4 ~ Wednesday, July 17, 1991 ~ North Shore News

Stags: a Canadian
cultural institution

A FRIEND of mine from Korea suggests that the custom
of holding stags is a very Canadian thing.

Ht just doesn't happen over in
Korea the way it does here. Or in
any other country thar he's
visited. and he’s visited quite a
few.

I'd never thought of stags as
part of the great Canuck cultural
mosaic, but now that the idea has
been suggested, | can see that they
are, indeed, a profound social rit-
ual, densely-packed with
sociological meaning.

Now that The Economist in
Britain has authoritatively
predicted that sooner or later Ca-
nadians are going to become
Americans, it behooves us to ex-
amine the culture we took for
granted with considerable atten-
tion to detail.

[ never thought of Canadians as
an endangered species until now.
The knowledge that we are likely
to turn out to be a short-term
phenomenon sharpens my appre-
ciation of the unique and soine-
times wonderful world Canada
can be.

Few scholars would select the
ritual of the stag as an example of
Canadiana, yet when you think
about it, it is truly as Maple Leaf
as you could hope for.

A bunch of males get together
and get totally smashed while do-
ing gross things.

A stag serves a lot of purposes.
For instance, on the occasion of
my brother’s stag, his best friend,
a cousin and I decided to try to
rescue him from what we were
absolutely certain would be a
disastrous marriage.

It is of course essential for the
male whose stag it is to get more
smashed than anybody else, ideal-
ly more smashed than any human
being in history.

As soon as the stag was over
and my brother had passed out,
his three would-be rescuers grab-
bed him, tied him up, and dumped
him in the back of my car. Our
goal was to drive him to Toronto,
no matter how loud he hollered.

if we could just keep him out
of circulation for three days, he's
miss the wedding and his bride
would never forgive him. His
future would be saved!

Alas, he woke up just past
Kenora. Maybe it was the
hangover, but he sure was in a
bad mood, especially once he fig-
ured out he was hog-tied. It was
when he started kicking the win-
dow that we gave up reasoning
with him.

I still don’t think you can make
a kidnapping charge stick against
your brother, cousin and best
friend, but he was beginning to
sound pretty serious aboul trying.

So we untied him and turned
the car around.

The marriage indeed turned out
to be a bummer. My brother did
admit years later that he’d often
wished we had ignored his threats

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and screams and kept on going,
but that's life. You lose a few key
batiles, win a few, and it’s over.
Poof!

f was invited to a stag the other
night, but a meeting came up that
[ had to attend. ft was late when $
got through, and the stag was be-
ing held on the othier side of
town, All of which was just
enough reason for me to cop out.

The reason I did the unmanty
and unCanadian thing of avoiding
the stag was because of the last
few stags | atended, especially the
very last one, which was held for
a@ guy who is now my brother-in-
law.

He got things rolling by drink -
ing an unbelievably-powerful po-
tion made up of several different
kinds of hard liquor. That was
preity well it for him.

Just as well. It got pretty crazy.
I dimly recall the final minutes
just before the palice broke down
the motel room door and [feat
from the second-story balcony to
make my escape.

There were several arrests, al-
though my brother-in-law wasn't
one of them, having passed out

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and rolled under the bed.

You'll notice a bit of a theme
here. Passing out. This is the only
honorable way for a male to end
the evening at his stag.

fam not condoning this sort of
behavior, you understand. Merely
reporting.

The stag I didn’t attend the
other night, was, by all accounts,
a classic. The things that happen-
ed are simply too disgusting,
godless, unsavory, debauched,
sexist and illegal for me to men-
tion in a family newspaper, or,
for that matter, to my wife.

[wish men weren't like that. 1
wish we were noble creatures,
pure of inind and soul, striving
only to do good.

Alas, we aren't. The ritual of
the stag is basically a male way of
enshrining bestial behavior, of
admitting (to other males anyway)
that we are every bit as disgusting
as the feminists say we are.
Worse, probably. In fact, if they
knew just how horrid it is in here
inside the male psyche, they'd try
to put us out of eur misery.

The relationsnip of the stag to
Canada’s culture?

Well, put it this way: the fact of
the matter is (hat we are a bar-
baric people, barely risen from the
caves, and for all the suits find ties
we wear, for all che manners we
display, for all the patience we
muster in line-ups, scratch the
surface of a male Canadian and
you find an animal.

Why do you think we call ita

‘a: ee era
NEWS photo Cindy Goodman

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