‘Just Blokes Doing Blokes’ Stuff’: Risk, Gender and the Collective Performance of Masculinity during the Eastern European Stag Tour Weekend

Abstract

The emergence in recent decades of the stag tour as a premarital ritual undertaken by large numbers of British men sheds new, and at times vivid, light on an array of connections linking notions of masculinity and travel. Starting with cities such as Amsterdam and Dublin in the 1990s, the stag tour ‘phenomenon’ soon spread east, with destinations in newly developing post-Soviet states of Central and Eastern Europe such as Prague, Riga, and Budapest achieving a degree of notoriety for drunk and disorderly British men, fuelled by copious amounts of what was, for them, outrageously cheap beer and vodka, causing trouble. The streets of these cities were, according to the media, literally overrun with gangs of dishevelled and disrespectful male tourists, all eager to seek out fun, excitement, and titillation at the expense of put-upon locals, yet, equally, such antics were and still are rarely greeted with more than a prosaic shrug and the dismissive assertion that, after all, ‘boys will be boys’.