘Is Anastasia judging me for eating fish?’, ‘Can I hate private schools and still send my child to one?’, ‘Do people still think I’m left-wing?’). 

All men – by which I mean late-twenties/early-thirties straight, white, London-dwelling, bourgeois, performatively progressive types – have a battle going on within their subconscious. Within us, there resides an anxious, self-conscious, left-wing charioteer with reins around a horse, but it’s not a horse, it’s Jay from The Inbetweeners and he’s saying things like ‘frigging off’ and ‘stinky fingers’ and ‘I was just toe fucking the one on the floor’. We all have this inner Jay, this seedy, tragic, embarrassing figure, and we wish we didn’t, but we all watched The Inbetweeners at a formative age, and now we do. It’s the liberal’s job to rein in this Jay, to stop the endless river of vulgarity and foolish ideas that come out of his mouth from being shared with the outside world.⁸

Normally this is fine, but on the Stag Do, the liberal is stupefied by alcohol, allowing Jay to throw off his reins and run riot. Jay, at his core, yearns for the Stag Do’s promise of true regression, for a return to a time when Nuts magazine was on the shelves and doctors conducting grotesque diet experiments on people accounted for 90% of the output on Channel 4 and people said the word ‘r*t*rd’ without people saying, ‘I’m not actually sure that’s on, is it?’ (cc: Peep Show Series 2, Episode 2). 

But letting Jay fully off the leash would be catastrophic because as soon as the liberal reclaims the reins, the guilt and shame is overwhelming. The risk is far too high to let Jay run riot. What if, in the pursuit of making the lads laugh, I do a problematic joke and it gets captured on camera and then it blows up online and my career is over?⁹ What if, in a state of drunkenness, my lolloping frame is carried into a strip club and I’m filmed whilst I have a procession of different lapdances and the footage is then sent to my girlfriend and posted on my Instagram and my relationship and career are over? What if I inadvertently share a drink with someone with an STD and then contract the STD via the sharing of the drink and my girlfriend breaks up with me because she thinks I’ve cheated on her? What if I drunkenly decide to deep-throat a cucumber for a laugh and then it gets stuck and I die halfway through cucumber fellatio? What if I don’t get that drunk, but instead of a stripper, they have a dominatrix at the stag and she kicks everyone in the balls, rendering us all infertile, but then I inadvertently develop a sexual taste for this sort of thing and that’s the only way I can get off for the rest of my life and I have to go and live in a mountain somewhere away from polite society with a dominatrix in an outhouse somewhere (presumably, or she’d fly in I suppose, that seems more dominant). What if we get in a fight and get beaten to a pulp? Or worse, what if I kill someone and have to go to prison? Or I get off on a technicality but I still have to live with the guilt? What if the plane crashes? 

I’m exaggerating, but these are all versions of thoughts that have genuinely crossed my mind. 

By the same token though, surely no one wants a liberal Stag Do? A group of ten soy boys asking if it would be okay to do some banter about the Stag’s mum? That would be awful and arguably more tragic than drinking fifteen pints, stealing a traffic cone and going to some seedy club? So you can’t let the liberal control everything either…

Ultimately, I’m going to have to tread the middle way on this Stag Do, walking the line between excess and deficiency, just as Aristotle wanted.

I’ve devised a five-point plan for this and will cling to it for dear life:

1. Anti Banter 

It’s my goal to try and maintain a ‘net zero’ banter policy for this stag. Obviously people will get slagged off, but to stop us from tipping into laddy toxicity it’s absolutely essential to counterbalance this with praise. 

Whenever I get the sense that someone is going to come in with something too harsh, I intend to disarm them by flattering them. 

For example: ‘You can’t possibly mean to tell me you’re angry enough to criticise someone whilst wearing such a gorgeous jacket’.

2. Find the anchor points 

There’s a doctor and a woman on this Stag Do. I’ll ingratiate myself with both of them early on and have them as anti-anxiety ballasts if I need them e.g. if my pulse is high on the Sunday morning and I need reassurance. 

3. If I am forced into a strip joint, go on record at the time to show I’m not enjoying it

As long as I create enough distance between myself and the establishments I’m in, I can’t be morally blameworthy and thus looked down on when I return to London. 

Or at the very least do a little bit of Brentian ironic self-distancing (see footnote 6). 

You can’t be critiqued for ogling breasts, if you’re ogling them as a comedy character…

4. Generally keep my head down and follow the group

No one can criticise a sheep (other than the more mentally ill factions of the conspiracy/masculinity brigade online). Here though, it’s essential to keep one’s head down, not to announce yourself as a public enemy or someone to be picked on. In other words, it’s key to approach the stag in exactly the same way one would approach prison. 

5. Get in there with quips 

Of course, I’ll be holding court with some entertaining anecdotes, but it’s also essential to lay the groundwork on the Stag Do WhatsApp group prior to the start of the weekend. The odd jibe here, the odd quip there, not too much but enough to keep oneself in the mix.

Now, I must pack. I shall let you know how the plan and, obviously the Stag Do, go on my return. 

…

If you’ve enjoyed this, I’d venture you’ll also enjoy my stand up show ‘Best Man’ where similar content is explored. Tickets for the autumn are available here.

1. I’m always a little reluctant to use this term because it maybe feels a tad incely? I know it’s just a biological term, but it feels a little 4chan. But what’s the alternative? My ‘women friends’? Sounds like Mark Zuckerberg trying to seem like a human being. My lady friends? Sounds a bit seedy. My girlfriends? Makes me sound dodgy/like a gay best friend, which of course would be fine but I’m not that (I mean obviously I’ve had gay thoughts, but that’s it).

2. See all my various brand deals, exactly the sort of thing Dylan would have done.

3. Most of my friends aren’t like this and based on my corporate stand up work the people that work in the city are generally bloody delightful chaps.

4. Yes, yes I’m aware this point is up for debate before the wankers come for me in the comments.

5. Get over yourself Garfield for the love of Christ: https://youtube.com/shorts/IuZA07L0Z7c?si=C9byMhBvdWvl63hR

6. Sorry to slag off the core audience again.

7. A visual representation of how most male banter makes me feel: https://youtube.com/shorts/v5xVboIj4Eo?si=3bqEdwkvKfaQeBdE

8. This is why you still see men say slightly transgressive things but in a slight voice or in the persona of David Brent, effectively allowing them to say the problematic thing but with a tiny veneer of irony which allows them to avoid the consequences. I call this act Brentian self-distancing.

E.g. ‘Yes I said ‘while you’re down their luv’, but I’m just satirising misogyny in a way…and she loves it, because it’s nothing vicious…’ - should this get men off the hook, the jury is still out…

9. I recognise I’m not famous enough for anyone to give even a solitary shit about this.